Monthly Archives: May 2019

This student-made robot dog jumps, flips and trots, will you buy?

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Putting their own twist on robots that amble through complicated landscapes, the Stanford Student Robotics club’s Extreme Mobility team at Stanford University has developed a four-legged robot that is capable of performing acrobatic tricks and traversing challenging terrain.

Anyone who wants their own version of the robot, dubbed Stanford Doggo, can consult comprehensive plans, code and a supply list that the students have made freely available online.

“We had seen these other quadruped robots used in research, but they weren’t something that you could bring into your own lab and use for your own projects,” said Nathan Kau, ’20, a mechanical engineering major and lead for Extreme Mobility. “We wanted Stanford Doggo to be this open source robot that you could build yourself on a relatively small budget.”

Whereas other similar robots can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and require customized parts, the Extreme Mobility students estimate the cost of Stanford Doggo at less than $3,000 – including manufacturing and shipping costs – and nearly all the components can be bought as-is online. They hope the accessibility of these resources inspires a community of Stanford Doggo makers and researchers who develop innovative and meaningful spinoffs from their work.

Already Stanford Doggo can walk, trot, dance, hop, jump and perform the occasional backflip. The students are working on a larger version of their creation – which is currently about the size of a beagle – but will take a short break to present Stanford Doggo at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation May 21, 2019 in Montreal, Canada.

Deny teenagers any screen, they’ll soon go to sleep: Study

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Sleep in teenagers can be improved by just one week of limiting their evening exposure to light-emitting screens on phones, tablets and computers, said a study whose findings will be presented in Lyon, at the European Society of Endocrinology annual meeting, ECE 2019.

The study indicates that by simply limiting their exposure to blue-light emitting devices in the evening, adolescents can improve their sleep quality and reduce symptoms of fatigue, lack of concentration and bad mood, after just one week.

Recent studies have indicated that exposure to too much evening light, particularly the blue light emitted from screens on smartphones, tablets and computers can affect the brain’s clock and the production of the sleep hormone melatonin, resulting in disrupted sleep time and quality.

The lack of sleep doesn’t just cause immediate symptoms of tiredness and poor concentration but can also increase the risk of more serious long-term health issues such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Other studies have suggested that sleep deprivation related to screen time may affect children and adolescents more than adults, but no studies have fully investigated how real-life exposure is affecting sleep in adolescents at home and whether it can be reversed.

In this collaborative study between the Netherlands Institute of Neuroscience, the Amsterdam UMC and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, researchers investigated the effects of blue light exposure on adolescents at home. Those who had more than 4 hours per day of screen time had on average 30 minutes later sleep onset and wake up times than those who recorded less than 1 hour per day of screen time, as well as more symptoms of sleep loss.

The team conducted a randomised controlled trial to assess the effects of blocking blue light with glasses and no screen time during the evening on the sleep pattern of 25 frequent users. Both blocking blue light with glasses and screen abstinence resulted in sleep onset and wake up times occurring 20 minutes earlier, and a reduction in reported symptoms of sleep loss in participants, after just one week.

Dr Dirk Jan Stenvers from the department of Endocrinology and Metabolism of the Amsterdam UMC says, “Adolescents increasingly spend more time on devices with screens and sleep complaints are frequent in this age group. Here we show very simply that these sleep complaints can be easily reversed by minimising evening screen use or exposure to blue light. Based on our data, it is likely that adolescent sleep complaints and delayed sleep onset are at least partly mediated by blue light from screens”

Dr Stenvers and his colleagues are now interested in whether the relationship between reduced screen time and improved sleep has longer lasting effects, and whether the same effects can be detected in adults.

Dr Stenvers comments, “Sleep disturbances start with minor symptoms of tiredness and poor concentration but in the long-term we know that sleep loss is associated with increased risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. If we can introduce simple measures now to tackle this issue, we can avoid greater health problems in years to come.”

There’s an insane inner pickpocket in everyone of us, says study

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Researchers have identified how the human brain is able to determine the properties of a particular object using purely statistical information, thus suggesting that there is an ‘inner pickpocket’ in all of us.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, the Central European University, and Columbia University, found that one of the reasons that successful pickpockets are so efficient is that they are able to identify objects they have never seen before just by touching them. Similarly, we are able to anticipate what an object in a shop window will feel like just by looking at it.

In both scenarios, we are relying on the brain’s ability to break up the continuous stream of information received by our sensory inputs into distinct chunks. The pickpocket is able to interpret the sequence of small depressions on their fingers as a series of well-defined objects in a pocket or handbag, while the shopper’s visual system is able to interpret photons as reflections of light from the objects in the window.

Our ability to extract distinct objects from cluttered scenes by touch or sight alone and accurately predict how they will feel based on how they look, or how they look based on how they feel, is critical to how we interact with the world.

By performing clever statistical analyses of previous experiences, the brain can immediately both identify objects without the need for clear-cut boundaries or other specialised cues, and predict unknown properties of new objects. The results are reported in the open-access journal eLife.

Lengyel and his colleagues designed scenes of several abstract shapes without visible boundaries between them, and asked participants to either observe the shapes on a screen or to ‘pull’ them apart along a tear line that passed either through or between the objects.

Participants were then tested on their ability to predict the visual (how familiar did real jigsaw pieces appear compared to abstract pieces constructed from the parts of two different pieces) and haptic properties of these jigsaw pieces (how hard would it be to physically pull apart new scenes in different directions).

The researchers found that participants were able to form the correct mental model of the jigsaw pieces from either visual or haptic (touch) experience alone, and were able to immediately predict haptic properties from visual ones and vice versa.