A robot that swims underwater, then flies straight out of it! 🦢 Water is 1,000 times denser than air. Moving through one or the other normally means two completely different machines. Around 100 bird species disagree. Loons, gulls, puffins and petrels dive after prey, then leap back into the sky. Engineers at MIT and EPFL built a robot that does the same thing. It's a flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle, it weighs under 300 grams, and the results are out in Science. @RaphZufferey who runs the AURA Lab at MIT, is lead author. A waterproof motor drives a crankshaft that pumps two flexible wings up and down at set frequencies, and a motorised tail changes angle to climb or dive. The wing membranes are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles so water sheds off them. Wing flexibility turned out to be the whole game. Flexible enough to keep flapping amplitude low in water, firm enough to hold the robot up in air. → Swims at almost 1 m/s flapping at around 5 Hz → Flies at around 6 m/s at a similar frequency, close to real diving birds → The water-to-air transition needs a pitch of around 70°. Shallower and the wingtips catch the surface, steeper and it falls back in My favourite finding is the one about feet. Puffins and ducks paddle at the surface to get airborne, so the team assumed a robot would need something equivalent. It doesn't. Wings and tail alone are enough. Funded in part by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship 🇵🇱 Read more here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

Cybercab’s motorized seat belts do more than tighten themselves. They can vibrate or pulse to provide haptic feedback and get the passenger’s attention. They can also proactively tighten when Cybercab anticipates or detects harsh braking, loss of traction or another sudden road event.

A reckless Bronx motorist lost control of their car and then leapt it into the side of a McDonald’s on Saturday afternoon, leaving a gaping hole just feet from the busy drive-thru window.

A netizen ran into a foreigner driving a Chinese "sanbengzi" (motorized tricycle) in Iceland — and he showed off the "Caution: Reversing" warning sound! #MadeInChina# #MotorizedTricycle#