gripping

A Plague Tale: Requiem — out Tuesday on PC, PS5, Xbox Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch via the cloud — is set six months after the events of the previous game, A Plague Tale: Innocence. Having survived the grasp of the Inquisition and with the Black Plague rat swarm off their scent, the de Rune family has found some respite in the outskirts of the Provence region. However, a chance encounter with bandits pushes Hugo to his limits, and it is now up to elder sister Amicia to search for a cure for the mysterious Macula…

Natalie Haynes began Pandora’s Jar (2020), her excellent nonfiction collection of essays about women in Greek myth, with the image of herself as a child, sitting on the sofa with her brother watching Clash of the Titans. Although that film inspired Haynes to study Classics, she never thought to question the presentation of Medusa. “She wasn’t a character,” she wrote, “she was just a monster… It would be years before I came across any other version of Medusa’s story, anything that told me how she became a monster, or…

La Belle Sauvage, the first volume in the Book of Dust trilogy – Philip Pullman’s prequel to the His Dark Materials series – begins with plucky 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead learning of the existence of six-month-old Lyra Belacqua, whose future as a thorn in the side of the church’s oppressive ruling body, the Magisterium, is foretold. The product of an affair between Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel, Lyra has been left in the care of the nuns at an Oxford priory where Malcolm sporadically helps out with the cooking. When a…

Why bother to design your own robots when you can just reuse what nature created? This was the thought process behind a research project from engineers at Rice University who successfully transformed dead spiders into robotic gripping claws. The scientists have dubbed their new area of research “necrobotics” and say it could create cheap, effective, and biodegradable alternatives to current robotic systems. So why spiders? Well, while humans move their limbs using pairs of antagonistic muscles, like biceps and…

Necrobotics: Engineers find to manipulate the legs of dead spiders to grip robots Mechanical engineers from Rice University have actually turned spider cadavers into what they call “necrobots,” able to function as mechanical grippers. The team inserted a needle into the spider’s prosoma chamber and created a seal around the tip of the needle with a glob of superglue. This advanced a novel area of research, of using dead animals as robots, known as necrobotics. The necrobotic gripper is capable of grasping…

“This is a ballad of fools and heroes and maybe you can work out which is which.” The real-life relationship between the Irish aristocrat turned republican revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his servant-cum-saviour, the freed slave Tony Small, is one that has been largely ignored by history. Small is remembered, if he is at all, as a minor character in Fitzgerald’s more celebrated story. But the association between the two men forms the backbone of the author and film-maker Neil Jordan’s latest novel, which explores…

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease, is a condition of unknown cause that progressively destroys the human motor system. The sufferer loses the ability to open jars or turn the pages of a book, then to walk, to bathe or feed herself, to speak, and eventually to breathe. A diagnosis of ALS means another three to 10 years of life, although some of this period will be a type of life that, outwardly at least, resembles death.The War for Gloria, the stunningly good second novel by Atticus Lish, spans four…

The following video contains strong language and themes some viewers may find distressing. The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial headed toward its conclusion on Friday as the duelling parties offered closing arguments after a seven-week trial that has gripped public attention and become something of a litmus test for the state of gender relations. Each side was given 61 hours over the 47-day televised trial to present their case, with dozens of…