German grandma builds wheelchair ramps from Lego

Hanau: Faced with rows of inaccessible shops and cafes, wheelchair user Rita Ebel has devised a low-tech high-fun solution — ramps made of Lego. “For me, it is just about trying to sensitise the world a little bit to barrier-free travel,” Ebel said in the German town of Hanau. Helped by her husband, Ebel often spends two to three hours a day building the made-to-order ramps, which contain several hundred of the small plastic bricks stuck together with up to eight tubes of glue. Reuters

Snake-inspired step-climbing robot developed

New York: Inspired by how snakes move, engineers have created a robot that can stably climb large steps, an advance that may lead to better search and rescue robots that can successfully navigate treacherous terrain. The robot, described in the journal Royal Society Open Science, climbed steps as high as 38 per cent of its body length with a nearly perfect success rate. “We look to these creepy creatures for movement inspiration because they’re already so adept at stably scaling obstacles in their day-to-day lives. Hopefully our robot can learn how to bob and weave across surfaces just like snakes,” said study co-author Chen Li from The Johns Hopkins University. PTI