#cockroach

#cockroach

Winners of the Close-up Photographer of the Year 2021The top 100 winners of Close-up Photographer of the Year 03 (2021) or CUPOTY 03 are now featured on its website showing the winners gallery.The Close-up Photographer of the Year website was the brainchild of husband-and-wife duo Tracy and Dan Calder of Winchester, UK. They wanted to put close-up, macro and micro photography on the center stage and be celebrated in its own right.Tracy, a former editor of Outdoor Photography and a features editor at Amateur Photography, has over 20 years experience in the photo magazine industry. She’s also a photography instructor at West Dean College in Sussex, and an author of Close-up & Macro Photography, which has been translated into French and Chinese. Dan is a contributor to Black + White Photography magazine.This year’s Close-up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY 03) has more than 9000 photos from 55 countries across nine different categories. These categories are insects, animals, plants and fungi, underwater, butterflies and dragonflies, intimate landscape, manmade, micro, and young.From each category, the top three winners were chosen alongside with the other finalists. Here are the top three winners per category.#photography #CUPOTY #MacroPhotography #CloseupPhotography #photographycompetitionInsects

This Cockroach Robot Can't be SquashedOh great! As if the upcoming robot apocalypse isn't scary enough, engineers have now created a cockroach-inspired robot that can't be squashed."Most of the robots at this particular small scale are very fragile," noted professor of mechanical engineering Liwei Lin of UC Berkeley, "If you step on them, you pretty much destroy the robot ... We found that if we put weight on our [cockroach] robot, it still more or less functions."Made from a piezoelectric material, Lin's robot weighs about 20 to 65 milligrams, but can withstand being stepped on by a human - that's over one million times its own weight. It can move at speed of about 20 body lengths per second (nearing the speed of a scurrying cockroach) and carry loads up to 6 times its own weight.#robot #cockroach #MechanicalEngineering #LiweiLin #piezoelectric #UCBerkeley