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Credit: Jie Yin/ North Carolina State University

Kirigami-inspired technique results in a gentle, precise grip

U.S. National Science Foundation engineers based at North Carolina State University have developed flexible robotic grippers that can lift delicate items without damage and have the precision to grab a single strand of hair. The breakthrough has a host of applications for soft robotics, biomedical technologies and wound care, the researchers said. The team published its results in Nature Communications.

Using kirigami, an art that involves folding and cutting two-dimensional sheets of material to form three-dimensional shapes, the researchers developed a technique that involves cutting parallel slits across the material to create a three-dimensional structure.

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From Adler's book What Life Could Mean To You

1. "A fight with a child is always a losing fight: he can never be beaten or won to cooperation by fighting. In these struggles the weakest always carries the day. Something is demanded of him which he refuses to give; something which can never be gained by such means. An incalculable amount of tension and useless effort would be spared in this world if we realized that cooperation and love can never be won by force."

2. "These three ties, therefore, set three problems: how to find an. occupation which will enable us to survive under the limitations set by the nature of the earth; how to find a position among our fellows, so that we may cooperate and share the benefits of cooperation; how to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in two sexes and that the continuance and furtherance of mankind depends upon our love-life. Individual"

3. "It was only because men learned to cooperate that we could make the great discovery of the division of labor; a discovery which is the chief security for the welfare of mankind. To preserve human life would not be possible if each individual attempted to wrest a living from the earth by himself with no cooperation and no results of cooperation in the past. Through the division of labor we can use the results of many different kinds of training and organize many different abilities so that all of them contribute to the common welfare and guarantee relief from insecurity and increased opportunity for all the members of society."

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

1. "You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven."

2. "How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined."

3. "Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition."

4. "We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us."

5. "The romantic contrast between modern industry that "destroys nature" and our ancestors who "lived in harmony with nature" is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life."

6. "This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions."

7. "How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away."

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Homo Scientia

What is the most human feature, the thing that distinguishes us from all other species? What makes us human beings? Is it the fact that we play, or dance, or maybe, that we use language? Another good pretender for such a trait is that we create our artificial world, in which we live whereas other species live in the natural world as it is. We call our species Homo Sapiens but if we take a look at the written human history, it is questionable that being reasonable and wise are our most distinctive characteristics. So what it is? Neil deGrace Tyson has an answer that you can hear in the video below.

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Words have their own history, which is as revealing and profound for the meaning they bring as, for example, the discovery of electricity for the rapid advancement of modern technology. Each step that language has made through the years left its footprint. A word is a bouquet of various senses and a multitude of connections with other words that eventually produces not only a notion of something but a feeling, imagery. Have you ever thought how is it possible that a given word describes its object so good, how irreplaceable it sounds? Well, it is not only that we have made a convention out of it. It is also the gradual sculpturing of meaning over and over through the centuries. Even though we are not always aware of all these transformations, we have adopted them when we learned to use language. It is a network that is erected upon a huge underground structure of nuances, contexts, and connotations, which are present although implicitly. When we use a word we give rise to a tremendous chain of meanings, that makes us perceive things in one way or another. Today, we will follow the long and captivating adventure of the word cosmos, which has always sounded so beautiful to me, and it turned out it has something to do with beauty.