![]() Subscribe to pluspluspodcast, Motherboard's new show about the people and machines that are building our future. Look no further than this amazing octopus-tentacle-themed bowl This intricate bowl is made from extremely durable borosilicate glass and comes in a variety of colors, so you can find the perfect one to match your style. No danger at all from the writhing disembodied tentacle. "The gripper poses no danger to the user in direct contact," a Festo spokesperson again told me in an email. Nope, nothing to fear from the robotic octopus. "Even in the event of a collision, they are harmless and do not have to be shielded from the worker like conventional factory robots." "Its safe structure already meets the strict criteria of a soft robotics component and guarantees a safe working relationship with people," the company states in a design overview. As Festo envisions OctopusGripper working in tandem with people, as part of an interchangeable set of tools at the end of the BionicCobot arm, the company goes to great lengths to reiterate that it's a friendly bot. Last year, roboticists in Livorno, Italy developed tentacles that stretch and flex using heated coils.īut even as more of these octo-bots start slithering into prototypes, there's something unsettling about the alien design of a grasping, squeezing sucker-hand. The individual motor control of an octopus' eight arms, its agile clamber across the seafloor, and its ability to squeeze through small spaces make it an excellent model for biomimicry. WATCH: A Smarter Gun, Motherboard's new documentary.Ĭephalopods are a longtime muse of scientists creating soft, flexible robots. Sous-vide and grilled octopus tentacles with mashed potatoes and wasabi mayonnaise. But it is still a delightfully unnerving sight to behold-sci-fi turned reality. The OctopusGripper is one of Festo's concepts leading up to Germany's Hannover Messe 2017 trade fair next month, and doesn't currently have a firm release date, nor price. On the other hand, we probably don’t want to start implanting neurons in our arms: imagine a severed human hand crawling across the floor, creating a real-life Addams Family moment.It's seen taking hold of a series of smooth, cylindrical items, passing a rolled-up magazine and a tube to a waiting person. The ultimate hope, of course, is to harness the AChE trick for human limb regeneration, although that’s still a distant vision. And for the next hundred days or so, the arm tip grew back in to resemble the original one.ĪChE rose, peaked and dipped throughout this process, conducting a regrowth orchestra of tissues, nerves and structures until the arm was good as new. Yet by day 28, these features disappeared. Around that time, a mass of stem cells and a hefty amount of blood vessels have arrived at the site. And further molecular signals were responsible for the “hook-like structure” that was visible at the end of the arm in the second week. Within three days, some cascade of chemical signals cued the formation of a “knob,” covered with undifferentiated cells, where the cut had been made. Harmon describes what happens when an octopus loses its leg: Humans have this protein, too, but our store of the molecule is much less active than an octopus’. To do this, octopus use a protein called protein acetylcholinesterase, or AChE. While cut-off limbs do not regrow a new octopus, à la starfish, the octopus can regenerate tentacles with a far superior quality than, say, a lizard’s replacement tail, Harmon writes. Tentacle Locker is an unusual video game for adults about a creature in the locker who hunts for school girls. ![]() If an octopus’ arm is cut off without the poor guy being euthanized, it’s no sweat for the cephalopod. Other research found that, when encountering a piece of food, a severed limb will snatch it up and try to move it in the direction of a phantom octopus mouth. ![]() In one experiment, researchers chopped off euthanized octopuses’ tentacles, chilled them in water for an hour, and then still managed to get a split-second response when they probed the severed limbs. Researchers think this allows octopuses to become the ultimate multi-taskers, Katherine Harmon, who’s got a book on octopi coming out soon, writes at Scientific American, since each of their arms can busily work away at some pesky mollusk shell or feel around in some new corner of habitat, nearly independent of the brain.Īnd these arms can continue reacting to stimuli even after they are no longer connected to the main brain in fact, they remain responsive even after the octopus has been euthanized and the arms severed. Octopuses are renowned for their smarts (they can open jars!), and most of their 130 million IQ-raising neurons are located not in their brains but along their eight tentacles.
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