Johns Hopkins University engineers have developed a pioneering prosthetic hand that can grip plush toys, water bottles, and other everyday objects like a human, carefully conforming and adjusting its grasp to avoid damaging or mishandling whatever it holds.

The system’s hybrid design is a first for robotic hands, which have typically been too rigid or too soft to replicate a human’s touch when handling objects of varying textures and materials. The innovation offers a promising solution for people with hand loss and could improve how robotic arms interact with their environment.

Details abou...

Astronomers uncover extremely hot and violent eruption from first ever near-infrared analysis of a recurrent nova outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. Using the Gemini South telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, and the Magellan Baade Telescope, astronomers have for the first time observed a recurring nova outside of the Milky Way in near-infrared light. The data revealed highly unusual chemical emissions as well as one of the hottest temperatures ever reported for a nova, both indicative of an extremely violent eruption.

Nova explosions occur in binary star systems in which a white dwarf — the dense remnant of a dead star — continually siphons stellar material from a nearby compan...

A smartphone’s glow is often the first and last thing we see as we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at the end of the day. It is increasingly becoming an extension of our body that we struggle to part with. In a recent study in Computers in Human Behavior, scientists observed that staying away from smartphones can even change one’s brain chemistry.

The researchers recruited young adults for a 72-hour smartphone restriction diet where they were asked to limit smartphone use to essential tasks such as work, daily activities, and communication with their family or significant others.

During these three days, the researchers conducted psychological tests and did brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of restricting phone usage...

A small team of AI engineers at Zoom Communications has developed a new approach to training AI systems that uses far fewer resources than the standard approach now in use. The team has published their results on the arXiv preprint server.

The new approach developed at Zoom is called Chain of Draft (CoD), an update of the traditional approach now in use called Chain of Thought (CoT). CoT uses a step-by-step approach to solving a problem, similar in many ways to human problem-solving...