Planex News

We all know about donuts - rings of bread, usually covered with different icings, or mabye even sprinkles. The donut to a scientist is ‘the edge’ of human food, and no food could be more ansintoformosed - or weirder in the common tongue. New-to-science Bevel Astronu has explained to many universities and museums in England that there could be other foods out there - infinite combinations and flavours. And then, 3 years after telling the cleverest minds that a simple  donut was not the end of foods, he decided to start his experiments. He started 20 years ago and has finally finished his massive discovery. It is all written down on various sheets of paper and in complicated language, but our team at Toby News have manage to simmer it down to just three quarters of an article. “We live a new age - one of seven boundaries of the seven foodstuffs of  the seven planets revolving around eating. I call these limits the Phosferacational Layers, one that humanity has not yet conqu

Many companies like SpaceX have tried (but failed) to send rovers and robots to Mars, also known as the Red Planet. But now NASA is going to move forward with their new Mars rover. Just like Solar Orbiter, Perseverance promises to ‘touch the Red Planet’, with a whole heap of hi-tech technology on board. The mission takes the art of space travel further as the whole point of the mission is to see whether life existed on Mars, or even see if microbial life exists NOW. It does this by searching for habitable conditions or dips in ground level where water could have thrived millions of years ago. Perseverance introduces a fast moving, hi-tech drill that can bore into the ground. It sends a message to the ‘brain’, which sends ANOTHER message to the arm, which picks the sample up and stores it in a drawer which will later be examined back on a Earth. Bigger samples or samples that share too heave will be left behind a special rock which future humans will pick up on a future mission. There a

Technology has definately developed over the years. Since Michael Faraday’s discovery of electricity, the world has gone crazy for it. We’ve had ovens, tumble dryers, TVs, computers, even LEGO that you control with a laptop. But, most importantly, robots. They come in all shapes and sizes, from a few micrometres wide to  as big as a skyscraper. But what are robots and how do they work? When you think of a robot, you think of a humanoid-like thing (left). But they aren’t all like that. Some can be just a few micrometres wide, and take the form of a computer’s CPU (see last issue). Some can be bigger than skyscrapers and have a huge wrecking ball attached to them. Did you know, there are actually more CPUs than humanoid robots! To build a humanoid robot, you will have to study the human body. Instead of bones, robots have lots of moveable segments attached to one another. Each segment is fitted together with special metal ‘joints’, which can spin, turn, twist and much more when you progr

Film-makers have created a lot of cool films over the years, some with cool graphic effects or creepy alien invasions. But how would they work if they WERE real life? Read this article to raise your brain levels up and outsmart your parents... The classic Star Wars character C3P0 is not much different to any other humanoid robot. Instead of bones, robots have lots of moveable segments attached to one another. Each segment is fitted together with special metal ‘joints’, which can spin, turn, twist and much more when you program them to do so. All these special parts make the robot really flexible. In the American film Back To The Future, a professor invents a time-travelling car powered by plutonium. Based on this, the british chemist and inventor Professor Flux, PhD invented a time-travel machine. Powered by Ghlucoshianian Acid, a substance only found on Saturn, this incredible invention had to have cleaning machines to concentrate the acid, because it would horrible mutate humans if i

As far as we know, liquid metal robots from the future have yet to show up. But new research into alloys and lattice materials shows how liquid metal shapes can be deformed and reformed using heat. Researchers have developed a method of wrapping Field’s alloy - a mixture of bismuth, indium and tin - in a lattice or shell made out of rubber-like elastomers, which gives the liquid metal some useful extra properties. In particular, the liquid metal and elastomer lattice combination can be deformed after heating, and then recover its original shape after being heated up again a second time: not quite a robot rising up out of a lava pit, but the same sort of idea. “We spent over half a year developing this manufacturing process, because this new lattice material is very hard to process,” says mechanical engineer Pu Zhang from Binghamton University. “You need to find the best materials and processing parameters.” “Without the shell, it won’t work, because the liquid metal will flow away. The