Do animal tails assist with “in-flight” stabilization?  It’s probably not a question you ponder every day, but it’s exactly what Berkeley graduate student researchers Thomas Libby and Evan Chang-Siu set out to find when they built a tailed robot … and drove it off a ramp.

Libby and Chang-Siu’s project made news when their paper Tail-assisted pitch control in lizards, robots, and dinosaurs made the cover of the latest issue of Nature. Their project is one of many exciting biomechanics projects underway in Berkeley’s Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research, or CiBER, led by Integrative Biology professor Dr. Bob Full.

Inspired by the observation that Red-headed Agama lizards stabilize themselves in free-fall with controlled movements of their tails, the researchers built a lizard-sized robot with wheels and a “tail” (metal rod) and tried to  mimic the ability to stay upright during a fall. Unlike previous attempts to build self-righting robots, their robot tail used a control mechanism called active feedback.  Active feedback occurs when the robot is able to respond to its environment by making instantaneous movements in accordance to the in-motion changes perceived by its sensors.  In contrast, previous work focused on feed-forward robots, which rely on pre-programmed movements to compensate a predetermined trajectory. Tom Libby explains the difference in terms of picking up a milk jug: if you expect the jug to be full, you will initiate an appropriate amount of muscle power as you pick up the jug; this is feed-forward.  If, upon picking up the jug, you realize that it is empty, the system you use to change the amount of power you input (thereby preventing yourself from getting smacked in the head with the jug) is feedback control.

Confession: Today I ate three cookies. Not because I particularly wanted them, but because they were there. I could be a case study for Brian Wansink’s book “Mindless Eating: Why we eat more than we should.” Wansink was one of the invited speakers at SPSP 2012 and he and his colleagues, such as David Just, apply psychology and behavioral economics to food marketing. They use experiments to answer questions such as, “Why do we eat more than we should?” and “How do we get kids to pick healthier food in the school cafeteria?”

Here are a few of their scientifically-backed tips for making healthier food choices. Many of these tips have been put in place in lunchrooms as part of their “SmarterLunchrooms Initiative,” but I think they can also be adapted for use at home, particularly if you are struggling with a child who has very particular food preferences.

On Monday night, I attended the stand-up routine and book reading of Adam Ruben, author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School (excerpt). Ruben was able to tap into the universal experiences of graduate students to garner laughs from an audience all too familiar with being “exhausted, overworked, underappreciated, and buried in shit.”

Self-titled “recovering graduate student” Adam Ruben received his Ph.D. in molecular biology from Johns Hopkins University after spending seven years in the program. He left academia to pursue comedy in such ventures as the Food Detective, The National Lampoon, NPR, and opening for Dane Cook; he also works as a microbiologist at a start-up biotechnology company.

Ruben read three sections from the book, which has been acclaimed by the graduate students who have been able to both afford it and have time to read it. (Finding a publisher is difficult when your target market has no money or time.) On the topic of grad school, Ruben said “I went to grad school in the sciences because, like many of you, I was lied to.”