An article published in “Nature” reports the creation of a flexible microprocessor based on plastic materials instead of silicon. A team of ARM researchers developed this processor that was called PlasticARM also because its Cortex-M0 core is based on ARM architecture, precisely ARMv6-M. It’s an extremely limited processor in its performance, as it has a frequency of 30 kHz and supports up to 128 bytes of RAM and 456 bytes of ROM. The aim was to produce a fully functional flexible processor so this is a starting point from which to develop processors for use in fields where flexibility is important such as wearables and other products connected via the Internet of Things such as medical devices.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics has released a video to celebrate what it hopes is a better year showing the ability of some of its robots to dance to the tune “Do You Love Me?”. In particular, two humanoid robots demonstrate their balancing skills by remaining on one leg at certain moments. In some parts of the video they’re accompanied by a quadrupedal robot and another robot that moves on two wheels.