1+ day, 1+ hour ago   (679+ words) A team of researchers in Peru has built a system that can fly a drone over a Hass avocado orchard and, in real time, tell a farmer not only where every visible fruit is hanging but also how ripe each…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago   (68+ words) Depth perception is one of the most fundamental challenges in computer vision, and for robots, autonomous vehicles, and augmented reality systems, it is the difference between smooth navigation and costly failure. Deep learning has produced stereo matching networks that achieve…...

1+ day, 3+ hour ago   (68+ words) A voice-controlled home robot that can navigate a house, switch appliances on and off, and hold a natural conversation in multiple languages has been built for less than 10,000 rupees — roughly one-fifth of the cost of comparable commercial systems. The robot,…...

1+ day, 4+ hour ago   (631+ words) Deep inside the intervertebral disc — the resilient cushion that sits between the vertebrae of the spine — a small population of cells works quietly for decades to keep the tissue functional....

1+ day, 4+ hour ago   (691+ words) Every spacecraft that tumbles, spins, or reorients itself in orbit does so according to a property that engineers cannot afford to guess: the mass moment of inertia....

1+ day, 5+ hour ago   (83+ words) When the first fish lineage crawled onto land some 375 million years ago, its fins had to be remodeled into limbs capable of bearing weight. Evolutionary biologists have long focused on the genes that pattern the skeleton—Hox clusters, Sonic hedgehog,…...

1+ day, 8+ hour ago   (78+ words) Robots may soon be able to feel the world with something approaching the sensitivity of human skin, thanks to a flexible pressure sensor that borrows its cleverness from an unusual marriage of materials: tiny spherical iron particles and ultrathin sheets…...

1+ day, 8+ hour ago   (632+ words) Beneath many of the world’s cities and agricultural regions lies a hidden network of long-distance water conveyance tunnels, structures that move drinking water, irrigation supplies and hydropower flows across tens or even hundreds of kilometres. These tunnels are among the…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (115+ words) Misplacing your keys, glasses, wallet or phone is one of those small domestic frustrations that almost everyone knows intimately. But for millions of older adults, and especially for people living with dementia, losing track of everyday objects is far more…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (55+ words) A robotic platform that rolls quietly between rows of potted lettuce, fusing depth cameras with multispectral sensors, may soon transform how scientists measure the earliest and most fragile stage of crop life. Researchers at the Beijing Academy of Agriculture and…...