Experiment in one of the world's quietest rooms reveals the hairs detect airborne sounds--like predators. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Have you ever walked into a room full of caterpillars? While the answer for most people is probably no, those of us who have may have noticed the insects reacting to the sound of your voice. That's what happened to Carol Miles, a biologist at Binghamton University in New York.

In mechanical structures like airplanes, cars and houses, noise is generated and transmitted through vibrations. To take measures to reduce this noise, vibrations need to be simulated with expensive numerical computations. Deep learning surrogate models present a promising alternative to classical numerical simulations as they can be evaluated magnitudes faster, while trading-off accuracy. To quantify such trade-offs systematically and foster the development of methods, we present a benchmark on the task of predicting the vibration of harmonically excited plates. The benchmark features a total of 12,000 plate geometries with varying forms of beadings, material, boundary conditions, load position and sizes with associated numerical solutions. To address the benchmark task, we propose a new network architecture, named \modelname, which predicts vibration patterns of plate geometries given a specific excitation frequency. Applying principles from operator learning and implicit models for shape encoding, our approach effectively addresses the prediction of highly variable frequency response functions occurring in dynamic systems. To quantify the prediction quality, we introduce a set of evaluation metrics and evaluate the method on our vibrating-plates benchmark.

Wellness brand Therabody's Theragun Black Friday deals are live until December 6. The company is mostly known for its percussive massage guns--which are on sale, too--but don't overlook the rest of Therabody's inventory. From skincare facial devices and compression boots to sleep aids and hot and cold wearables, there is a gadget for every concern. Most of these products are HSA/FSA eligible, too. We've rounded up the best Therabody and Theragun Black Friday deals worth your attention (and money).

Beyond a simple notification of incoming calls or messages, more complex information such as alphabets and digits can be delivered through spatiotemporal tactile patterns (STPs) on a wrist-worn tactile display (WTD) with multiple tactors. However, owing to the limited skin area and spatial acuity of the wrist, frequent confusions occur between closely located tactors, resulting in a low recognition accuracy. Furthermore, the accuracies reported in previous studies have mostly been measured for a specific posture and could further decrease with free arm postures in real life. Herein, we present Heterogeneous Stroke, a design concept for improving the recognition accuracy of STPs on a WTD. By assigning unique vibrotactile stimuli to each tactor, the confusion between tactors can be reduced. Through our implementation of Heterogeneous Stroke, the alphanumeric characters could be delivered with high accuracy (93.8% for 26 alphabets and 92.4% for 10 digits) across different arm postures.

From runaway robots to "sonic bombs," we reviewed offbeat alarm clocks designed to awaken even the heaviest sleepers. Not every alarm clock is created equal. Heavy sleepers know how easy it is to snooze through the overly genteel alarms on your phone. For people who can't get out of bed without a bigger jolt, extreme alarms have popped up in recent years--from relatively simple puzzle-alarm phone apps to alarms on wheels to alarms that shake the bed. Not only are these an innovative way to get chronic snoozers out of bed, but they can be great for those who are hard of hearing, utilizing different frequencies and pitches as well as movement through vibration.

Environment Animals Wildlife Spiders Spiders'decorate' their webs to help trap dinner Stabilimenta may help spiders find a buggy snack. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of nature's most beautiful natural wonders, spider webs sometimes feature little extra bits of flair called stabilimenta . Stabilimenta are highly-reflective UV structures. Basically, think of them like spidey bike reflectors scattered throughout a web.

In modern gear manufacturing, stringent Noise, Vibration, and Harshness (NVH) requirements demand high-precision finishing operations such as power honing. Conventional quality control strategies rely on post-process inspections and Statistical Process Control (SPC), which fail to capture transient machining anomalies and cannot ensure real-time defect detection. This study proposes a novel, data-driven framework for in-process monitoring of gear power honing using vibration signal analysis and machine learning. Our proposed methodology involves continuous data acquisition via accelerometers, followed by time-frequency signal analysis. We investigate and compare the efficacy of three subspace learning methods for features extraction: (1) Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction; (2) a two-stage framework combining PCA with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) for enhanced class separation; and (3) Uncorrelated Multilinear Discriminant Analysis with Regularization (R-UMLDA), adapted for tensor data, which enforces feature decorrelation and includes regularization for small sample sizes. These extracted features are then fed into a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to predict four distinct gear quality categories, established through rigorous geometrical inspections and test bench results of assembled gearboxes. The models are trained and validated on an experimental dataset collected in an industrial context during gear power-honing operations, with gears classified into four different quality categories. The proposed framework achieves high classification accuracy (up to 100%) in an industrial setting. The approach offers interpretable spectral features that correlate with process dynamics, enabling practical integration into real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance systems.

Affective tactile interaction constitutes a fundamental component of human communication. In natural human-human encounters, touch is seldom experienced in isolation; rather, it is inherently multisensory. Individuals not only perceive the physical sensation of touch but also register the accompanying auditory cues generated through contact. The integration of haptic and auditory information forms a rich and nuanced channel for emotional expression. While extensive research has examined how robots convey emotions through facial expressions and speech, their capacity to communicate social gestures and emotions via touch remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we developed a multimodal interaction system incorporating a 5*5 grid of 25 vibration motors synchronized with audio playback, enabling robots to deliver combined haptic-audio stimuli. In an experiment involving 32 Chinese participants, ten emotions and six social gestures were presented through vibration, sound, or their combination. Participants rated each stimulus on arousal and valence scales. The results revealed that (1) the combined haptic-audio modality significantly enhanced decoding accuracy compared to single modalities; (2) each individual channel-vibration or sound-effectively supported certain emotions recognition, with distinct advantages depending on the emotional expression; and (3) gestures alone were generally insufficient for conveying clearly distinguishable emotions. These findings underscore the importance of multisensory integration in affective human-robot interaction and highlight the complementary roles of haptic and auditory cues in enhancing emotional communication.

Abstract--T actile sensing holds great promise for enhancing manipulation precision and versatility, but its adoption in robotic hands remains limited due to high sensor costs, manufacturing and integration challenges, and difficulties in extracting expressive and reliable information from signals. In this work, we present a low-cost, easy-to-make, adaptable, and compact fingertip design for robotic hands that integrates multi-modal tactile sensors. We use strain gauge sensors to capture static forces and a contact microphone sensor to measure high-frequency vibrations during contact. These tactile sensors are integrated into a compact design with a minimal sensor footprint, and all sensors are internal to the fingertip and therefore not susceptible to direct wear and tear from interactions. From sensor characterization, we show that strain gauge sensors provide repeatable 2D planar force measurements in the 0-5 N range and the contact microphone sensor has the capability to distinguish contact material properties. We apply our design to three dexterous manipulation tasks that range from zero to full visual occlusion. Given the expressiveness and reliability of tactile sensor readings, we show that different tactile sensing modalities can be used flexibly in different stages of manipulation, solely or together with visual observations to achieve improved task performance. For instance, we can precisely count and unstack a desired number of paper cups from a stack with 100% success rate which is hard to achieve with vision only. More details and videos can be found in https://sites.google.com/view/tactilefingertip.

Structural vibrations induced by external excitations pose significant risks, including safety hazards for occupants, structural damage, and increased maintenance costs. While conventional model-based control strategies, such as Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), effectively mitigate vibrations, their reliance on accurate system models necessitates tedious system identification. This tedious system identification process can be avoided by using a model-free Reinforcement learning (RL) method. RL controllers derive their policies solely from observed structural behaviour, eliminating the requirement for an explicit structural model. For an RL controller to be truly model-free, its training must occur on the actual physical system rather than in simulation. However, during this training phase, the RL controller lacks prior knowledge and it exerts control force on the structure randomly, which can potentially harm the structure. To mitigate this risk, we propose guiding the RL controller using a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) controller. While LQR control typically relies on an accurate structural model for optimal performance, our observations indicate that even an LQR controller based on an entirely incorrect model outperforms the uncontrolled scenario. Motivated by this finding, we introduce a hybrid control framework that integrates both LQR and RL controllers. In this approach, the LQR policy is derived from a randomly selected model and its parameters. As this LQR policy does not require knowledge of the true or an approximate structural model the overall framework remains model-free. This hybrid approach eliminates dependency on explicit system models while minimizing exploration risks inherent in naive RL implementations. As per our knowledge, this is the first study to address the critical training safety challenge of RL-based vibration control and provide a validated solution.