Explorer

You may be cursing the harsh cold of winter, but roboticists at the University of Michigan are capitalizing on the cold temperatures. A team working on the development of Cassie the Robot took advantage of the recent cold snap to perform testing. Read how Cassie performed in this article from Wired.

Last summer, the Canada Science and Technology Museum offered up access to its collection so that researcher Jennifer Thivierge could study “keypunch girls” — the women who punched holes in data cards and fed them into machines or tabulators, starting in the 1950s. The University of Ottawa’s Gazette writes about her findings, and what they say about gender discrimination within the field of computer science.

A new product will soon enable novice beekeepers to keep honeybees inside their houses. The BEEcosystem is modular honeybee habitat that can be hung almost anywhere; it simply needs to be placed near a window if inside, or in a sheltered location outside. Watch a video that shows how the technology works.

Researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute have developed a method for quick, on-site E. coli detection in food. While current food safety testing either requires days to complete or expensive equipment, this new method, paired with a smartphone and QR code, will make testing inexpensive and portable. The new detection process uses Janus emulsions, droplets consisting of two hemispheres of different densities. In water, the less dense, hydrocarbon hemisphere sits above the denser hemisphere