All articles starting with S

Soft jumping and rolling robots

Soft jumping and rolling robots are mobile robots built largely from compliant materials like silicone, moving by ballistic leaps or rolling to clear obstacles and cross terrain.

Soft Kitty

Soft Kitty (also "Warm Kitty") is a children's lullaby from The Big Bang Theory, sung to Sheldon Cooper when he is sick. Lyrics by Edith Newlin, 1937; melody from the Polish tune Wlazł kotek na płotek; subject of a dismissed 2017 copyright suit.

Soft lithography

Soft lithography is a family of non-photolithographic microfabrication techniques that use an elastomeric stamp or mold to pattern features from 30 nm to 100 μm.

Soft Machine

Soft Machine: English band formed mid-1966 by Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers, Daevid Allen, and Mike Ratledge, named after Burroughs's novel; founding band of the Canterbury scene, evolving from psychedelia to jazz fusion, still touring and recording (Thirteen, 2026).

Soft Machines

Soft Machines was a Santa Clara, California semiconductor startup founded in 2006 by two former Intel employees, which developed the VISC architecture and was acquired by Intel, confirmed by March 2017.

Soft magnetic composite

A soft magnetic composite, also called a magnetic powder core, is a magnetic core made of insulated iron powder pressed into shape, used in electric motors and transformers.

Oct 22, 2026

Soft magnetic high-entropy alloys

Soft magnetic high-entropy alloys (soft magnetic HEAs) are metallic alloys with five or more principal elements that combine low coercivity with strength, corrosion resistance, and high electrical resistivity.

Soft microprocessor

A soft microprocessor, also called a soft or softcore processor, is a processor core described in a hardware description language and synthesized onto an FPGA rather than fixed silicon.

Soft On Demand (ソフト・オン・デマンド)

Soft On Demand (ソフト・オン・デマンド) is a Japanese adult video company founded in 1995 in Tokyo, distributing for about 40 makers and selling about 5 million units a year.

Soft palate

Soft palate (velum, palatum molle): mobile muscular posterior third of the palate ending in the uvula, with five muscles innervated by the vagus via the pharyngeal plexus except tensor veli palatini (V3); central to swallowing, speech, and sleep apnea.

Soft phonon mode

A soft phonon mode is a lattice vibration whose frequency decreases toward zero as a crystal approaches a phase transition, and whose displacements freeze into the new, low-temperature structure.

Soft power

Soft power, coined by Joseph Nye in 1990's Bound to Lead, is a country's ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment, contrasting with hard power and combining into smart power.

Soft robotic hands with pneumatic actuation

A soft robotic hand with pneumatic actuation is a multi-fingered gripper whose elastomeric fingers bend when air chambers inflate, the most widely used soft grasping technology.

Oct 21, 2026

Soft robotics

Soft robotics: robots built from compliant materials like elastomers and hydrogels, actuated by fluidic, SMA, EAP, magnetic, light, sound, or chemical means, for safe medical, agricultural, and unstructured-environment use.

Soft Robotics (company)

Soft Robotics Inc. was an American robotics company founded in 2013 as a Harvard spinoff that built soft pneumatic grippers for handling delicate food products.

Soft rock

Soft rock: melodic, unaggressive style of rock music, also called lite rock, emphasizing pop hooks and smooth production; peaked in the 1970s with Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, then fed into adult contemporary radio.

Soft serve

Soft serve: semi-soft frozen dairy dessert dispensed from a continuous freezer and eaten immediately; lower milkfat (about 3-10%) than ice cream, high air overrun, served around -6 C; also called soft cream in Japan.

Soft sign (Ь ь)

Soft sign (Ь ь, Russian мя́гкий знак, from Cyrillic ерь) is the silent 30th letter of the Russian alphabet marking palatalization, separating iotated vowels, or marking grammar; originally a reduced front vowel lost by about 1400.

Soft skills

Soft skills are personal, interpersonal, and self-management abilities such as communication, teamwork, problem solving, and adaptability, applicable across jobs; the term, coined in 1972, has no agreed definition.

Oct 22, 2026

Soft spots

Soft spots are localized weak regions of an amorphous solid, such as a glass or metallic glass, where plastic deformation begins, playing the role that dislocations play in crystals.

Soft starter

A soft starter is a motor-control device that ramps voltage to an AC induction motor during starting and stopping, limiting inrush current and starting torque on pumps, fans, and conveyors.

Soft story

A soft story is a building story, often an open ground floor, whose lateral stiffness is much lower than the stories above it, making it vulnerable in earthquakes.

Soft supersymmetry breaking

Soft supersymmetry breaking is a way of breaking supersymmetry by adding restricted terms to the Lagrangian that keep its good renormalization properties, especially quadratic-divergence cancellation.

Soft switching

Soft switching is a power electronics technique that turns transistors on or off at zero voltage (ZVS) or zero current (ZCS) via resonance, reducing switching losses and electromagnetic interference compared with hard switching.

Soft systems methodology

Soft systems methodology (SSM) is an action-oriented inquiry process for messy problem situations, developed by Peter Checkland at Lancaster University and matured in his 1981 book Systems Thinking, Systems Practice.

Soft tennis at the 2026 Asian Games

Soft tennis at the 2026 Asian Games (ソフトテニス): five-event discipline at the Aichi-Nagoya Games, September 18–23, 2026, at Nagoya City Higashiyama Park Tennis Center; South Korea won 3 bronzes and no gold for the first time in 32 years.

Soft theorems

Soft theorems are universal statements about scattering amplitudes when an emitted photon, gluon, or graviton carries vanishing energy, first derived by Steven Weinberg in 1965 and greatly expanded after 2014.

Soft tissue biopsy

A soft tissue biopsy is a diagnostic procedure that removes a sample of muscle, fat, or connective tissue for microscopic examination to identify disease, especially tumors.