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Johns Hopkins University engineers have developed a pioneering prosthetic hand that can grip plush toys, water bottles, and other everyday objects like a human, carefully conforming and adjusting its grasp to avoid damaging or mishandling whatever it holds. The system’s hybrid design is a first for robotic hands, which have typically been too rigid or too soft to replicate a human’s touch when handling objects of varying textures and materials. The innovation offers a promising

Soilless growing systems inside greenhouses, known as controlled environment agriculture, promise to advance the year-round production of high-quality specialty crops, according to an interdisciplinary research team at Penn State. But to be competitive and sustainable, this advanced farming method will require the development and implementation of precision agriculture techniques. To meet that demand, the team developed an automated crop-monitoring system capable of providing continuous and frequent data about plant growth and needs, allowing for informed

An NYU Tandon School of Engineering-led research team has developed a way for self-driving vehicles to share their knowledge about road conditions indirectly, making it possible for each vehicle to learn from the experiences of others even when they rarely meet on the road. The research, presented in a paper at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on February 27, 2025, tackles a persistent problem in artificial intelligence: how to help vehicles

Springtails, smallbugs often found crawling through leaf litter and garden soil, are expert jumpers. Inspired by these hopping hexapods, roboticists in theHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have made a walking, jumping robot that pushes the boundaries of what small robots can do. Published in Science Robotics, the research glimpses a future where nimble microrobots can crawl through tiny spaces, skitter across dangerous ground, and sense their environments without human

A low-energy challenger to the quantum computer that also works at room temperature may be the result of research at the University of Gothenburg. The researchers have shown that information can be transmitted using magnetic wave motion in complex networks. Spintronics explores magnetic phenomena in nano-thin layers of magnetic materials that are exposed to magnetic fields, electric currents and voltages. These external stimuli can also create spin waves, ripples in a material’s magnetisation that travel

How does a tennis player like Carlos Alcaraz decide where to run to return Novak Djokovic’s ball by just looking at the ball’s initial position? These behaviours, so common in elite athletes, are difficult to explain with current computational models, which assume that the players must continuously follow the ball with their eyes. Now, researchers of the University of Barcelona have developed a model that, by combining optical variables with environmental factors such as gravity,