Stretchy Artificial 'Skin' Could Give Robots a Sense of Touch

Rubber electronics and sensors that operate normally even when stretched to up to 50 percent of their length could work as artificial skin on robots, according to a new study. They could also give flexible sensing capabilities to a range of electronic devices, the researchers said.

Like human skin, the material is able to sense strain, pressure and temperature, according to the researchers.

"It's a piece of rubber, but it has the function of a circuit and sensors," said Cunjiang Yu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston. Yu and his team describedtheir innovation in a study published online Sept. 8 in the journal Science Advances. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

usaid the rubber electronics and sensors have a wide range of applications, from biomedical implants to wearable electronics to digitized clothing to "smart" surgical gloves.

Because the rubbery semiconductor starts in a liquid form, it could be poured into molds and scaled up to large sizes or even used like a kind of rubber-based ink and 3D printed into a variety of different objects, Yu told Live Science.

One of the more interesting applications could be for robots themselves, Yu said. Humans want to be able to work near robots and to coexist with them, he said. But for that to happen safely, the robot itself needs to be able to fully sense its surroundings. A robot — perhaps even a soft, flexible one, with skin that's able to feel its surroundings—could work side by side with humans without endangering them, Yu said.

In experiments, Yu and his colleagues used the electronic skin to accurately sense the temperature of hot and cold water in a cup and also translate computer signals sent to the robotic hand into finger gestures representing the alphabet from American Sign Language.

Electronics and robots are typically limited by the stiff and rigid semiconductor materials that make up their computer circuits. As such, most electronic devices lack the ability to stretch, the authors said in the study.

In research labs around the world, scientists are working on various solutions to produce flexible electronics. Some innovations include tiny, embedded, rigid transistors that are "islands"in a flexible matrix. Others involve using stretchy, polymer semiconductors. The main challenges with many of these ideas are that they're too difficult or expensive to allow for mass production, or the transmission of electrons through the material is not very efficient, Yu said.

This latest solution addresses both of those issues, the researchers said. Instead of inventing sophisticated polymers from scratch, the scientists turned to low-cost, commercially available alternatives to create a stretchy material that works as a stable semiconductor and can be scaled up for manufacturing, the researchers wrote in the study.

Yu and his colleagues made the stretchable material by mixing tiny, semiconducting nanofibrils — nanowires 1,000 times thinner than a human hair — into a solution of a widely used, silicon-based organic polymer, called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS for short.

When dried at 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), the solution hardened into a stretchable material embedded with millions of tiny nanowires that carry electric current.

The researchers applied strips of the material to the fingers of a robotic hand. The electronic skin worked as a sensor that produced different electrical signals when the fingers bent. Bending a finger joint puts strain on the material, and that reduces electric current flow in a way that can be measured.

For example, to express the sign-language letter "Y," the index, middle and ring fingers were completely folded, which created a higher electrical resistance. The thumb and pinky fingers were kept straight, which produced lower electrical resistance.

Using the electrical signals, the researchers were able spell out "YU LAB" in American Sign Language.

Yu said he and his colleagues are already working to improve the material's electronic performance and stretchiness well beyond the 50 percent mark that was tested in the new study.

"This will change the field of stretchable electronics," he said.

Real-Life Superpower: 'See' Around Corners with Smartphone Tech

In spy novels and superhero films, the ability to see through walls has always been a handy — not to mention, impressive — trick. And now, this tech could be available to people in real life, with smartphone cameras that can help detect moving objects even if they are hidden around corners, according to a new study.

This futuristic-sounding tech could one day help vehicles see around blind corners, the researchers said

We may eventually be able to use this idea to alert drivers to pedestrians or cars that are about to dart out from behind buildings into a driver's path. Perhaps a few seconds of notice could save lives," said study lead author Katie Bouman, an imaging scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[Mind-Controlled Cats?! 6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real]

"Search and rescue, or helping to understand what is going on behind a wall in a hostage situation, are also potential applications," Bouman added.

Researchers have taken many different approaches in trying to make the "superpower" of seeing around corners a reality. For example, in 2015, researchers showed they could use lasers to see objects around cornersby firing light pulses at surfaces near the items. Those surfaces could act like mirrors, scattering the laser pulses onto any hidden objects. By analyzing the light that was reflected off the objects and other surfaces back onto the scanners, researchers could reconstruct the shapes of the hidden items.

Although most strategies for seeing around corners "are really great ideas," they also "usually require complex modeling [or] specialized hardware, or are computationally expensive," Bouman told Live Science. The 2015 study's technique, for example, required both extremely fast lasers and extraordinarily sensitive cameras.

But Bouman and her colleagues' method for seeing around corners simply uses a smartphone camera.

"We use light naturally in the scene and do not have to introduce our own light to probe the hidden scene," Bouman said. "This allows us to use common consumer cameras and not specialized equipment to see around corners."

The new system, known as CornerCameras, analyzes light that is reflected off objects hidden around corners and that falls on the ground within the line of sight of the camera. This light is called the "penumbra."

he system analyzes this penumbra over several seconds, stitching together dozens of distinct images, according to the study. This data helps the system measure the speed and trajectory of objects around corners in real time. (It does not see any identifying details about those objects — just the fact that they are moving.)

"I think the biggest surprise was that the system worked well in situations that I would not have expected," Bouman said. "For instance, once, during filming, it started raining. This caused big raindrops to start appearing on the ground, changing the color of the concrete floor."

Because CornerCameras is trying to analyze light signals that are just 0.1 percent of the total brightness of the ground, "I thought these raindrops would wipe out any signal we had," Bouman said. However, CornerCameras analyzes the data of a scene across dozens of images, so "the effect of the raindrops was essentially averaged out."

One current limitation of CornerCameras is that it requires a stationary camera that's held very steady. "In many situations, such as in a collision-avoidance system on a car, you do not have the luxury of a stationary camera," Bouman said. The researchers are now focused on getting the system to work first on a moving wheelchair and eventually on a moving car, she said.

Future research will also aim to make CornerCameras work in a variety of lighting situations, or in changing lighting conditions, such as when clouds overhead constantly move in front of the sun. "Getting the system to work in these scenarios would open up the possibility of it being able to be used by a person with a handheld smartphone," Bouman said.

Bouman and her colleagues will detail their findings on Oct. 25 at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Venice, Italy.

Beam of Invisibility' Could Hide Objects Using Light

Once thought of as the province of only "Star Trek" or "Harry Potter," cloaking technologies could become a reality with a specially designed material that can mask itself from other forms of light when it is hit with a "beam of invisibility," according to a new study.

Theoretically, most "invisibility cloaks" would work by smoothly guiding light waves around objects so the waves ripple along their original trajectories as if nothing were there to obstruct them. Previous work found that cloaking devices that redirect other kinds of waves, such as sound waves, are possible as well.

But the new study's  researchers, from at the Technical University of Vienna, have developed a different strategy to render an object invisible — using a beam of invisibility. [Now You See It: 6 Tales of Invisibility in Pop Culture]

Complex materials such as sugar cubes are opaque because their disorderly structures scatter light around inside them multiple times, said study senior author Stefan Rotter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna.

"A light wave can enter and exit the object, but will never pass through the medium on a straight line," Rotter said in a statement. "Instead, it is scattered into all possible directions."

With their new technique, Rotter and his colleagues did not want to reroute the light waves.

"Our goal was to guide the original light wave through the object, as if the object was not there at all. This sounds strange, but with certain materials and using our special wave technology, it is indeed possible," study co-author Andre Brandstötter, a theoretical physicist at the Technical University of Vienna, said in the statement.

The concept involves shining a beam, such as a laser, onto a material from above to pump it full of energy. This can alter the material's properties, making it transparent to other wavelengths of light coming in from the side.

"To achieve this, a beam with exactly the right pattern has to be projected onto the material from above — like from a standard video projector, except with much higher resolution," study lead author Konstantinos Makris, now at the University of Crete in Greece, said in a statement.

The pattern that is projected onto an object to render it invisible must correspond perfectly to the inner irregularities of that item that usually scatters light, the researchers said.

"Every object we want to make transparent has to be irradiated with its own specific pattern, depending on the microscopic details of the scattering process inside," Rotter said in a statement. "The method we developed now allows us to calculate the right pattern for any arbitrary scattering medium."

Rotter and his colleagues are now carrying out experiments to see whether their idea will actually work. "We think that an experiment would be easiest to perform in acoustics," Rotter told Live Science. For instance, loudspeakers could generate sound waves to make a tube "transparent" to other forms of sound.

"For me, personally, the most surprising aspect is that this concept works at all," Rotter said. "There may be many more surprises when digging deeper along these lines."

Eventually, similar research could also experiment with light, he said. Such work could have applications in telecommunication networks, Rotter said. "It is clear, however, that considerable work is still required to get this from the stage of fundamental research to practical applications," Rotter said.

Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 92nd birthday at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Thank you God,for my life thank you dad

Earth Day

Mobile phones stuffed in shoe soles, scalpel sewn into coat sleeves, drugs injected into tennis balls — these are just a few of the tricks jailbirds employ to smuggle contraband into India’s prisons

In February 2014, a real estate developer made his way nervously to the prisonward of Mumbai’s St. George’s Hospital. He had recently bagged a Slum Rehabilitation Authority project, a lucrative business opportunity in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets.

For over a month, he had been getting threatening phone calls from the “underworld”. They ordered him to pay a hefty extortion amount or stop work on the project. When he refused to pay heed, a henchman turned up at his doorstep. The builder was forced to accompany him to the hospital. Awaiting him in the prison ward, in perfect good health, was Ravi Mallesh Bora alias D.K. Rao, a top aide of gangster Rajendra Nikhalje alias Chhota Rajan.

Three years later, in 2017, the builder finally approached the Mumbai Crime Branch. Its Crime Investigation Unit found that Rao had been comfortably running his extortion racket from Taloja Central Jail in Navi Mumbai, where he had been lodged for years. He had also been in direct touch with his boss Rajan, who was giving him instructions and seeking regular updates on the dhandha(business).

This revelation of the prison cell serving as Rao’s ‘office’, however, wasn’t an unexpected one. In 2015, a surprise check of Rao’s cell at Taloja had unearthed three mobile phones. The call records showed he had made hundreds of calls over the last three months, many of them to international numbers. The builder’s complaint in 2017 only further confirmed what the police already knew: prison is not even a speed bump for criminal elements who know their way around.

But it isn’t only established international criminal syndicates such as Rajan’s that run their operations from inside prisons. Local gangsters do it too. The name Uday Pathak, though not as widely known as Chhota Rajan or Dawood Ibrahim, still strikes fear in northern Mumbai’s Kurar and surrounding areas.

Turf control

In June 2011, Pathak and his gang kidnapped four men of a rival gang to avenge a petty insult. They took them to a forest area near Kurar, tortured and mutilated them, and finally burned their bodies. Pathak was arrested and was undergoing trial when he learned that some local toughs were trying to take over his area. He arranged for mobile phones and relayed instructions to his friends on the outside to make it known that he was still a force to reckon with. This was in mid-2015.

So, a few months later, in November 2015, a gunman walked up to a construction site in Kurar, fired a single round, dropped four pieces of paper on the ground and fled the scene. One of the notes had the name Uday Pathak scribbled on it, with a demand for money. The other three had the names of local political figures and businessmen, indicating that they too could be Pathak’s targets.

Other examples of hit jobs being ordered from prison include those of Yusuf Suleiman Kadri alias Yusuf Bachkana, also a Chhota Rajan aide, who, in 2013, ordered a hit on a Mumbai builder for refusing to pay extortion money; and Prashant Rao, an aide of gangster Yusuf Lakdawala, who instructed three of his henchmen to kill a businessman for the same reason in November 2016. Bachkana was then lodged in Hindalga Central Jail in Belgaum, while Rao was in Nashik Central Jail. Luckily, the targets in both the cases survived the attempts on their lives.

Clearly, these gangsters wouldn’t have been able to order hit jobs and communicate with their associates unless they had access to mobile phones — an access that is illegal. So how did they manage to get their hands on one?

In the sprawling 212-acre complex of Chennai’s Puzhal Central Prison, undertrials were being lined up for security check at the gate. Under the watchful eyes of the warders, they walked through the scanning machines one by one.

A prisoner who passed through the metal detector without triggering an alert caught the guards’ attention. There was something unusual about his gait. Suspecting foul play, prison officials searched him. They found nothing on his body. A careful examination of his footwear revealed that one of the shoes had been customised to accommodate mobile phone components. He had cut open the grooves in the sole to fix a handset, battery, and charger. He had been trying to walk without giving putting too much weight on one of the shoes, the one with the mobile phone parts. This ended up arousing suspicion and led to the exposé.

This is just one of several options used by prisoners to smuggle prohibited articles into prison. Despite thorough frisking, round-the-clock security, watch towers, and an extensive CCTV network, inmates sneak in contraband at will.

But it’s not only phones that are sneaked in. A 21-year-old ex-inmate who spent over six months in Delhi’s Rohini district jail in 2017 recalls how “everything that’s small in size” was smuggled inside. “Be it drugs in the form of powder or pills, mobile phones, or pocket knives.”

Three layers of checking

Sitting in his East Delhi home, the undertrial, who was in jail on charges of rash driving and attempt to commit culpable homicide, shares a story about how a fellow inmate managed to take a scalpel into Rohini prison.

“He is not a noted criminal,” he says, refusing to take names. “But he has been in and out of prison several times. All the warders knew him personally. Now, anyone who comes to the prison goes through three layers of checking before they meet the prisoner. But often, if a lawyer has been visiting regularly, he can get in without a thorough check,” he says. “You have to understand that there’s a nexus at play here.”

He said that in this particular case, the advocate had concealed the scalpel on the inside of the right arm of his black coat, after making an incision in the cloth. When he reached the room where the prisoner was waiting for him, he told the warder that he needed the prisoner to sign a document. “The prisoner signalled to the warder to let him sign in person instead of the document being carried to him by the jail staff. The warder agreed. The prisoner and the lawyer met and ‘shook hands’. And the scalpel passed from the lawyer to his client.

“The warder knew what was going on,” claims the young undertrial out on bail, adding, “They play a major role in the movement of contraband into and within the prison. Parents, relatives and other visitors can also transfer contraband like the lawyer did, provided they have connections.”

But the smuggling of contraband into jail premises doesn’t necessarily have to be through the main gate. Court meetings are a popular rendezvous used to transfer drugs and phones to prison inmates. If that proves too tough to manage, you could simply chuck stuff into the prison. If you have a good arm, you can fit whatever it is into a tennis ball and throw it, like a fielder at deep fine leg hurling the ball to the wicket-keeper.

“Some prison walls are accessible from the road,” points out Ajay Kashyap, Director-General of Tihar jail. “For instance, one of the boundary walls of Rohini jail is close to a flyover. Often, tennis or Cosco balls are recovered from the prison backyard. We have found them filled with a note or small articles,” says Kashyap, adding that if a prisoner is found with such balls, he is immediately punished. He either has some of his perks — such as what he can buy from the canteen — reduced, or is denied meetings with his family.

A.G. Maurya, former Deputy-Inspector General (DIG) of Prisons, Tamil Nadu, echoes Kashyap’s point that contraband is often thrown into the prison campus.

“Puzhal Central Prison is a huge campus. It has deserted places full of thick vegetation, where construction materials have been dumped, and even some unused buildings. When the prisoners go to the court for remand extension every 15 days, or meet visitors at the prison, they fix on a date and time when their contact will throw the parcel containing mobile phones, cigarettes or drugs. They even co-ordinate this using mobile phones already smuggled into the prison,” says Maurya, adding that inmates have full knowledge of the prison topography and the places that are beyond the reach of surveillance. “Sometimes they even pick up a parcel after a few days. The guards can’t patrol the whole campus all the time. A few places are not visible to the armed guards on watch towers.”

Lucrative barters

But why do inmates resort to such smuggling knowing full well that they will spend more time in jail if caught? Is it primarily to run their criminal activities, as in the case of the Rajan gang members? Is it to protect themselves? Or is it just addiction — either to mobile phones or drugs? Prison officials say that money is the big driver.

A cigarette that retails for ₹10 in the outside world is worth 10 times more inside the prison. “It is the addiction of other inmates to tobacco that makes some prisoners take the risk of smuggling. They get to make at least 10 times the money they invest in smuggling these substances. The income earned is paid to the families outside. This is a working revenue model,” says an official from Puzhal prison.

Prisons also tend to have a vibrant barter trade. An inmate might offer a pack of beedis in exchange for being able to make a phone call to his family. Another will offer WhatsApp on his phone for an hour in exchange of drugs. Sometimes, however, the motivation could be as simple as wanting to take a selfie.

President nod to ordinance providing death penalty for rape of girls below 12

The minimum punishment in case of rape of women has been increased.

President Ram Nath Kovind on Sunday promulgated an ordinance to pave way for providing stringent punishment, including death penalty, for those convicted of raping girls below the age of 12 years.

The Union Cabinet on Saturday approved the ordinance to allow courts to award death penalty to those convicted of raping girls under 12 years.

New fast-track courts will be set up to deal with such cases and special forensic kits for rape cases will be given to all police stations and hospitals in the long term, according to the Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance 2018.

It stipulates stringent punishment for perpetrators of rape, particularly of girls below 16 and 12 years. Death sentence has been provided for rapists of girls under 12 years, officials said quoting the ordinance.

The minimum punishment in case of rape of women has been increased from rigorous imprisonment of seven years to 10 years, extendable to life imprisonment, they said.

In case of rape of a girl under 16 years, the minimum punishment has been increased from 10 years to 20 years, extendable to imprisonment for rest of life, which means jail term till the convict’s “natural life".

The punishment for gangrape of a girl below 16 years will invariably be imprisonment for the rest of life of the convict, the officials said.

Stringent punishment for rape of a girl under 12 years has been provided with the minimum jail term being 20 years which may go up to life in prison or death sentence, they said.

The Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Evidence Act, the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act will now stand amended.

The measure also provides for speedy investigation and trial. The time limit for investigation of all cases of rape has been prescribed, which has to be mandatorily completed within two months.

The deadline for the completion of trial in all rape cases will be two months, the officials said. A six-month time limit for the disposal of appeals in rape cases has also been prescribed.

There will also be no provision for anticipatory bail for a person accused of rape or gang rape of a girl under 16 years.