Lifeboat Foundation

SUMMARY: A soft robot with octopus-inspired sensory and motion capabilities represents significant progress in robotics, offering nimbleness and adaptability in uncertain environments.

Robotic engineers have made a leap forward with the development of a soft robot that closely resembles the dynamic movements and sensory prowess of an octopus. This groundbreaking innovation from an international collaboration involving Beihang University, Tsinghua University, and the National University of Singapore has the potential to redefine how robots interact with the world around them.

The blueprint for this highly adaptable robot draws upon the intelligent, soft-bodied mechanics of an octopus, enabling smooth movements across a variety of surfaces and environments with precision. The sensorized soft arm, lovingly named the electronics-integrated soft octopus arm mimic (E-SOAM), embodies advancements in soft robotics with its incorporation of elastic materials and sophisticated liquid metal circuits that remain resilient under extreme deformation.

The gel demonstrated an adsorption capacity of about six times its weight in humid conditions and 90 percent of this water could be recovered.

In arid areas, vapor from the air is the only option but needs an inexpensive and scalable technique to produce large amounts of water.

Micrometeorites originating from icy celestial bodies in the outer solar system may be responsible for transporting nitrogen to the near-Earth region in the early days of our solar system. That discovery was published in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers, including University of Hawai’i at Mānoa scientists, led by Kyoto University.

Nitrogen compounds, such as ammonium salts, are abundant in material born in regions far from the sun, but evidence of their transport to Earth’s orbital region had been poorly understood.

“Our recent findings suggest the possibility that a greater amount of nitrogen compounds than previously recognized was transported near Earth, potentially serving as building blocks for life on our planet,” says Hope Ishii, study co-author and affiliate faculty at the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).

A breakthrough in nanofluidics is set to revolutionize our grasp of molecular dynamics at minuscule scales. Collaborative efforts from scientists at EPFL and the University of Manchester have uncovered a previously hidden world by using the newly found fluorescent properties of a graphene-like 2D material, boron nitride. This innovative approach enables scientists to track individual molecules within nanofluidic structures, illuminating their behavior in ways never before possible. The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Nature Materials.

Nanofluidics, the study of fluids confined within ultra-small spaces, offers insights into the behavior of liquids on a nanometer scale. However, exploring the movement of individual molecules in such confined environments has been challenging due to the limitations of conventional microscopy techniques. This obstacle prevented real-time sensing and imaging, leaving significant gaps in our knowledge of molecular properties in confinement.

A symbiotic culture of specialized yeast and bacteria can generate tough materials able to perform a variety of functions.

The crack resistance of polymer materials is explained by a new model that incorporates a network of stretchable polymer chains.

Plastics and other polymer materials are often very resistant to cracking—a fact that models have not been able to accurately capture. Now a research team has developed a model of polymer fracture that explains how these materials remain intact under intense stretching. [1]. The key to the model is that it accounts for polymer chains that extend deep within the material and that can share the strain that would break a material with more localized chains. The insights could lead to the development of new structures with an enhanced resistance to shocks.

Researchers typically study fracture by cutting a small notch or crack into a material and then pulling it apart. The amount of work required to enlarge the crack is called the fracture energy. For most materials, the fracture energy is equal to the energy it takes to break the molecular bonds located along the crack tip, where the enlargement occurs. For polymers, the situation is more complex, as the molecules are long chains. In the 1960s, theorists came up with a model of polymer fracture based on the rupture of individual chains at the crack tip [2]. “The problem is that this model underestimates by a factor of 10 to 100 the energy required to fracture a polymer material,” says Xuanhe Zhao from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A dynamical tension model captures how cells swap places with their neighbors in epithelial tissues, explaining observed phase transitions and cellular architectures.

Epithelial tissues line the surfaces of every organ in our bodies. In the earliest stages of organ development and in wound healing, the cells that make up these simple sheets constantly rearrange themselves, exchanging positions like molecules in a liquid. But this fluidization is often hindered by the formation of multicell clusters, whose origins remain unclear. Using a dynamical structural model, Fernanda Pérez-Verdugo and Shiladitya Banerjee of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania now identify the mechanical prerequisites that lead to the formation and dissolution of these stabilized clusters [1]. They show how dynamic feedback between tension and strain controls the tissue’s material properties.

Existing models of tissue fluidity treat epithelial tissues as foam-like, polygonal networks of cells whose edges join at triple points. However, these models fail to explain the mechanisms underpinning cell neighbor exchanges. In particular, they oversimplify such exchanges by treating them as an instantaneous process, thereby avoiding the impact of exchanges that stall midprocess. One resulting discrepancy with experimental results is the absence of stable “rosette” structures that are observed in developing tissues where four or more cells meet.

The material could also be used in water filters.

Wwing/iStock.

Now, ETH Zurich researchers at the Laboratory of Soft and Living Materials, led by former ETH Professor Eric Dufresne, have managed to replicate the material in the laboratory to be used in applications such as batteries and water filters.

Continue reading “Scientists create new battery material by mimicking bluebird feathers” »

Insider Brief.

Scientists report on a new approach that can significantly improve the study and understanding of entanglement in quantum materials.

The researchers were led by Peter Zoller at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.