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Soft ExoSuit

The Soft ExoSuit is a clothing-like wearable robot developed at Harvard's Wyss Institute under Conor Walsh that assists walking, best known for improving gait after stroke.

Soft gamma repeater

A soft gamma repeater (SGR) is a neutron star that emits sporadic bursts of soft gamma rays, generally understood to be a magnetar with a magnetic field of roughly 10^14 to 10^15 gauss.

Soft grunge (music)

Soft grunge (music): a 2010s alternative rock style from the emo revival fusing 1990s grunge heaviness with emo introspection; bands include Citizen, Basement, Title Fight, and Balance and Composure, largely on Run For Cover Records; distinct from the Tumblr soft grunge fashion aesthetic.

Soft hair

Soft hair is a proposed set of zero-energy degrees of freedom on a black hole's horizon, proposed by Hawking, Perry, and Strominger in 2016 as a possible carrier of information lost to Hawking radiation.

Soft handover

Soft handover, also written soft handoff, is a make-before-break handover mechanism in CDMA cellular systems in which a mobile communicates with two or more base stations at once.

Soft hyphen

The soft hyphen (U+00AD, SHY) is an invisible Unicode character marking where a word may break, showing a hyphen only if the line breaks there.

Soft independent modeling of class analogy

Soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA) is a supervised pattern recognition method in chemometrics, introduced by Svante Wold in 1976, that builds a separate PCA model for each class.

Soft interference cancellation

Soft interference cancellation is an iterative wireless receiver technique that subtracts soft estimates of interfering signals, refining them by exchanging soft information with channel decoders.

Soft ionization

Soft ionization is a family of mass spectrometry ionization techniques, including electrospray ionization (ESI) and MALDI, that preserves intact molecular ions for analysis of large biomolecules.

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.

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.

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.

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.