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Miniscule Sensing Suite is a Big Step Towards Robotic Gnats

Cars That Think

In the late 1980s, Rod Brooks and Anita Flynn published a paper in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society with the amazing title of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: A Robotic Invasion of the Solar System.

Cheap 119
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Who Really Invented the Thumb Drive?

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In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. Computer users badly needed a cheap, high-capacity, reliable, portable storage device. The thumb drive was all that—and more.

Singapore 145
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Wireless Heater Made From a Leaf Skeleton Is Fully Biodegradable

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We’ve gotten very, very good at making things that are cheap and durable. What’s more, the process of making these goods is also bad for the environment, considering raw materials, refining, supply chain, packaging, and so on. Unfortunately, there are some deleterious side effects. Katherine W. Song et al.

Waste 70
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Cheap Sensors for Smarter Farmers

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One of the benefits of using print electronics is being able to mass-produce at a low cost, says Gregory Whiting at the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the principal investigators of the team working on the sensors. With the new, cheap sensors, farmers will be able to collect data on their farms without worrying about the variability.

Cheap 145
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False Starts: The Story of Vehicle-to-Grid Power

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Then, as electricity entrepreneurs expanded power generation and transmission capacity, they faced the new problem of what to do with all the cheap off-peak, nighttime electricity they could now produce. As utilities shifted to more reliable alternating-current systems, they phased out these costly backup batteries. Electric Car tzero 0-60 3.6

Grid 138
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Inventing Postscript, the Tech That Took the Pain out of Printing

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Back then, Warnock already had a rough idea how to “Print Anything.” from the University of Utah , joined the center in 1978, he immediately began work on a new printer protocol. from the University of Utah , joined the center in 1978, he immediately began work on a new printer protocol. in Mountain View, Calif.

Design 108
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Optimus: The Tesla Bot Here’s What We Know…Or, At Least Been Shown

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Given Tesla’s degree of mechanical ability, we can expect these to be completely adequate, but nothing here is crazy small, cheap, efficient, powerful, or anything else. Most of those components ported quite easily over to the bot’s environment.

Tesla 40