Head-turning Cassie Cal makes campus moves on hovershoes

A bipedal robot called Cassie Cal is in the news, thanks to a video from its home at the Hybrid Robotics group at University of California Berkeley.

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The surprising reason why some lemurs may be more sensitive to forest loss

Duke University scientists have given us another way to tell which endangered lemur species are most at risk from deforestation—based on the trillions of bacteria that inhabit their guts.

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Canada must double its carbon tax to reach emissions target: report

Canada is falling so far behind on its emissions goal under the Paris Agreement that it would have to double its unpopular carbon tax to catch up, a parliamentary budget officer said Thursday.

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PoseRBPF: A new particle filter for 6D object pose tracking

Researchers at NVIDIA, University of Washington, Stanford University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have recently developed a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter for 6-D pose tracking, called PoseRBPF. The approach can effectively estimate the 3-D translation of an object and its full distribution over the 3-D rotation. The paper describing this filter, pre-published on arXiv, will be presented at the upcoming Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Freiburg, Germany.

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Viruses found to use intricate 'treadmill' to move cargo across bacterial cells

Countless textbooks have characterized bacteria as simple, disorganized blobs of molecules.

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Innovative robot fingers hold promise for assistive living, prosthetics

There's nothing quite like the comforting squeeze of your partner's hand. But a robot's hand? That's perhaps a bit different.

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Researchers show glare of energy consumption in the name of deep learning

Wait, what? Creating an AI can be way worse for the planet than a car? Think carbon footprint. That is what a group at the University of Massachusetts Amherst did. They set out to assess the energy consumption that is needed to train four large neural networks.

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Australia approves vast coal mine near Great Barrier Reef

Australia approved Thursday the construction of a controversial coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef, paving the way for a dramatic and unfashionable increase in coal exports.

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Investigating the implications of social robots in religious contexts

Researchers at Siegen University and Würzberg University, in Germany, have recently carried out a study investigating the user experience and acceptability associated with the use of social robots in religious contexts. Their paper, published in Springer's International Journal of Social Robotics, offers interesting insight into how people perceive blessing robots compared to other robots for more conventional purposes.

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New assay detects patients' resistance to antimalarial drugs from a drop of blood

Antimalarial drugs appear to follow a typical pattern, with early effectiveness eventually limited by the emergence of drug resistance. A report in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes a new assay using whole blood that simplifies the genetic analysis of malarial parasites by completely eliminating processing steps. This provides rapid access to critical information associated with resistance to antimalarials at the point of care, avoiding the time, expense, and effort of having the sample sent to a central laboratory and allowing clinicians to quickly re-evaluate treatment options.

* This article was originally published here