Robotic lightning bugs take flight

MIT News  June 21, 2022 Inspired by fireflies an international team of researchers (USA – MIT, China) developed a 650 mg aerial robot powered by four electroluminescent (EL) dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) that have distinct colors and patterns. They also tweaked the fabrication process so the actuators could emit multicolored and patterned light. To fabricate a glowing actuator, they incorporated electroluminescent zinc sulphate particles into the elastomer. During robot flight, a strong (>40 V/μm) and high frequency (400 Hz) electric field is generated within the DEA, exciting the EL particles to emit light. As they are too light to carry […]

Rubbery camouflage skin exhibits smart and stretchy behaviors

EureakAlert  June 13, 2022 Cephalopod (octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish) skin is a soft organ that can endure complex deformations, such as expanding, contracting, bending, and twisting, capable of cognitive sensing and responding that enable the skin to sense light, react and camouflage its wearer. While artificial skins with either these physical or these cognitive capabilities have existed, none has simultaneously exhibited both qualities. An international team of researchers (USA – Pennsylvania State University, University of Houston, South Korea, China) has developed artificial neuromorphic cognitive skins based on arrayed, biaxially stretchable synaptic transistors constructed entirely out of elastomeric materials. Through investigation […]

Exploring chemical logic systems that can respond to environmental conditions

Phys.org  May 13, 2022 Even the simplest form of life (a single cell), can sense various chemical and physical stimuli and process this information through their intrinsic complex intracellular logic to perform complicated cellular functions such as cell division, cell motility, and cargo transport. Harnessing the complete potential of such systems, regarding their ability to process information from multiple external stimuli and perform programmable spatiotemporal functions remains unexplored. An international team of researchers (South Korea, India) has developed out-of-equilibrium chemical systems, which can sense multiple external stimuli ( light, sound, atmospheric oxygen) and process this information to execute programmable life-like […]

Water as a ‘glue’ for elasticity enhanced, wet attachment of biomimetic structures

Phys.org  March 29, 2022 Octopus, clingfish, and larva use soft cups to attach to surfaces under water. Using a novel micro cup, fabricated by two-photon lithography, coupled with in situ pressure sensor and observation cameras, an international team of researchers (Germany, USA – University of Illinois) has detailed the nature of its attachment/detachment under water. It involves elasticity-enhanced hydrodynamics generating “self-sealing” and high suction at the cup-substrate interface, converting water into “glue.” Detachment is mediated by seal breaking. They identified three distinct mechanisms of breaking including elastic buckling of the cup rim. A mathematical model described the interplay between the […]

Blowin’ in the wind – tiny battery-free sensor devices float like dandelion seeds (w/video)

Nanowerk  March 16, 2022 Inspired by plants which disperse their seeds using the wind researchers at the University of Washington developed and demonstrated wind dispersal of battery-free wireless sensing devices. The millimetre-scale devices weigh 30 milligrams and were designed on a flexible substrate using programmable, off-the-shelf parts to enable scalability and flexibility for various sensing and computing applications. The system is powered using lightweight solar cells and an energy harvesting circuit that is robust to low and variable light conditions and has a backscatter communication link that enables data transmission. To achieve the wide-area dispersal and upright landing they developed thin-film […]

Hoverfly brains mapped to detect the sound of distant drones

Science Daily  March 15, 2022 Insect vision systems have been mapped for some time now to improve camera-based detections. Researchers in Australia shown that it is possible pick up clear and crisp acoustic signatures of drones, including very small and quiet ones, using an algorithm based on the hoverfly’s visual system. They converted acoustic signals into spectrograms and used the neural pathway of the hoverfly brain to improve and suppress unrelated signals and noise, increasing the detection range for the sounds they wanted to detect. They looked for narrowband and/or broadband to pick up drone acoustics at short to medium […]

A star in the world of ceramic engineering

Science Daily  February 10, 2022 A team of researchers in the US (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Bowdoin College, Harvard University) investigated the complex and highly ordered mineralized skeletal system of sea star from the tropical Indo-Pacific region. The skeleton consists of many millimeter-sized skeletal elements called ossicles which connect with soft tissue, allowing the animal to be flexible and move. Each ossicle is constructed of a microlattice structure so uniform that it can be described mathematically. They found that it is essentially a single crystal structure at atomic level which allows a sea star to reinforce its skeleton […]

Scientists engineer new material that can absorb and release enormous amounts of energy

Phys.org  February 2, 2022 Solid–solid phase transformations can affect energy transduction and change material properties. A team of researchers at UMass Amherst developed elasto-magnetic metamaterials that display phase transformation behaviors due to nonlinear interactions between internal elastic structures and embedded, macroscale magnetic domains. They also developed the design algorithms that allow these materials to be programmed with specific responses, making them predictable. Using predictive model, they developed a quantitative phase map that relates the geometry and magnetic interactions to the phase transformation. According to the researchers their work demonstrates that the new material holds great promise for a very wide […]

Bone growth inspired ‘microrobots’ that can create their own bone

Science Daily  January 17, 2022 Combining materials which together resemble the natural process of bone development an international team of researchers (Sweden, Japan) constructed a microrobot which can assume different shapes and change stiffness. They started with a gel material called alginate. On one side of the gel, they grew an electroactive polymer which changes its volume when a low voltage is applied, causing the microrobot to bend in a specified direction. On the other side of the gel, they attached biomolecules, that are important for bone development which allowed the soft gel material to harden. They demonstrated that the […]

This 3D-Printer Uses Ink Made From Microbes to Print Blobs That Are Alive

Science Alert December 1, 2021 Based on the living cells ability to synthesize molecular components and precisely assemble them to build living functional architectures under ambient conditions microbial engineering has produced materials for various applications. However, building 3D structures in arbitrary patterns and shapes has been a challenge. A team of researchers in the US (Harvard University, Northeastern University, Harvard Medical School) has developed a bioink (microbial ink) that is produced entirely from genetically engineered microbial cells, programmed to perform a bottom-up, hierarchical self-assembly of protein monomers into nanofibers, and nanofiber networks that comprise extrudable hydrogels. They demonstrated the 3D […]