“Humanity’s excessive production of material waste poses a critical environmental threat, and the problem is only escalating, especially in the past few decades with the rapid development of powerful electronic tools and persistent consumer desire to upgrade to the newest available technology,” the team, led by Professor Soekheun Choi, wrote in a paper published in the ASC Applied Materials and Interfaces journal.

“The poor disposability of electronics,” the researchers continue, “is especially an issue for the newly arising field of single-use devices and sensors, which are often used to evaluate human health and monitor environmental conditions, and for other novel applications. Though impressive in terms of function and convenience, usage of conventional electronic components in these applications would inflict an immense surge in waste and result in higher costs.”

Traditional circuit boards are manufactured from resin, glass fibers, and metal wiring, making them somewhat bulky and harder to recycle. That means that millions of single-use circuits in things like personal wearable devices, point-of-care medical devices, and environmental monitors simply get tossed in the trash every day.

In response to this issue, the team — assembled from the University’s Bioelectrics and Microsystems Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering — turned to an exercise in “papertronics.” They created a single-use, amplifier-type electronic circuit board made from renewable and biodegradable materials like paper and wax.

The started by printing out electronic channels using wax onto a single sheet of filter paper. The wax was heated to 266 degrees Fahrenheit for two minutes so it could soak completely through the paper. The next step was to fill in all the areas not covered in wax with both semi-conductive and conductive ink. The team then screen-printed conductive metal components onto the paper before bonding the layers together with Thru-hole technology. Lastly, they cast a gel-based electrolyte at 140 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes onto the sheet.

The tiny, flexible circuit board proved effective when it came to resistor, capacitor, and transistor functions. If left unused, it could biodegrade over time with minimal permanent waste left behind — but the team also demonstrated that the board could be completely disintegrated within seconds with just the smallest of flames. And because of the limited amount of materials required, producing these paper circuit boards would likely be very inexpensive, and easily scalable for mass production.

Professor Choi and his team are excited by the potential their creation has to curb e-waste on a global scale. As they explain: “All electronic components are paper-based and integrated on paper-based printed circuit boards (PCBs), innovatively providing a realistic and practical solution for green electronic platforms.”

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In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication.

“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

She points out that digital listening posts are now being used to continuously record the sounds of ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the bottom of the ocean. Developments in miniaturization have even enabled scientists to place microphones on tiny animals like honeybees.

“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes. The next step for many scientists is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to sift through these sounds and enable robots to “speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication.”

She cites a team of researchers in Germany that have taught tiny robots how to do the honeybee waggle dance. Using these dancing machines, the scientists were able to command the honeybees to stop moving, and to communicate where to fly to collect a specific nectar. The researchers plan to experiment with implanting robots into the hives so that the honeybees accept them as members of their community.

Bakker also writes about bioacoustics scientist Katie Payne and her discoveries regarding elephant communication. Payne was the first to find that elephants make infrasound signals, sounds below the human hearing range. The vibrations of these signals allow elephants to send messages across long distances through soil and stones. Scientists have since found that elephants have different signals for “honeybee” and “human,” as well as distinguishable signals for “threatening human” versus “nonthreatening human.” If the power of AI could be harnessed to send messages to elephant herds, we might be able to help protect their dwindling populations without removing them from their natural habitats.

Coral reefs also get attention in Bakker’s book. “A healthy coral reef sounds a little bit like an underwater symphony,” she explains. “There are cracks and burbles and hisses and clicks from the reef and its inhabitants and even whales dozens of miles away. If you could hear in the ultrasonic, you might hear the coral itself.” With the use of AI, scientists might eventually be able to get coral to repopulate certain areas by broadcasting “healthy coral reef” sounds to coral larvae.

While the idea of someday having “a zoological version of Google Translate” sounds overwhelmingly positive, there is the fear is that unscrupulous humans might use the technology to control animal populations for their own gain. Bakker warns that the possibility of exploiting animals “raises a lot of alarm bells” and that our “newfound powers” should never be used “to assert our domination over animals and plants.”

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The robot’s self-led evolution is part of what makes it so fascinating. It isn’t improving its speed and dexterity thanks to new lines of code in its programming or some kind of robot bootcamp. It’s learning on its own by running through facilities full of obstacles that mimic conditions in the real world.

A lot of robot developers train their creations to navigate rough terrain by essentially running them at full capacity at all times, anticipating the most challenging obstacles like ice on a path. But that makes the robot inefficient, and keeps it from learning through experience. MIT puts the Mini Cheetah and other robots through physical agility courses, but they’ve also found a much faster way to get the results they want: through artificial intelligence.

The Mini Cheetah robot project is led by researchers from the Institute of AI and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) and MIT’s Improbable AI Lab, which is part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) directed by MIT Assistant Professor Pulkit Agrawal. MIT PhD student Gabriel Margolas and IAIFI postdoc Ge Yang explained the process in an interview with MIT.

“Programming how a robot should act in every possible situation is simply very hard,” Margolas and Yang explain. “The process is tedious, because if a robot were to fail on a particular terrain, a human engineer would need to identify the cause and failure and manually adapt the robot controller, and this process can require substantial human time. Learning by trial and error removes the need for a human to specify precisely how the robot should behave in every situation. This would work if (1) the robot can experience an extremely wide range of terrains; and (2) the robot can automatically improve its behavior with experience.”

“Thanks to modern simulation tools, our robot can accumulate 100 days worth of experience on diverse terrains in just three hours of actual time. We developed an approach by which the robot’s behavior improves from simulated experience, and our approach critically also enables the successful deployment of those learned behaviors in the real world.”

The Mini Cheetah features a mechanically robust design that lets it survive accidents and high-impact falls. It’s powered by high-torque actuators that allow for omnidirectional movement with different gaits depending on the terrain: trotting, pacing, bounding, and something called “pronking,” a behavior seen in animals like gazelles that involves springing into the air and lifting all four feet off the ground simultaneously.

This is what allows the Mini Cheetah to do a 360-degree backflip, which it was able to do before it could even walk. The cheetah has also learned how to turn at high speeds and run with a disabled leg. To understand just how agile the Mini Cheetah really is, you have to see it in action. Check out this video from MIT CSAIL showing the robot’s latest evolution.

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“We’ve made huge strides with silicon computing, but they’re still rigid and inflexible,” says Brett Kagan, an author of the study published in Neuron and Chief Scientific Officer at Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia. “That’s something we don’t see with biology.”

“From worms to flies to humans, neurons are the starting block for generalized intelligence,” he adds. “So, the question was, can we interact with neurons in a way to harness that inherent intelligence?…We chose Pong due to its simplicity and familiarity, but [also because] it was one of the first games used in machine learning, so we wanted to recognize that.”

Kagan and his team of researchers from 10 other institutions decided to explore that query by seeing how brain cells would react when taught to play a video game.

To achieve their goal, the researchers took material from adult stem cells and grew a layer of 800,000 living neurons on a silicon chip at the bottom of a nutrient-filled petri dish. The chip was connected to a computer, with the ability to detect and send electrical signals to the neurons. The team then booted up a game of Pong, sending electrical impulses to the living sample to indicate the position of the bouncing ball. The computer monitored electrical activity from the cells to see what they did with the new information.

At first, they didn’t do much — until the researchers gave the brain cells some motivation to learn to play. Every time the brain cells sent electrical signals to move the paddle to where the ball would be, scientists gave the cells a gift in the form of a beautifully organized burst of electrical activity. If the cells incorrectly predicted the position, they would instead receive a stream of chaotic white noise.

“If they hit the ball, we gave them something predictable,” Kagan says. “When they missed it, they got something that was totally unpredictable.”

This reward and punishment strategy was based on the Free Energy Principle that says brain cells always want to be able to predict their environment, leading them to seek out organized electrical signals over chaotic ones.

Eventually the petri dish cells learned to formulate electrical patterns that moved the paddle in front of the ball, gradually resulting in longer rallies. While the cells never got very good at playing, they still predicted the correct position significantly more often than just random simulations, an exciting achievement considering that the petri dish contained fewer brain cells than a cockroach.

“If you could see a cockroach playing a game of Pong and it was able to hit the ball twice as often as it was missing it, you would be pretty impressed with that cockroach,” Kagan says. The research team hopes that this experiment will lead to breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works, with possible biocomputing implications.

Study co-author Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist and professor at University College London, says: “We now have, in principle, the ultimate biomimetic ‘sandbox’ in which to test the effects of drugs and genetic variants — a sandbox constituted by exactly the same computing (neuronal) elements found in your brain and mine.”

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In October, multinational pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. declared that it was exercising its option to jointly develop and commercialize a personalized cancer vaccine (PCV) from Moderna that is already undergoing human trials. Called mRNA-4157/V940, the vaccine is designed for high-risk melanoma patients. According to the American Academy of Dermatology Association, the vast majority of skin cancer deaths are from melanoma, resulting in roughly 20 American deaths every day.

While most vaccines try to prevent the body from ever getting a disease, cancer vaccines of that nature have proven elusive in the past. The mRNA-4157/V940 takes a different approach, teaching the immune systems of those with melanoma how to fight off tumors based on their individual cancer markers.

Here’s how it works: The scientists take samples of a melanoma patient’s mutated cancer cells. They then sequence the tumor genes, identifying the antigens that will trigger an immune response. From there, they create an individualized mRNA vaccine that can tell the patient’s body to generate T cells to combat the specific mutational signature of the tumors, thereby halting the progress of the cancer.

Biotechnology firm Moderna was one of the first major companies to develop an effective vaccine against the COVID-19 disease, helping to dramatically reduce the severity of the global pandemic. That vaccine used breakthrough mRNA technology to teach the body to recognize and fight a disease without ever having encountered it (by contrast, traditional vaccines introduce a weakened or inactivated germ into the body so it can learn to combat it in the future). As this technology proved successful at preventing SARS viruses, many companies have since started developing mRNA vaccines for everything from heart failure to food allergies to dementia.

The fact that Merck has exercised its option with Moderna on this mRNA cancer vaccine means that human trials are going very well. The two companies first established the agreement in 2016 for Moderna to develop a cancer-fighting injection, but none of the research was promising enough for Merck to want to jump in on the action until now. Merck will pay Moderna $250 million to help with and share in the profits of further development, sales, and distribution of mRNA-4157/V940.

The cancer vaccine is currently being administered in Phase 2 clinical trials among 157 patients who have had their cancer surgically removed but are at high risk for recurrence. Some of the patients in the trial receive nine doses of mRNA-4157/V940 every three weeks, in addition to Merck’s powerhouse cancer immunotherapy Keytruda every three weeks. The rest of the patients only receive Keytruda. The study’s main goal is to determine how long patients stay recurrence-free based on both treatment options. Primary data is expected in the fourth quarter of 2022, but preliminary results are extremely encouraging, according to both companies.

“This long-term collaboration combining Merck’s expertise in immuno-oncology with Moderna’s pioneering mRNA technology has yielded a novel tailored vaccine approach,” says Dr. Eliav Barr, Merck’s Senior Vice President, Head of Global Clinical Development, and Chief Medical Officer, in a press release, adding “We look forward to working with our colleagues at Moderna to advance mRNA-4157/V940 in combination with KEYTRUDA as it aligns with our strategy to impact early-stage disease.”

“Together we have made significant progress in advancing mRNA-4157 as an investigational personalized cancer treatment used in combination with KEYTRUDA,” explains Stephen Hoge, M.D. and President of Moderna. “With data expected this quarter on PCV, we continue to be excited about the future and the impact mRNA can have as a new treatment paradigm in the management of cancer.”

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It turns out this idea is not only a viable one, but something that could revolutionize the entire construction industry. Publishing their findings in the science journal Nature, researchers at Imperial College London and Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology) created a fleet of small flying 3D printers that can work together to build and repair structures high above the ground. The teams were inspired by swarms of bees, which cooperate seamlessly to construct their hives.

Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, the scientists created a fleet of drones collectively called Aerial Additive Manufacturing (Aerial-AM). To test their idea, the team tasked the bots with the job of building four cement-like structures. Some drones were designed as “BuilDrones” to do the actual work of creating materials during the job, while others were created as “ScanDrones” to continually assess the BuilDrones’ output and provide instructions for next steps.

After all being fed the exact same blueprints, the drones worked autonomously to create a 72-layer, two-meter-high tower out of polyurethane-based foam, as well as a 28-layer, 18-centimeter higher cylinder out of a custom-designed cement-like compound.
The researchers also acted as human controllers on the ground, analzying the bots’ work in real time and intervening if necessary to make sure they were working collectively and accurately (within five millimeters of the building schematics).

“We’ve proved that drones can work autonomously and in tandem to construct and repair buildings, at least in the lab,” says lead author Mirko Kovac, Professor at Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics and Head of Empa’s Materials and Technology Center of Robotics. He adds: “Our solution is scalable and could help us to construct and repair buildings in difficult-to-reach areas in the future.”

The team’s next goal is to prove the drones’ viability in a real-world setting, and they already have plans for collaborations underway. If the trials are successful, the 3D printing drones could not only construct new buildings and help make standard repairs, but they could also be deployed for massive rebuilding in post-disaster situations, where manpower may be limited or access is obstructed for traditional construction vehicles.

Armies of building drones would significantly lower the risk of human injury and death on tall worksites, all for dramatically lower costs compared to conventional construction methods. The bots’ environmental benefits are also promising, as they would reduce the need for massive fuel-consuming vehicles and cause far less damage to local ecosystems during the construction process.

While we may not yet be at the point where swarms of flying robots swoop down in our neighborhoods to create new homes and buildings from the ground up, these smart drones hint that a world like that could be our reality in a matter of years, if not decades.

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A collection of researchers from France’s École Polytechnique school of engineering, Germany’s Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) laboratory, and the University of Rostock attempted to simulate the conditions found on the two massive planets made from ice rocks and ice-forming molecules.

The interiors of Uranus and Neptune are composed mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, a combination of elements that are actually found in similar proportions in PET (polyethylene terephthalate), the polymer that makes up everyday objects like plastic water bottles and plastic packaging. Thankfully for their research, PET sheets are cheap to come by.

Even though the icy giants are the coldest planets in our solar system, with temperatures reaching lows of -373 °F, the interiors can still top 10,000°F, with an atmospheric pressure a million times greater than that on Earth. To mimic these conditions, the researchers brought their plastic bottle material to California’s National Accelerator Laboratory to make use of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), an extremely powerful, hard x-ray free electron laser.

After firing ten ultra-concentrated laser pulses per second at the plastic, the PET reached temperatures of 10,832 °F, comparable to the inner temperatures of Neptune and Uranus. The impact of the laser on the plastic bottle also created a shockwave that compressed the material at a pressure equal to those on the icy giants. The result was flashier than expected, producing an explosion of nanodiamonds.

“We discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds,” explains Dominik Kraus, HZDR physicist and University of Rostock professor.

Kraus adds that “the nanodiamonds are indeed diamonds in terms of crystal structure. The same crystal structure as on many wedding rings, just a million times smaller. So yes, these are actual diamonds. On the short timescale of our experiments, they have not enough time to grow further. However, inside planets where we could have growth times of millions of years, the diamonds could be gigantic — kilometers or larger.”

The discovery has both terrestrial and celestial implications. Here on Earth, diamonds might now be produced to perfection. “So far, diamonds of this kind have mainly been produced by detonating explosives,” says Kraus. “With the help of laser flashes, they could be manufactured more cleanly in the future. The X-ray laser means we have a lab tool that can precisely control the diamonds’ growth.”

This could also be a new way to manufacture nanodiamonds used as “quibits” for quantum computing and sensors, or to create the tiny diamonds that are used for many industrial strength abrasives and polishing agents. In the space arena, the findings could help expand our knowledge of the most common type of planets floating around in the universe, including the fact that they may have continual sparkling diamond showers.

“Planets like Uranus and Neptune, and slightly smaller, have been found to be the most abundant planets outside our Solar System,” Kraus says. “Understanding those planets will therefore also help to get further inside where life could exist outside our Solar System.”

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Created by artists Ella and Nicki, Hugh Broughton Architects, Professor Lucy Berthoud, Dr. Bob Myhill, PEARCE+, and public input, Mars House features an inflatable gold foil structure designed to sit on the surface of the red planet, and a subterranean level beneath it. The prototype is currently on display in the English city of Bristol along with a four-month public program of workshops, events, and research that will ultimately help determine what the interiors of the house look like. For now, it’s just a shell providing space for small research groups to collaborate on projects that help us envision what a future life on Mars could look like.

“The two-story 53-square-meter house is powered by solar panels and designed to be lightweight and withstand the environmental challenges that would be faced on Mars — such as average temperatures of -63 degree Centigrade and exposure to galactic and cosmic radiation,” says PEARCE+ Architects. “The upper level is designed to sit on the Martian landscape and is formed using a pressurized inflatable gold-coated foil, making it lightweight enough to be transported to Mars.”

The architects note that: “in Bristol the foil is filled with air so it can be reused, but on Mars it would be filled with Martian concrete made of regolith (soil) and the water found below the surface, to provide protection from galactic and solar radiation. The house has a glazed elevation, with views towards Bristol’s Princes Wharf standing in for the Martian landscape. Inside, a hydroponic living room is designed to surround occupants with plants to aid relaxation. This will feed into a circular waste water system linking the plants with the ablutions and kitchen water systems.”

The entirety of the structure can currently be seen above-ground in the Martian House’s Bristol location, so we can imagine what the underground portion would look like as well. This area would occupy lava tubes that naturally exist beneath the surface of Mars, protecting inhabitants from high levels of radiation. It contains an environmental control room that houses all life support systems for the house, two tiny bedroom pods, a shower, and a low-water “Martian loo.”

All those who interact with the project in person will be welcomed to contribute to the design of its interior components, which include everything from furniture and appliances all the way down to toothbrushes. This level of public participation turbo-charges creativity, introducing a wide range of ideas that might just help us figure out real-world solutions for our quest to populate the most promising planet in our solar system. Check out the schedule of events lasting throughout the rest of October here.

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In conventional batteries, there’s a positive electric terminal at one end and a negative terminal at the other, with either lead or lithium in between as the liquid, paste, or gel electrolyte substance that propels ions back and forth to generate electricity. Scientists and engineers at the University of Maryland found a way to replace that lead and lithium with chitosan, a polysaccharide sugar that gives the outer skeletons of shellfish their strength and flexibility. Even better, that chitosan can be sourced from materials that are usually thrown away as a byproduct of the food industry. The researchers published their discovery this month in the journal Matter.

“The most abundant source of chitosan is the exoskeletons of crustaceans, including crabs, shrimps, and lobsters, which can be easily obtained from seafood waste,” said lead author and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Liangbing Hu, director of UMD’s Center for Materials Innovation. “You can find it on your table.”

Chitosan can be synthesized into a firm gel membrane with the addition of acetic acid aqueous solution, combined with zinc, and then used as an electrolyte for a battery. Zinc is an abundant naturally occurring metal found in more than 50 countries around the world. It’s used to make batteries safer, and it’s recyclable. That means the major components of the batteries are cheap and readily available, a crucial consideration when so many so-called “sustainable” innovations require the mining of rare minerals.

“Zinc is more abundant in Earth’s crust than lithium,” notes Hu. “Generally speaking, well-developed zinc batteries are cheaper and safer.”

The UMD researchers found that their chitosan-based battery is 99.7-percent energy efficient even after 1,000 battery cycles (about 400 hours of use). That means they can be quickly charged and discharged without affecting their performance. They’re also not flammable, and two-thirds of their composition can break down in the soil within a mere five months, leaving the zinc behind to be recycled. The next step will involve testing the batteries on a larger scale and under commercial use conditions. If successful, these biodegradable batteries could be used in tandem with solar panels, wind farms, hydropower, and other green energy solutions.

“In the future, I hope all components in batteries are biodegradable,” said Hu. “Not only the material itself but also the fabrication process of biomaterials.”

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Researchers at Italy’s University of Naples Federico II developed a bartending robot called BRILLO that does more than just sling precisely measured drinks. Computer scientists at the university used machine-learning algorithms to teach the robot how to hold complex conversations. BRILLO, which stands for “Bartending Robot for Interactive Long-Lasting Operations,” can make small talk or respond to customers who just want to vent. It can even sense the tone of the conversation to gauge whether it’s appropriate to be cheerful, playful, or serious.

The team at the university’s Projects of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Cognitive Systems (PRISCA) lab began working on the robot bartender back in 2020. They collaborated with Totaro Automazioni, an Italian manufacturer of food assembly line machines, to get the physical part down. After all, making good drinks is still a bartender’s primary job. For now, at least, performing as expected requires the robot to look less than convincing. It’s weirdly tall, with enormous, multi-jointed low-slung arms that rotate in various directions to grab ingredients from various locations behind the bar.

A brief video posted on Twitter shows how the BRILLO looks while moving these very robotic arms. A mannequin-like head with an immovable face glows faintly, and the body is dressed in a vest and bowtie. The effect is far from realistic, but for now, that’s not the point. Professor Silvia Rossi, one of the project’s lead researchers, told CNBC that her team just wanted to take the concept of a cocktail vending machine a step further and test whether a robot could mimic the social aspects of a bartender’s job.

Their goal is for BRILLO to be able to recognize customers, remember their favorite drinks, and ask them questions based on conversations they’ve had in the past. The researchers taught BRILLO to study customers’ faces and speech patterns to gauge what kind of mood they’re in. That will help it choose how to start the conversation.

For the foreseeable future, BRILLO is just a learning tool. Its creators don’t plan to market and sell it. Rossi notes there are a lot of wrinkles that need to be ironed out, not the least of which is protecting the privacy of human customers whose personal data is already being gathered from every conceivable source. Spilling your troubles to a robot bartender sounds like an action that could have consequences, even if you aren’t exactly confessing to murder.

Rossi and her team believe that robots like BRILLO will never fully replace human workers, no matter how advanced they get. Even if conversations with artificial intelligence eventually feel as natural as can be, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to fulfill all of our social needs. Robots like BRILLO could step in to alleviate labor shortages or take on the kind of grunt work most humans don’t want to do, but the extent to which that will affect our own livelihoods and quality of life remains to be seen.

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“It happens to be the case that the spider — after it’s deceased — is the perfect architecture for small-scale, naturally derived grippers,” says Daniel Preston, an engineer with Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering. The macabre idea came to Preston and Rice graduate student Faye Yap when they encountered one of the eight-legged creatures in their lab post-mortem.

“We were moving stuff around in the lab and we noticed a curled-up spider at the edge of the hallway,” says Yap. “We were really curious as to why spiders curl up after they die.”

They quickly realized that, unlike antagonistic human muscles like biceps and triceps, spiders only have flexor muscles, which allow their legs to curl in. They must be extended outward by hydraulic pressure.

“When they die, they lose the ability to actively pressurize their bodies. That’s why they curl up,” Yap adds. “At the time, we were thinking, ‘Oh, this is super interesting.’ We wanted to find a way to leverage this mechanism.”

He eventually harnessed that power by supergluing a needle into the hydraulic chamber, or prosoma, of a wolf spider carcass. They then connected the other end of the needle to a handheld syringe. When they injected a shot of air into the “necrobot’s” legs, they unfurled instantaneously, and then re-curled when the pressure was relieved. The legs can also be individually controlled thanks to the internal valves in the spider prosoma.

Yap notes “When we did it, it worked … right off the bat. I don’t even know how to describe it — that moment when you see it move.”

The scientists were able to control the zombie spiders to turn on and off a light switch and even pick up other dead spiders. And the necrobots repeated the tasks hundreds of times without decay.

“It starts to experience some wear and tear as we got close to 1,000 cycles,” says Preston. “We think that’s related to issues with dehydration of the joints. We think we can overcome that by applying polymeric coatings.”

Preston and Yap are excited about the implications these spider robots could have on the world. Preston says “There are a lot of pick-and-place tasks we could look into, repetitive tasks like sorting or moving objects around at these small scales, and maybe even things like assembly of microelectronics.”

“Another application could be deploying it to capture smaller insects in nature because it’s inherently camouflaged,” adds Yap. And as a final bonus, these necrobots are “biodegradable.” Preston explains “We’re not introducing a big waste stream, which can be a problem with more traditional components.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JOS6hMHIUM
Arachnophiles — and anyone else fascinated by the idea of zombie spiders — can watch a video of their work here.

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“The idea is that robots need to take care of themselves,” says Boyuan Chen, a roboticist at Duke University in North Carolina and an author of a study on the self-aware robot published in Science. “In order to do that, we want a robot to understand their body.”

“We humans clearly have a notion of self,” he adds. “Close your eyes and try to imagine how your own body would move if you were to take some action, such as stretch your arms forward or take a step backward. Somewhere inside our brain we have a notion of self, a self-model that informs us what volume of our immediate surroundings we occupy, and how that volume changes as we move.”

In addition to Chen, the team for this project included Robert Kwiatkowski and Carl Vondrick, both with the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, and Hod Lipson from Columbia’s Mechanical Engineering Department. Together with their assistants, they created a simple robotic arm and gave it access to multiple camera feeds so it could essentially see itself from several angles.

“We were really curious to see how the robot imagined itself,” says Lipson. “But you can’t just peek into a neural network, it’s a black box.”

Using that neural network, the robot (which was mounted to a table) was able to create a conglomerate picture of its own shape and size, using a marker to draw a self-portrait on paper for the researchers. The robot was also given a command to pick up a red sphere on the surface of the table. Through a process of wiggling and rotating its arm back and forth, it began to teach itself the cause and effect of each movement. After just three hours, it was able to easily touch the ball consistently.

While past robots have been self-aware in that they were given models of themselves, this experiment is novel, as the robot came up with an understanding of itself much in the way an animal or human would — by looking in the mirror, flailing limbs about, and trying out new motions. A robot that can self-model could be much more effective and long-lasting.

“Self-modeling is a primitive form of self-awareness,” Chen explains. “If a robot, animal, or human has an accurate self-model, it can function better in the world, it can make better decisions, and it has an evolutionary advantage.”

This self-awareness could help robots on assembly lines diagnose their own problems and learn to fix them. It could also be extremely useful in situations where humans cannot be on hand to solve mechanical errors, like deep sea dives or in space.

The robotic arm currently has four degrees of freedom, or types of motion. The researchers are now trying to work it up to 12 degrees. By comparison, a human body has hundreds.

“The more complex you are, the more you need this self-model to make predictions. You can’t just guess your way through the future,” notes Lipson. “We’ll have to figure out how to do this with increasingly complex systems.”

The group’s work is also groundbreaking in that most researchers first use virtual simulations to model how a robot would respond, but such computations can be expensive and time demanding. Allowing a robot to teach itself about its own nature could potentially save vast amounts of money and resources.

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Calling the space photos “really gorgeous,” Jane Rigby, NASA’s Operations Project Scientist for the telescope, said: “that’s something that has been true for every image we’ve gotten with Webb. We can’t take blank sky [images]. Everywhere we look, there’s galaxies everywhere.”

The Webb telescope got its start back in 1996 under the name Next Generation Space Telescope. As an international program, NASA combined forces with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency during the following two decades of research and development. It was finally launched on Christmas Day 2021 with the goal of being the premier observatory of this decade. It’s also the largest infrared telescope currently in space.

For the first six months, the telescope’s equipment calibrated as the device glided into its halo orbit, a spot between the sun and the moon where the gravitational forces from both keep it on a specific path. Once the calibration was complete, Webb was able to send its first set of data. These are some of its biggest discoveries:

Deep Field

The first deep field captured by Webb is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, itself a collection of thousands of galaxies. “This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours — achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks,” NASA explains. Those 12.5 hours allowed Webb to pinpoint light from one galaxy that had traveled 13.1 billion years before reaching the giant telescope’s mirrors.

Baby Stars

Webb also captured a chunk of a “stellar nursery” roughly 7,600 lightyears from Earth. Called NGC 3324, it is situated at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula. The image shows an amazing mountain of space dust as stars begin to form. “The blistering ultraviolet radiation from the young stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away,” NASA said in a statement. “Dramatic pillars tower above the glowing wall of gas, resisting this radiation. The ‘steam’ that appears to rise from the celestial ‘mountains’ is actually hot, ionized gas and hot dust streaming away from the nebula due to the relentless radiation.”

Star Deathbed

Webb was also able to immortalize the death of a star in the Southern Ring Nebula, with exquisite detail thanks to the mid-infrared technology.

Five Galaxies in One Image

Webb also shined its lens on a cluster of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet, a great celestial laboratory for studying the effects galaxies have on each other. The returned picture of this area is the largest of the telescope’s images to date, with over 120 million pixels and a conglomeration of almost 1,000 separate image files. The photo is actually about one-fifth the size of the Moon’s diameter.

Puffy Giants

The telescope also took in data on WASP-96 b, a giant gas planet outside our solar system. While NASA didn’t release any pictures of this one, they did put out a spectrum analysis of the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists also found the “chemical fingerprint” of water in the swirling gas, itself an epic discovery.

The James Webb Space Telescope developers designed it to pull in images for at least five years, but they are hopeful it will last at least ten. The longevity will most likely be limited by how much fuel it takes to maintain the halo orbit around the sun. No matter how long it lasts, it’s clear the cutting-edge device is already providing us with incredible new insights into our universe.

The post NASA’s James Webb Telescope Glimpses Galaxies More Than 13 Billion Years Old first appeared on Dornob.

Most people have heard of 3D printing — a manufacturing process that involves pushing a building material like plastic or resin through a machine that forms it into a precise and predetermined shape. This type of printing is revolutionizing all kinds of industries from construction to automobiles. Scientists have also been able to 3D print tissues and biological parts from living cells called bio-inks.

The University of Chicago engineers have taken that process one step further by developing a bio-ink that can be printed in four dimensions. That means there’s also a time component to the product. Namely, this special bio-ink can instruct the material to transform its shape over time. It can even do this multiple times in a preprogrammed schedule or on-demand in response to external signals.

“This bio-ink system provides the opportunity to print bio-constructs capable of achieving more sophisticated architectural changes over time than was previously possible,” says research leader Eben Alsberg, a professor in the departments of biomedical, mechanical, and industrial engineering, pharmacology and regenerative medicine, and orthopedics in a university publication.

“These cell-rich structures with pre-programmable and controllable shape morphing promise to better mimic the body’s natural developmental processes and could help scientists conduct more accurate studies of tissue morphogenesis and achieve greater advances in tissue engineering,” he adds.

The bio-ink Alsberg and his team created is made up of tightly-packed, flake-shaped microgels and living cells.

“The bio-inks have what are called shear-thinning and rapid self-healing properties that enable smooth extrusion-based printing with high resolution and high fidelity without a supporting bath. The printed bioconstructs, after further stabilization by light-based crosslinking, remain intact while, for example, bending, twisting, or undergoing any number of multiple deformations. With this system, cartilage-like tissues with complex shapes that evolve over time could be bioengineered,” Alsberg explains.

The team published their work in the science periodical Advanced Materials in a study titled “Jammed Micro-Flake Hydrogel for Four-Dimensional Living Cell Bioprinting,” sharing the results of their experiments with the prototype hydrogels.

“This is the first system that meets the demanding requirements of bioprinting 4D constructs: load living cells in bio-inks, enable printing of large complex structures, trigger shape transformation under physiological conditions, support long-term cell viability, and facilitate desired cell functions such as tissue regeneration,” says Aixiang Ding, Team Member and Postdoctoral Research Associate at UIC.

This groundbreaking, shape-shifting bio-ink could make it possible to 4D-print livers, kidneys, and perhaps even hearts that can better copy the shape, function, and healing properties of natural organs.

“We are endeavoring to translate this system into clinical applications of tissue engineering, as there is a critical shortage of available donor tissues and organs,” Ding adds.

If this new bio-ink can live up to its potential, it could drastically reduce and eventually eliminate the need for human organ donors, potentially saving thousands of lives of those on transplant waiting lists each year.

The post Researchers Develop 4D-Printed Bio-Ink for Organ and Tissue Regeneration first appeared on Dornob.

Ever thought it would be nice to have an extra pair of hands? Or maybe you’ve always thought Spider-man’s Doc Ock had the right idea with his mechanical appendages. A robotics lab at the University of Tokyo is taking such matters into their own hands by creating a pair of attachable arms that could have multiple applications in everyday life.

The extra arms from the University’s Information Somatics Lab (ISL) aren’t available for public use yet, but a recently released video on YouTube shows how consumers might someday benefit from these robotic limbs. Wearers are strapped into a contraption via shoulder bands and a waist belt with mini controllers atop each metal forearm. So far, ISL has created three distinct modes that assist users in performing normal daily tasks.

Passive Mode

In this setup, the limbs are locked into certain positions to hold or grab things for the user, allowing them to use their natural arms for other tasks. For example, in passive mode, the robot arms can hold and carry a tray of food, extract something hot out of an oven, or hold a phone for the perfectly positioned selfie. In locked positions, the arms could also pull your luggage for you at the airport, hold an umbrella over your head during a rainstorm, or hold a drink at the ready while you go about your day.

Playback Mode

After the user makes the arms perform a certain motion in Playback mode, they can automatically repeat it. This setting could be helpful with repetitive movements like fanning yourself, leaving your real arms free for other purposes.

Power Assist Mode

In Power Assist mode, the robotic arms augment the strength of the user, amplifying the force they apply to any object. Not only does this mean people can save their backs during heavy lifting, but the co-limbs in this setting could also provide great blessings to those with physical limitations. The team thinks they could especially benefit elderly populations, as the robo-arms could grab on to something to help them stand up from a sitting position as well as hold and stabilize things, like a cup of tea, if hand tremors are an issue.

Other Configurations

While these mechanical arms are controlled by the wearer’s actual hands, the ISL team is also developing alternate ways to send directions to them. For instance, they’ve constructed a headset with a fisheye lens over each shoulder that can sense six different shoulder motions, each of which triggers a different motion from the arms.

Another experiment involves using foot-powered levers to control the robotic limbs. So far this is only effective while the wearer is seated, but the possibilities could be expanded further down the road.

In a separate project, the ISL is studying the possibility of robot “swarms” as extra limbs. In this iteration, dozens of tiny robots would connect to form arms and hands, but when a small surface needs to be breeched, the bots could detach and squeeze through to retrieve an object or perform a task before swarming back into hand position.

These experiments point to a future where the human body will be artificially enhanced for all kinds of daily tasks, perhaps turning us all into some version of a comic book superhero after all.

The post This Japanese Lab Can Lend You a Hand with Robotic Arms first appeared on Dornob.

MIT professor Michael Strano and his team of researchers were able to defy decades of scientific studies by coaxing polymers, the building blocks of all plastics, out of their traditional chain shape into two-dimensional sheet orientations. By layering these molecular discs, the team was able to forge an ultra-strong, lightweight material they named 2DPA-1.

“Instead of making a spaghetti-like molecule, we can make a sheet-like molecular plane, where we get molecules to hook themselves together in two dimensions,” Strano explains in an MIT press release. “This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”

Exactly how strong is this molecular arrangement? The researchers found that its elastic modulus (the amount of force required to deform a material) was four to six times greater than that of bulletproof glass, its yield strength (the amount of force needed to break the material) was twice as strong as steel, and its density was only one-sixth that of steel.

Another novel feature of 2DPA-1 is its gas impermeability. Other plastics are composed of coiled chains of polymers with gaps that allow gases to flow through. Strano likened them to a bowl of spaghetti noodles. He said with a large bowl of noodles, it’ll be hard to see the bottom of the bowl, but sauce added on top can still seep through all the way to the bottom because of the little pockets of space in between noodles.

The 2DPA-1 material is instead configured of monomers that lock together in unbreakable hydrogen bonds like like interlocking LEGO bricks, making it impossible for gases to leak through. The applications of this discovery could be wide reaching. One possibility could include creating ultra-thin coatings for anything covered in paint. For example, a layer of 2DPA-1 could significantly extend the life of a car’s paint job as it would prevent water and gases from getting through, keeping rust and rot at bay. It could also be employed as a coating for cell phones to make them virtually indestructible.

The uber-strong plastic could also radically change the construction market. Being twice as strong as steel, 2DPA-1 could replace traditional framing materials, allowing structures like bridges and skyscrapers to last much longer. That would reduce the carbon footprint of each new building, and save valuable resources from being used up as quickly.

“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” Strano adds. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.”

Having filed two patents for 2DPA-1, the MIT team is now conducting more experiments on their remarkable 2D polymer sheets to discover what other types of innovative materials can be fashioned from its groundbreaking molecular form.

The post Scientists Create New Lightweight Plastic That’s Twice as Strong as Steel first appeared on Dornob.