Technology can help us with our baseball swing, and be made to walk on water

Q. How are next-generation sensors making baseball bats (and other sports equipment) smarter than ever? A. The name of the game here is MEMS, for microelectromechanical systems, tiny machines with elements about the thickness of a human hair, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and pressure sensors, says Karen Lightman in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine.

For example, if you want to analyze a baseball player as he whips the bat around, you need to consider rotational angles and swing speed, and now sensorfusion hardware and software are able to synthesize data output from multiple sources in real time.

Consider the smart baseball bat add-on developed by the University of Michigan’s Noel Perkins and the University of Pittsburgh’s William Clark. In 2014 Clark’s new company, Diamond Kinetics, rolled out its first commercial product, Swing Tracker, a lightweight sensing accessory that tracks 15 different swing metrics, including power, speed, efficiency and distance the bat travels in the hitting zone.

Mounted to the knob of the bat, it captures “11,000 data points per second to analyze swing data and shares that information with coaches via Bluetooth to a mobile device.”

Baseball not your sport? Sensor-based equipment can also help boost your performance for golf, tennis, basketball and others. Q. Humans have been cultivating the stuff for at least 6,000 years and possibly twice that long, making it one of our earliest crops. Many today know it by one of its nicknames: pot, weed, Mary Jane, sticky-icky. Can you say what its more scientific name is? A. The psychotropic plant is technically “cannabis,” and until about a hundred years ago, that’s what Americans called it, says Gemma Tarlach in “Discover” magazine. Now it’s commonly known as “marijuana.” According to research, “the first evidence of the plant’s cultivation comes from East Asia, where the stems were used for fibers and the fruits eaten.”

The world’s oldest pharmacopoeia compiled from Chinese oral tradition and dating back to 2700 B.C. mentioned cannabis, which was said “to relieve conditions ranging from constipation to malaria, though its hallucinogenic qualities were also noted.” Other early cultures mentioning the plant include India, where it was considered a sacred plant; and the Talmud, Judaism’s key ancient text.

In recent years, research into the various properties of cannabis has increased. For example, a 2014 study failed to confirm any association between recreational marijuana use and junk food cravings (the “munchies”). In fact, “long-term ingestion caused mice to eat less and lose weight,” but, as Tarlach adds, that’s “in a lab setting without access to Doritos or doughnuts.” Q. You insectophiles out there are probably well aware of what water striders can do on a routine basis. But are you aware of the splash made last year by imitative roboticists? A. As its name suggests, a water strider can indeed walk on water but it can hop upward from a watery surface as well — “one of the natural world’s niftiest tricks,” says Stephen George in “Discover” magazine.

Now researchers at Korea’s Seoul National University and Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have emulated the insect’s biomechanics to create a microrobot that can vault 5.5 inches — more than 10 times its height — without breaking surface tension.

“Made from ultralight components, the tiny bot weighs just 0.002 ounce and gets its leaping power from a built-in catapult mechanism.” As the magazine put it, it was “a super-tiny bot making history in a single bound.”