🦿Robotic brace helps children walk more than 100 million steps, CT scans offer first look inside massive hailstones, kirigami and magnets move very small objects

Canada-based wearable robotics developer Trexo Robotics is helping children with disabilities walk when many were told it wouldn’t be possible.

The brace’s gait adjusts to each user and over time. The system accommodates changes in gait pattern, step speed, weight-bearing, and support level.

Though they haven’t expanded to adult users yet, they recently featured a young adult who went from just 30 steps in a manual walker to 4,000 steps with Trexo, demonstrating what a major advancement this new brace is.

Could manual walkers retire one day soon, thanks to this new technology? Delve deeper into our Must-Read.

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MUST-READ

🦿Trexo’s robotic brace helps children walk more than 100 million steps

The new robotic brace has enabled children with disabilities to take over 100 million steps already, translating to two full rotations around the Earth.

 This innovative brace connects to a person’s legs as a pair of robotic legs, allowing them to move independently while being supported by an external walker frame. It even gives these children the possibility of exercising.

“Many of these kids were told that they would never take a step,” said founder Manmeet Maggu, “so every single one tells a story of courage, progress, and hope. The company plans to up the ante to help disabled children take 500 million steps.

🧊 CT scans offer first look inside massive hailstones, unlocking formation mysteries

For the first time ever, researchers have been able to see inside giant hailstones with the help of CT scans, a method typically reserved for medical imaging adapted to study this weather phenomenon.

Fascinated by hailstones for decades, scientists have wanted to know how these icy spheres develop inside storm clouds. But they haven’t been able to find out because the methods would result in breaking them.

Using CT scans, they created over 500 images or “slices” for each hailstone that they were able to study. What they observed contradicted the previous belief that irregularly shaped hailstones could form large sizes, and it could even improve forecasting.

🧲 US scientists blend kirigami and magnets to move very small objects, fluids

Using the design principles of kirigami, the ancient art of folding and cutting paper, researchers in the US have developed technology that can move fragile objects like gels and liquids without even holding them, as robotic arms can’t be used to perform these tasks.

They created a “metasheet” embedded with microparticles, which was then fitted into a frame. Kirigami design principles were used to cut patterns on the sheet because it helped improve flexibility without impacting the material's stiffness.

Using a magnetic field under the metal sheet, they could generate large movements such as the bulging or sinking of the sheet, which could then be used to move fluids.

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