- ‘Rennervations’: Jeremy Renner Makes First Red Carpet Appearance Since Snowplow Accident; Says Show “Moves The Needle A Lot” In His Life Deadline
- Why Jeremy Renner Got ‘Kicked Out’ of the First ICU He Was Placed In Parade Magazine
- Jeremy Renner on Snowplow Accident, Getting Kicked Out of the ICU & Get Well “Cameo” from Paul Rudd Jimmy Kimmel Live
- Jeremy Renner expresses guilt over traumatic snowplow accident: ‘So many people thought I was dead’ Fox News
- Jeremy Renner Walks Rennervations L.A. Red Carpet Premiere After Accident PEOPLE
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: needle
Netflix live Chris Rock special won’t ‘move the needle,’ but better move than sports: Analyst – Yahoo Finance
- Netflix live Chris Rock special won’t ‘move the needle,’ but better move than sports: Analyst Yahoo Finance
- How Will Smith Feels About Chris Rock’s Comedy Special (Source) Entertainment Tonight
- Jada Pinkett Smith’s affair partner thought Chris Rock’s jokes were ‘funny’ New York Post
- Chris Rock Has Been Obsessed With Jada Pinkett-Smith For Years, Report Says. And This Surprises Who? Yahoo Life
- When Chris Rock Got Brutally Honest About His P*rn Addiction & Confessed It Impacted His Marriage: “I Was Not A Good Husband, I Was F*cked Up…” Koimoi
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Scientists Are Turning Dead Spiders Into ‘Necrobots’ And We Are So Creeped Out
When mechanical engineering graduate student Faye Yap saw a dead spider curled up in the hallway, it got her thinking about whether it could be used as a robotics component.
Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people’s idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip large, delicate, and irregularly shaped objects firmly and softly without breaking them.
So, in collaboration with mechanical engineer Daniel Preston, Yap and her colleagues at Rice University discovered a way to make a dead wolf spider’s legs unfurl and grip onto objects.
They called this new type of robotics ‘necrobotics’.
Weirdly, spider legs don’t have muscles for extension, but instead move their legs via hydraulic pressure – they have what’s called a prosoma chamber, or cephalothorax, which contracts, sending inner body fluid into their legs, making them extend.
So, the team inserted a needle into the spider’s prosoma chamber and created a seal around the tip of the needle with a glob of superglue. Squeezing a tiny puff of air through the syringe was enough to activate the spider’s legs, achieving a full range of motion in less than one second.
“We took the spider, we placed the needle in it not knowing what was going to happen,” says Yap in a video on the Rice University website.
“We had an estimate of where we wanted to place the needle. And when we did, it worked, the first time, right off the bat. I don’t even know how to describe it, that moment.”
The team were able to make the dead spider grip onto a small ball and used that experiment to determine a peak grip force of 0.35 millinewtons.
They then demonstrated the use of a dead spider to pick up delicate objects and electronics, including having this necrobotic gripper remove a jumper wire attached to an electric breadboard and then move a block of polyurethane foam.
They also showed that the spider could bear the weight of another spider of about the same size.
(Preston Innovation Laboratory/Rice University)
Since spiders extend their legs by exerting hydraulic pressure from their cephalothorax, when they die the hydraulic system doesn’t work anymore. The flexor muscles in the spider’s legs go into rigor mortis, but, as the muscles only work in one direction, the spider curls up.
While most man-made robotics components are quite complex to manufacture, spiders are complex already and (unfortunately for arachnophobes) are in plentiful supply.
“The concept of necrobotics proposed in this work takes advantage of unique designs created by nature that can be complicated or even impossible to replicate artificially,” the researchers say in their paper.
Spiders are also biodegradable, so using them as robot parts would cut the amount of waste in robotics.
“One of the applications we could see this being used for is micro-manipulation, and that could include things like micro-electronic devices,” says Preston in the video.
One drawback to the dead spider gripper is that it starts to experience some wear and tear after two days or after 1,000 open-and-close cycles.
“We think that’s related to issues with dehydration of the joints. We think we can overcome that by applying polymeric coatings,” explains Preston.
The researchers experimented with coating the wolf spiders in beeswax and found that its mass decrease was 17 times less than the uncoated spider over 10 days, which meant it was retaining more water and its hydraulic system might function longer.
This study was published in Advanced Science.
Scientists find an exotic black hole deemed a ‘needle in a haystack’
An artist’s impression showing what the binary star system VFTS 243 — containing a black hole and a large luminous star orbiting each other — might look like if we were observing it up close. (REUTERS)
Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
WASHINGTON — Astronomers have spotted in a galaxy adjacent to our Milky Way that they are calling a cosmic “needle in a haystack” — a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star.
Researchers said on Monday this one differs from all other known black holes in that it is “X-ray quiet” — not emitting powerful X-ray radiation indicative of gobbling up nearby material with its strong gravitational pull – and that it was not born in a stellar blast called a supernova.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so intense not even light can escape.
This one, with a mass at least nine times greater than our sun, was detected in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy and is located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
An extremely luminous and hot blue star with a mass about 25 times that of the sun orbits with this black hole in a stellar marriage. This so-called binary system is named VFTS 243. The researchers believe the companion star eventually also will become a black hole and could merge with the other one.
Dormant black holes, thought to be relatively common, are hard to detect because they interact very little with their surroundings. Numerous prior proposed candidates have been debunked with further study, including by members of the team that uncovered this one.
“The challenge is finding those objects,” said Tomer Shenar, a research fellow in astronomy at Amsterdam University, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “We identified a needle in a haystack.”
“It’s the first object of its kind discovered after astronomers have been searching for decades,” said astronomer and study co-author Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
It’s the first object of its kind discovered after astronomers have been searching for decades.
–Kareem El-Badry, astronomer and study co-author
The researchers used six years of observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope.
There are different categories of black holes. The smallest, like the newly detected one, are so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the ends of their life cycles. There also are intermediate-mass black holes as well as the enormous supermassive black holes residing at the center of most galaxies.
“Black holes are intrinsically dark objects. They do not emit any light. Therefore, in order to detect a black hole, we usually look at binary systems in which we see one luminous star moving around a second, not-detected object,” said study co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Munich.
It is typically assumed that the collapse of massive stars into black holes is associated with a powerful supernova explosion. In this case, a star perhaps 20 times our sun’s mass blew some of its material into space in its death throes, then collapsed in on itself without an explosion.
The shape of its orbit with its companion offers evidence for the lack of an explosion.
“The orbit of the system is almost perfectly circular,” Shenar said.
Had a supernova occurred, the blast’s force would have kicked the newly formed black hole in a random direction and yielded an elliptical rather than circular orbit, Shenar added.
Black holes can be mercilessly ravenous, guzzling any material — gas, dust and stars — wandering within their gravitational pull.
“Black holes can only be mercilessly ravenous if there is something close enough to them that they can devour. Usually, we detect them if they are receiving material from a companion star, a process we call accretion,” Bodensteiner said.
Shenar added, “In so-called dormant black hole systems, the companion is far enough away that the material does not accumulate around the black hole to heat up and emit X-rays. Instead, it is immediately swallowed by the black hole.”
×
Related stories
Most recent Science stories
More stories you may be interested in
Scientists find an exotic black hole deemed a ‘needle in a haystack’
An artist’s impression showing what the binary star system VFTS 243 – containing a black hole and a large luminous star orbiting each other – might look like if we were observing it up close is seen in this undated handout image. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the sun’s mass and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the sun. ESO/L. Calcada/Handout via REUTERS
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
WASHINGTON, July 18 (Reuters) – Astronomers have spotted in a galaxy adjacent to our Milky Way what they are calling a cosmic “needle in a haystack” – a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star.
Researchers said on Monday this one differs from all other known black holes in that it is “X-ray quiet” – not emitting powerful X-ray radiation indicative of gobbling up nearby material with its strong gravitational pull – and that it was not born in a stellar blast called a supernova.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so intense not even light can escape.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
This one, with a mass at least nine times greater than our sun, was detected in the Tarantula Nebula region of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy and is located about 160,000 light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
An extremely luminous and hot blue star with a mass about 25 times that of the sun orbits with this black hole in a stellar marriage. This so-called binary system is named VFTS 243. The researchers believe the companion star eventually also will become a black hole and could merge with the other one.
Dormant black holes, thought to be relatively common, are hard to detect because they interact very little with their surroundings. Numerous prior proposed candidates have been debunked with further study, including by members of the team that uncovered this one.
“The challenge is finding those objects,” said Tomer Shenar, a research fellow in astronomy at Amsterdam University, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “We identified a needle in a haystack.”
“It’s the first object of its kind discovered after astronomers have been searching for decades,” said astronomer and study co-author Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The researchers used six years of observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope.
There are different categories of black holes. The smallest, like the newly detected one, are so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the ends of their life cycles. There also are intermediate-mass black holes as well as the enormous supermassive black holes residing at the center of most galaxies.
“Black holes are intrinsically dark objects. They do not emit any light. Therefore, in order to detect a black hole, we usually look at binary systems in which we see one luminous star moving around a second, not-detected object,” said study co-author Julia Bodensteiner, a postdoctoral research fellow at the European Southern Observatory in Munich.
It is typically assumed that the collapse of massive stars into black holes is associated with a powerful supernova explosion. In this case, a star perhaps 20 times our sun’s mass blew some of its material into space in its death throes, then collapsed in on itself without an explosion.
The shape of its orbit with its companion offers evidence for the lack of an explosion.
“The orbit of the system is almost perfectly circular,” Shenar said.
Had a supernova occurred, the blast’s force would have kicked the newly formed black hole in a random direction and yielded an elliptical rather than circular orbit, Shenar added.
Black holes can be mercilessly ravenous, guzzling any material – gas, dust and stars – wandering within their gravitational pull.
“Black holes can only be mercilessly ravenous if there is something close enough to them that they can devour. Usually, we detect them if they are receiving material from a companion star, a process we call accretion,” Bodensteiner said.
Shenar added, “In so-called dormant black hole systems, the companion is far enough away that the material does not accumulate around the black hole to heat up and emit X-rays. Instead, it is immediately swallowed by the black hole.”
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Astroworld security guard pricked in neck with needle, Houston police say
At least one person at the Travis Scott concert where eight people died Friday night was injected with something by an unknown, “needle” wielding assailant, and had to be revived with Narcan — a drug used to treat narcotic overdoses, Houston’s police chief said Saturday.
Chief Troy Finner said the investigation into the mayhem at the Astroworld concert that also saw 300 injured “is now a criminal investigation that is going to involve our homicide division as well as narcotics.”
The details of what happened to the security officer who was jabbed are not yet clear, Finner said.
“He was reaching over to restrain or grab a citizen and he felt a prick in his neck,” the police chief said. After he was given the Narcan, medical staff did see a mark on his neck that might appeared to be made by a needle, he said.
The injury appeared to confirm rumors that someone at NRG Park was using a needle to jab members of the crowd, one of the possibilities Finner said was under investigation. The police are waiting for medical examiners reports for the eight who died, who ranged in age from 14 to 27.
Some victims among the dead and the 25 who were hospitalized after the melee were trampled as the crowd surged toward the stage, Finner said. Of the injured, 13 people, including one who is 10 years old, remain hospitalized.
Houston officials said they are investigating all aspects of the operations surrounding the concert, which saw 50,000 people packed into the stadium for the first night of a two-day festival.
The probe will include the permitting and planning, security and medical staffing and more. Scott’s staff and the event promoter, Live Nation, are cooperating with the investigation.
“This remains a very active investigation. There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered and a lot of people that we need to talk to,” Finner said.
Threading a Needle on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover took this image of the Martian rock nicknamed “Rochette” on August 27, 2021, shortly after it abraded a circular patch known as “Bellegarde.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
During the solar conjunction period, the project’s science and engineering teams have had time to digest the data from Perseverance collected since the rover landed in Jezero crater. While taking a step back from the normal routines of operating the rover and its fine set of instruments, we had the chance to reflect on what the rover and its team has accomplished.
Perseverance and its team have come a long way over the past 8 months of operation on the surface of 
Image captured of the rock ‘Rochette’ after the target ‘Bellegarde’ was abraded. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The robotic arm and turret constitute a highly stable and reliable platform that must support all percussion and abrasion tools while simultaneously supporting the two proximity instruments, PIXL and SHERLOC. Figuring out how to mount all these systems on the same platform was challenging, but with a clever mechanical design, a single shared platform was possible.
From this platform the PIXL instrument conducts its scientific Xray Fluorescence observations. PIXL emits a focused Xray beam of about 120 µm in diameter (as thin as a single strand of human hair!) and collects a fingerprint size map scan of measurements. For PIXL to achieve this, it constantly checks and self-adjusts the distance between the instrument and the targeted rock to maintain optimal focus of the Xray beam. This operation is much like threading a needle – requiring great precision and is performed relentlessly a few thousand times for each scan.Written by David Pedersen, Co-Investigator, PIXL Instrument at Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
Japan health minister says Okinawa vaccine contaminants likely from needle stick
TOKYO, Aug 31 (Reuters) – Japan’s health minister said on Tuesday it was highly likely that foreign matter found in Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) COVID-19 vaccines in the southern prefecture of Okinawa were caused when needles were stuck into the vials.
Some Moderna shots were temporarily halted in Okinawa on Sunday after foreign materials were discovered in vials and syringes. The health ministry said later needles may have been incorrectly inserted into vials, breaking off bits of the rubber stopper.
“Whatever the reason (for the foreign matter) we have heard that there is no safety or other issues,” health minister Norihisa Tamura told reporters, adding that it was not uncommon for foreign material to enter a vial with other vaccines.
“We will continue to gather information and report back,” he added.
Japan is facing its biggest wave of COVID-19 infections so far during the pandemic, driven by the highly transmissable Delta variant.
A race to boost inoculations has been hampered by delays in imported vaccines and the discovery of the contaminants in some Moderna doses that prompted the suspension of three batches last week.
Taro Kono, the minister in charge of the inoculation campaign, said on Tuesday he wanted to speed up shipments of vaccines to municipalities that had been forced to put a halt reservations due to shortages.
The government is considering when and how to give out booster shots that may be needed to maintain immunity against the virus but is focusing for now on completing the first two shots for the public, Kono told reporters.
(This story was refiled to correct “where” to “were” in first paragraph.)
Reporting by Mari Saito and Rocky Swift in Tokyo; Editing by Richard Pullin
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
UnityPoint to vaccinate almost 3,000 Iowans over the weekend
UnityPoint plans to vaccinate 3,000 people this weekend in their clinics across the metro — as they continue to work through Phase 1B of the rollout.Right now, UnityPoint is reserving their vaccine allocation mostly for their 43,000 clients that meet the age requirement of 65 years old — since they’re the ones most likely to suffer the worst symptoms if they were to catch the virus. At their location on University Avenue on Des Moines’ east side, they plan to give 640 shots this weekend, and 3,000 across all their metro clinics.”I was eager to get it done, I want to get it done and get my second one, and hopefully get on with my life,” Ona Lovell said just minutes after receiving her first dose. Lovell says she’s barely left her house at all over the last year out of fear of the pandemic — and couldn’t wait for the shot.”I feel fine, it was actually easier than getting the flu shot,” she said.UnityPoint is also working with eight school districts, 17 child care facilities and first responders in five Polk County cities to get their phase 1B employees vaccinated.
DES MOINES, Iowa —
UnityPoint plans to vaccinate 3,000 people this weekend in their clinics across the metro — as they continue to work through Phase 1B of the rollout.
Right now, UnityPoint is reserving their vaccine allocation mostly for their 43,000 clients that meet the age requirement of 65 years old — since they’re the ones most likely to suffer the worst symptoms if they were to catch the virus.
At their location on University Avenue on Des Moines’ east side, they plan to give 640 shots this weekend, and 3,000 across all their metro clinics.
“I was eager to get it done, I want to get it done and get my second one, and hopefully get on with my life,” Ona Lovell said just minutes after receiving her first dose.
Lovell says she’s barely left her house at all over the last year out of fear of the pandemic — and couldn’t wait for the shot.
“I feel fine, it was actually easier than getting the flu shot,” she said.
UnityPoint is also working with eight school districts, 17 child care facilities and first responders in five Polk County cities to get their phase 1B employees vaccinated.