Snake Robots: Can you watch this without squirming?

Are you, like many, afraid of snakes? What about robots? What about snake robots?

Are you, like many, afraid of snakes? What about robots?
How about we put that in an innovative light? Today we Ever Widening Circles brings you the story of robots with the advantages of a snakes.

Now here’s an idea that is truly “outside the box!” This innovation, which uses nature for inspiration, is just one incredible example of biomimicry; a growing field of science at the intersection of engineering, design, and biology.
After we get over the impulse to recoil from how snake-like it is, you will see that the snake robot has some incredible abilities and applications, about which we will soon learn more. But first, let’s take a look at the possibilities for underwater applications:


Via: Michele Guarnieri 2
What is the potential for the snake robot?
Consider the many dirty jobs that, performed by humans, endanger lives, or jobs that require access to small spaces, spaces that even conventional robots, with limbs or wheels, could never access.   Consider the possibility for assisting in minimally-invasive surgery, for inspection of power plants, for aiding in search and rescue efforts, in archaeological digs.

When one considers the many fields of work and disciplines of study in which we humans are engaged, and the number of associated problems we are trying to solve, it becomes clear that the snake robot has a lot of potential indeed!

We found a short video from a conference that explores the reaches of the snake robot’s potential. Let’s take a little trip into the future of this extraordinary technology, with a video courtesy of the Huffington Post:

If you’d like to read more about the snake robot story, here’s a link to a darn good article by Fox News called Snake Robots: Slithering machines could aid search and rescue efforts.

Snake robots aren’t just interesting creepy crawlies, they offer us a chance to explore our world and enhance our experience.

Why should we care?
Most importantly, inventions like the snake robot remind us to look to nature in our search for solutions to our many problems.

Think about it for a moment: humans have been perking along, solving problems with clever inventions since the dawn of simple machines like the wheel. That’s about 5,500 years. But Mother Nature has been barreling along, solving every challenge an organism can face on this earth for 3.5 billion years!

That’s a lot of “research and development” and “institutional knowledge” that we can tap into!

And that’s essentially what the new field of science I mentioned – called “Biomimicry”, or in professional circles, “Biomemetics” – is doing to make the world a better place.

If you’d like to check out a few other great articles we’ve done on that remarkable innovation of the future, I can recommend a great article we wrote called Biomimicry and the Floating Islands. Or another that gets shared a lot is called, Turning Birds into Dinosaurs.

Samsung launches Galaxy S8, S8+ smartphones with 'safety' as the mantra

NEW YORK: Samsung seems to be playing it safe with its first major smartphone since the embarrassing recall of its fire-prone Note 7. The Galaxy S8 features a larger display than its predecessor, the Galaxy S7, and sports a voice assistant intended to rival Siri and Google Assistant. But there is no increase in battery capacity, providing the battery more breathing room. The Note 7 pushed the engineering envelope with its battery, which contributed to a series of spontaneous smartphone combustions.

The Galaxy S8 will come in two sizes, both bigger than last year's models. Both models have screens that curve around the edges and get rid of the physical home button.

The Note 7 recall cost Samsung at least $5.3 billion. Though many customers remain loyal, any further misstep could prove fatal for the brand. "We're in the process of earning back that trust,'' saidDrew Blackard, a senior director of product marketing for Samsung. In the US, Samsung will start taking orders Thursday, with shipments scheduled for April 21. Prices haven't been announced yet. About that battery Samsung has blamed the Note 7 fires on multiple design and manufacturing defects in its batteries. Inspectors concluded that the initial batteries were too small for their capacity, and that their external pouch put pressure on the internal structure, leading to damage and overheating. Samsung recalled the phones and shipped replacements, but the newer batteries had welding defects and a lack of protective tape in some battery cells. Samsung recalled the replacements, too, and scrapped the phone. The company says phones will now go through multiple inspections, including X-rays and stress tests at extreme temperatures. The standard-size S8 phone has as much battery capacity as last year's Galaxy S7, but the phone is 4 percent larger by volume. The larger S8 Plus model has 3 percent less capacity than the Galaxy S7 Edge and the same capacity as the Note 7, but the phone's volume is larger by 12 percent and 6 percent, respectively.