All posts tagged: crawl

Shipping slows to a crawl through Strait of Hormuz, threatening to snarl international trade

Shipping slows to a crawl through Strait of Hormuz, threatening to snarl international trade

Published by Sam Flores

To keep cargo flowing, President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that the U.S. Navy would start “escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz” if necessary. But since then, traffic has remained at a near standstill, and it’s unclear if any tankers have taken the government up on its offer. “Naval escorts would help reduce the threat for the ships being protected,” said Jakob Larsen, chief safety and security officer at global shipping organization BIMCO. “That said, providing protection for all tankers operating in areas currently threatened by Iran is unrealistic as this would require a very high number of warships and other military assets.” More than 150 vessels, including oil and liquid natural gas tankers, have been forced to anchor or reroute, causing significant operational challenges, according to insurance broker Marsh Risk. Insurers are canceling coverage under war risk policies, causing a coverage gap that is spiking the cost of safe passage. Marsh said that rates have surged from 0.25% to 1.25% of the value of the ship as of …

Shia LaBeouf’s New Orleans Bar Crawl: ‘He’s Terrorizing the City’

Shia LaBeouf’s New Orleans Bar Crawl: ‘He’s Terrorizing the City’

Published by Daniella Wilson

If there was ever a city to fall off the wagon in, it’s New Orleans. If there was ever a time, it’s Mardi Gras. While the carnival culminates tomorrow, Fat Tuesday, the Transformers actor Shia LaBeouf — who has professed to be sober, and who has blamed his abusive behavior towards ex-girlfriend FKA Twigs on his past alcoholism — has been on an extended-weekend bar crawl in the city’s Uptown neighborhood since Thursday, say employees of various drinking establishments around the city. The mercurial actor ran into a door block early Sunday night at the open-24/7 bar Ms Mae’s when LaBeouf — married to Frankenstein indie queen Mia Goth — showed up at the boisterous dive sans shirt or cash. He wasn’t alone in what Ms Mae’s doorman Robert Skuse described as an “inebriated” state, and was “somewhat belligerent.” LaBeouf came in right around the time the Bacchus super-krewe parade rolled up St. Charles Avenue, amid thousands of revelers, most of them deeply in their go-cups, catching “throws” and watching floats and marching bands go by. In the middle of the mayhem, “he did the ‘Do you know who I am?’ bit,” Skuse said. Many …

This robot hand can detach from its arm and crawl around

This robot hand can detach from its arm and crawl around

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Engineers in Switzerland recently created a detachable, spider-like robot hand capable of grabbing multiple objects and using its fingers to crawl. The unsettling device, reminiscent of a threatening video game creature, can separate itself from a mounted robot arm, tip-toe (or really, tip-finger) its way toward small objects, pick them up, and carry them on its back. The symmetrical design and flexible fingers mean that the robot can transport objects on either side of its body. For humans, that would look like holding a ball in your palm while simultaneously grasping a piece of fruit on the back of your hand. But the robot hand’s designers say this bizarre form factor is more than just the product of a creepy fever dream: it’s an example of a design that’s more efficient than the human hand, unburdened by natural selection’s pesky constraints.  The researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology detailed their findings this week in Nature Communications at the …

Air-powered soft robots think, sense and move with no electronics

Air-powered soft robots think, sense and move with no electronics

Published by Jenni Sidey

Robots that move, sense and even coordinate with one another usually bring to mind tangled wires, circuit boards and humming motors. In a new study from the University of Oxford, all of that disappears. Instead, soft machines built from rubbery parts and air tubes come to life using only air pressure and clever design, with no electronics or software at all. These soft “fluidic robots” are described in the journal Advanced Materials. They can hop, crawl, shake and sort objects. They can even fall into a shared rhythm, like a tiny mechanical flock, without a central controller. Professor Antonio Forte, who leads the Robotic and Additive Design Laboratory (RADLab) at Oxford, put it simply: “We are excited to see that brain-less machines can spontaneously generate complex behaviours, decentralising functional tasks to the peripheries and freeing up resources for more intelligent tasks.” Fluidic Unit Operation. (CREDIT: Advanced Materials) How Air Powered Soft Robots Work Soft robots rely on flexible bodies instead of rigid frames. That makes them good at gripping fragile items, squeezing through tight gaps …