Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
When you make a composite airplane, you make these giant wing and fuselage parts.
And they asked us for a better way to stick them together because the joints were a place of failure.
And what we discovered was instead of making a few big parts, if you make little loops of carbon fiber...
and you reversibly link them in joints, and you do it in a special geometry that balances being under constrained and over constrained with just the right degrees of freedom, we set the world record for the highest modulus ultralight material
just by in effect making carbon fiber Lego.
Lightweight materials are crucial for energy efficiency.
This let us make the lightest weight high modulus material.
We then showed that with just a few part types, we can tune the material properties, and then you can create really wild robots
that instead of having a tool the size of a jumbo jet to make a jumbo jet, you can make little robots that walk on these cellular structures to build the structures where they error correct their position on the structure and they navigate on the structure.
And so using all of that with NASA, we made morphing airplanes, a former student, Kenny,
Chang and Benjaminette made a morphing airplane the size of NASA Langley's biggest wind tunnel.
With Toyota, we've made super efficiency race cars.
We're right now looking at projects with NASA to build these for things like space telescopes and space habitats.
where the ribosome, who I mentioned a little while back, can make an elephant one molecule at a time.
Ribosomes are slow.
They run at about one molecule a second, but ribosomes make ribosomes.
So you have thousands of them, trillions of them, and that makes an elephant.
In the same way, these little assembly robots I'm describing can make giant structures.
at heart because the robot can make the robot.
So more recently, two of my students, Amira and Miana, had a nature communication paper showing how this robot can be made out of the parts it's making so the robots can make the robot so you build up the capacity of robotic assembly.
Showing 261–280 of 1,202 · page 14 of 61
← Previous
Next →