This Robot Snake Means No Harm, Really

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Not so sheepish now: Google Street View adds the Faroe Islands

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View more sharing options Shares 405 Comments 0 Rachel Dixon Thursday 2 November 2017  14.24 GMT Last modified on Thursday 2 November 2017  14.25 GMT The Faroe Islands  has become the latest remote part of the world to be featured on  Google Street View  – thanks to one woman and five sheep. Last July, tired of waiting for Google to map the autonomous Danish archipelago between Norway and Iceland, resident Durita Andreassen started her own  Sheep View . She strapped 360-degree cameras to a handful of sheep and uploaded the resulting images, with their GPS coordinates, to Street View, while petitioning Google to finish the job. (There are nearly twice as many sheep as people on the 18 islands, hence the attention-catching method.) When the project hit the headlines, Google responded by supplying islanders with camera equipment. Residents and tourists captured more images on foot, by bike, in cars, from kayaks and ship...
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New and Improved RoboBee Flies, Dives, Swims, Then Flies Again

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A Harvard engineering lab has been building a robotic bee for more than 25 years, and it can now do things that even real bees can't manage. For more than 25 years now, a quiet little design lab at Harvard has been working on a unique robotics project — perfecting the world's first and only RoboBee. Research  published  Oct. 25 in the journal  Science Robotics  details the latest iteration of the little bot, which was first conceived by mechanical engineering student Robert Wood in 1991. Since then, the RoboBee project has been a perennial work-in-progress for scientists and students at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering. Even in its most basic configuration, the RoboBee is a mechanical marvel. Its tiny polymer wings – designed to mimic real insect wings – are powered by small ceramic “muscles” that convert electrical pulses into kinetic energy, making the RoboBee the w...
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Elon Musk Tweets Out First Glimpse of LA Underground Tunnel System

When Elon Musk tweets, people listen. Or read, or retweet, or flip out, depending. The tech mogul's latest Twitter dispatch shows a section of Musk's proposed underground tunnel network beneath Los Angeles. The photo provides the first glimpse of Musk's pipe dream for busting traffic problems in California. Musk and his ambitious startup company — the Boring Company — intend to connect destinations in and around Los Angeles with a network of tunnels. Vehicles traversing LA's famously gridlocked roads and freeways will be able to drop down by elevator into the tunnel system, which will shuttle them across town in rail pods traveling at up to 125 mph. Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has been publicly sharing developments on the Boring Co. project for several months. The company has been digging out an underground test tunnel near SpaceX headquarters in the Southern California city of Hawthorne, a suburb of the Los Angeles-area megalopolis. The ...
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