TechBlog

Gnat-sized robots, microscopic gyroscopes, television beamed directly onto your retina. This may sound like a grocery list for a crazed sci-fi visionary. But all these projects are in the works today, thanks to an emerging chip technology known as microelectromechanical systems. While magical microbots may still be a few years away, MEMS are already a multibillion-dollar business in the car, printer, and display-projection industries.

Traditional chips are flat, static structures. MEMS, by contrast, are silicon wafers packed with kinetic, three-dimensional gizmos: laboratories, laser-guided mirrors, canals flowing with chemicals. An offshoot of the semiconductor industry, MEMS benefit from the well-known peculiarities of the silicon universe - every year chips get tinier, cheaper, and faster.

Continue reading ‘As the MEMS Revolution Takes Off, Small Is Getting Bigger Every Day’ »

By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News

It turns out that butterflies’ fluttering is neither random nor clumsy.

Researchers from Oxford University in England have devised a method of studying the way butterflies fly, and their initial results show that the insects have many more tricks of flight than they get credit for.

The researchers trained red admiral butterflies to fly between artificial flowers in a wind tunnel, and recorded the way air flowed around their wings using smoke and high-resolution cameras. The work provides fodder for researchers working on insect-sized flying robots.

Continue reading ‘Butterflies offer lessons for robots’ »

Bionic Bugs:

In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.

“It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce,” said team leader Robert Wood.

Continue reading ‘Bionic Bugs The eye in the sky’ »