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Weird Science Weekly: Bionic kangaroo hops us into the future of robotics

Engineers unveil bionic kangaroo

In this installment of Weird Science Weekly, we're looking at just a small sample of the strange science being studied these days, including a bionic kangaroo that can store the energy from its jumps, a tiny fuel cell that can be powered by human spit, and computers that teach other computers how to play video games...

This bionic kangaroo is the model for reusable energy

If you were going to build a robot, your first choice might not be to design it after the kangaroo. However, German robotics company Festo has done just that, and with good reason: the way a kangaroo hops is very energy efficient. When the animal hops, it expends energy to launch itself into the air, but when it lands, it gains a lot of that energy back to be reused for the next jump. Emulating this in robotic form could lead to new robots in manufacturing that recover a lot of the energy they expend as they perform their job, cutting back on how much energy they need to run.

This was only a proof-of-concept model apparently, so just to show it could be done. Presumably, they'll be taking the concept and seeing how it can be applied to other types of robots and robotic processes. Who knows, though, with the ability to control the robot via hand gestures, it might lead to new line of robot pets too!

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The fuel cell that's powered by human spit

Microbial fuel cells — ones that generate electricity by using microbes the produce a charge when they break down organic matter — are nothing new, but a team of engineers at Penn State University have produced one that can use human saliva.

"There is a lot of organic stuff in saliva," Bruce E. Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State, said in a statement. He gives credit for the discovery to Justine Mink, a fellow researcher at the university, who came up with the idea while thinking about glucose monitoring for diabetics.

The only thing that's lacking from the saliva is the right kind of bacteria. That has to be something they add to the fuel cell, but the saliva provides the food (thus the fuel source). This could mean a bunch of new electronic products that can be powered simply by providing a little bit of saliva, or if they don't necessarily want people spitting into their electronics, any liquid with the same kind of 'organic stuff' can be used.

[ Related: Weird Science Weekly: Is it safe to pee in the pool? ]

Computers teach other computers to play Pac-Man and StarCraft

Pac-Man isn't a very complicated video game when you take it at face value — move him around, eat dots, avoid ghosts, grab cherries to eat ghosts, rinse and repeat — but it actually involves a surprisingly complex set of decisions to play well. This, along with a game like StarCraft, is being used to see how computers can teach each other how to play these games, and in essence, teach each other how to make good decisions given the information on hand.

The researchers used a typical Pac-Man game, with the goal of getting the highest score, and a simplified StarCraft game, with just the computer facing off as a sniper against a Zerg on a square course, with the idea of not getting killed. They ran the computer through the games so that it could learn how to play them, and then had the computer teach a bunch of uninitiated computers (noobs, as John Timmer of Ars Technica put it) how to play. The computer used several different teaching methods (giving all tips at once, spreading them out over time, correcting when the 'noob' did something wrong, speaking up at important parts of the game, and even correcting when the teacher guessed that the student was going to do something wrong). The winner of all these was the method of correcting when the student did something wrong, but in all cases, having the teacher and student working together did better than the computer working alone to learn the game.

Very cool stuff, as long as it doesn't help bring about the robot apocalypse!

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Keep your eyes on the wonders of science, and if you spot anything particularly strange you'd like me to check out for next week, comment below, email me using the link in the banner above, or drop me a line on Twitter!

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