Robot climbs walls (w/ Video)

Wielding two claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a grandfather clock's pendulum, a small robot named ROCR ("rocker") scrambles up a carpeted, 8-foot wall in just over 15 seconds - the first such robot designed to climb ...

Exploring chaos on the nanometer scale

Chaotic behavior is typically known from large systems: for example, from weather, from asteroids in space that are simultaneously attracted by several large celestial bodies, or from swinging pendulums that are coupled together. ...

Mathematicians explain how some fireflies flash in sync

Stake out in Pennsylvania's Cook State Forest at the right time of year and you can see one of nature's great light shows: swarms of fireflies that synchronize their flashes like strings of Christmas lights in the dark.

Exploring quantum gravity and entanglement using pendulums

When it comes to a marriage with quantum theory, gravity is the lone holdout among the four fundamental forces in nature. The three others—the electromagnetic force, the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive ...

Using physics to map the chaos of movement in living organisms

The behavior of living organisms might obey the same mathematical laws as physical phenomena, such as weather and the motion of planets, says new research from the Biological Physics Theory Unit at the Okinawa Institute of ...

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