Me Tarzan

This cheetah

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This video shows a demonstration of the “Cheetah” robot galloping at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour (mph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set in 1989.

The robot’s movements are patterned after those of fast-running animals in nature. The robot increases its stride and running speed by flexing and un-flexing its back on each step, much as an actual cheetah does.

Plumbing the Plums, and Beyond

1901 — the year the nuclear atom was “invented”!

[The] planetary model is an important one historically, and was accurate enough in its time (and still today) to forgive its faults. It arose naturally in the early 1900s, in a period of great confusion and uncertainty about atomic structure. With tantalizing and rather bewildering experimental hints, scientists speculated wildly about the nature of the atom. The strongest contender was the “plum pudding” model of J.J. Thomson, in which atoms were visualized to be a “pudding” of positively-charged fluid within which were embedded negatively-charged electron “plums”. In Thomson’s original paper, these plums were arranged equidistantly around a circle within the pudding and orbiting within it