Popular YouTuber ‘Mutekimaru Channel’ built a special Nintendo Switch controller for their pet fish to let it play games during livestreams, but little did they know that it would lead to credit card fraud of sorts. How does the controller work? Button inputs are registered as the fish swims across specific points on the controller.
While not as bizarre as this AI-powered human washing machine, two divers managed to capture rare footage of a live giant squid off Japan’s west coast. Yosuke Tanaka and his wife Miki run a diving operation in Toyooka city. They received a tip from a local fisherman who spotted the giant squid in a bay, so the couple set off to find it.
Photo credit: Aerovironment
This innovative MEDUSA drone can fly and land on water, while future drones could have flapping wings, thanks to engineers at Lund University. They are developing a biohybrid robotic wing that is partly built from real feathers, with more advanced kinematic capabilities than previous robotic wings and similar to those of a real bird.
Frogs at Chernobyl are turning black, while translucent glass frogs have always had the ability to hide their blood when sleeping to camouflage themselves from predators. How so? When these tiny amphibians are sleeping, they hide nearly 90% of their red blood cells in their liver and also shrink most of their organs inside their body.
Think of Bird Buddy as Pokémon Go, but with real animals, or hummingbirds in this case. It uses artificial intelligence to help identify 350 different hummingbird species and then capture photos or videos of them when the motion sensor is triggered. Not just blurry photos, Bird Buddy is capable of capturing wing speeds of up to 60 mph, thanks to its high-quality camera.
It’s no PHRACTYL Macrobat, but the autonomous P-Flap robot bird by researchers in Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne does have a talon-like claw mechanism that enables it to land safely on a perch. This Perching Flapping-Wing Robot (P-Flap) boasts a 59-inch (1.5-meter) wingspan and its carbon fiber claw requires no external power source to stay open or closed, as it’s directly connected to the robot’s under-body.
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and University of California, Irvine scientists teamed up to develop BirdBot, a robot leg that is not only energy-efficient, but needs fewer motors and theoretically, could be scaled to a large size. It was modeled after a flightless bird, or more specifically, the ostrich, and there is no motor in the foot, just a spring / cable mechanism.
Elon Musk took to the stage yesterday to showcase the latest Neuralink technology and during that presentation, a monkey appeared to type using only its mind. The experiments were performed on six monkeys, and despite not knowing how to spell, they were able to move a cursor using only their minds to arrange the pre-written words in the correct order.
Insect-like robots are military-ready, while honeypot ants are just plain fascinating. Why? They’re the world’s only ant species that make a honey-like substance, as the liquid stored inside them can be used later by their fellow workers when food is otherwise scarce.
Scuba diver Andrea Humphrey is no stranger to aquatic life, but her most recent encounter with a giant Pacific octopus was unexpected to say the least. It happened in the 3-meter (9.8-foot) water off Vancouver’s Campbell River and as she went in for photos, the creature just started crawling closer for a friendly greeting.