Aurelia Butler

With Amazon aiming to make 10,000 deliveries with drones in Europe this year and Walmart planning to expand its drone delivery services to an additional 60,000 homes this year in the states, companies are investing more research and development funding into drone delivery, But are consumers ready to accept this change as the new normal?
Northwestern University’s Mobility and Behavior Lab, led by Amanda Stathopoulos, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, wanted to know if consumers were ready for robots to replace delivery drivers, in the form of automated vehicles, drones and robots. The team found that societally, there’s work to do to shift public perceptions of the near-future technology.
“We need to think really carefully about the effect of these new technologies on people and communities, and to tune in to what they think about these changes,” Stathopoulos, the study’s senior author, said.
The study, titled “Robots at your doorstep: Acceptance of near-future technologies for automated parcel delivery,” published last week in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers noted a “complex and multifaceted” relationship between behavior and acceptance of near-future technologies for automated parcel delivery.
While people were generally more willing to accept an automated vehicle as a substitute for a delivery person — perhaps because there already is familiarity with self-driving cars — people disliked drones and robots as options. However, as delivery speed increased and price decreased, likelihood to accept the technology increased.
They also found that tech-savvy consumers were more accepting of the near-future technologies than populations less familiar with the technology.
Stathopoulos is the William Patterson Junior professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where she studies the human aspects of new systems of mobility. She also is a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Transportation Center. She said especially after the pandemic, people have come to expect efficient delivery from e-commerce purchases as they increasingly work from home.

Maher Said, a graduate of Stathopoulos’s lab, is the study’s lead author.
“There’s a paradox: We’re having a hard time reconciling the convenience and the benefit of getting speedy, efficient delivery with its consequences, like poor labor conditions in warehouses, air pollution and congested streets,” Stathopoulos said. “We don’t really see that other role that we play as citizens or as users of the city. And one role is directly affecting the other role, and we are both. With automated delivery, we could reduce some of these issues.”
The team designed a survey to assess preferences of 692 U.S. respondents, asking questions about different delivery options and variables like delivery speed, package handling and general perceptions.
Stathopoulos said that while new modes of delivery present an exciting opportunity, societally, “we’re not there just yet.” As companies ramp up drone deliveries due in part to labor shortages and in part because existing systems cannot satisfy the sheer volume of e-commerce deliveries, the researchers caution that these innovations may fail because of a lack of public acceptance.
Stathopoulos said she thinks shipping and logistics centers should be placed at the “front and center” of city planning and design, as in some European cities, to recognize its importance and role in quality of life. Policy makers will also need to become part of the conversation as more drones enter the airspace and labor shifts. None of this will work, Stathopoulos argued, until companies begin to consolidate their unique systems.
“On the planning side, we need to make sure that we embrace the fact that the massive amount of deliveries is going to shape our cities,” Stathopoulos said. “Collaboration, coordination, and information sharing between companies has been a running challenge — but it’s not going to work if everyone has their own technology. It just destroys the purpose and builds redundant and overlapping systems.”
However, by listening to and conducting more frequent assessments of user acceptance of technologies, Stathopoulos argues that policy makers and companies can prepare for the future and work to overcome anxiety and reluctance to accept new technologies.
The study was supported by the National Science Foundation Career program. More

Deep within every piece of magnetic material, electrons dance to the invisible tune of quantum mechanics. Their spins, akin to tiny atomic tops, dictate the magnetic behavior of the material they inhabit. This microscopic ballet is the cornerstone of magnetic phenomena, and it’s these spins that a team of JILA researchers — headed by JILA Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn — has learned to control with remarkable precision, potentially redefining the future of electronics and data storage.
In a new Science Advances publication, the JILA team — along with collaborators from universities in Sweden, Greece, and Germany — probed the spin dynamics within a special material known as a Heusler compound: a mixture of metals that behaves like a single magnetic material. For this study, the researchers utilized a compound of cobalt, manganese, and gallium, which behaved as a conductor for electrons whose spins were aligned upwards and as an insulator for electrons whose spins were aligned downwards.
Using a form of light called extreme ultraviolet high-harmonic generation (EUV HHG) as a probe, the researchers could track the re-orientations of the spins inside the compound after exciting it with a femtosecond laser, which caused the sample to change its magnetic properties. The key to accurately interpreting the spin re-orientations was the ability to tune the color of the EUV HHG probe light.
“In the past, people haven’t done this color tuning of HHG,” explained co-first author and JILA graduate student Sinéad Ryan. “Usually, scientists only measured the signal at a few different colors, maybe one or two per magnetic element at most.” In a monumental first, the JILA team tuned their EUV HHG light probe across the magnetic resonances of each element within the compound to track the spin changes with a precision down to femtoseconds (a quadrillionth of a second).
“On top of that, we also changed the laser excitation fluence, so we were changing how much power we used to manipulate the spins,” Ryan elaborated, highlighting that that step was also an experimental first for this type of research.
Along with their novel approach, the researchers collaborated with theorist and co-first author Mohamed Elhanoty of Uppsala University, who visited JILA, to compare theoretical models of spin changes to their experimental data. Their results showed strong correspondence between data and theory. “We felt that we’d set a new standard with the agreement between the theory and the experiment,” added Ryan.
Fine Tuning Light Energy
To dive into the spin dynamics of their Heusler compound, the researchers brought an innovative tool to the table: extreme ultraviolet high-harmonic probes. To produce the probes, the researchers focused 800-nanometer laser light into a tube filled with neon gas, where the laser’s electric field pulled the electrons away from their atoms and then pushed them back. When the electrons snapped back, they acted like rubber bands released after being stretched, creating purple bursts of light at a higher frequency (and energy) than the laser that kicked them out. Ryan tuned these bursts to resonate with the energies of the cobalt and the manganese within the sample, measuring element-specific spin dynamics and magnetic behaviors within the material that the team could further manipulate. More

Physical properties (stability, solubility, etc.), critical to the performance of pharmaceutical and functional materials, are known to strongly depend on the solid-state form and environmental factors, such as temperature and relative humidity. Recognising that late appearing, more stable forms can lead to disappearing polymorphs and potentially market withdrawal of a life-saving medicine, the pharmaceutical industry has heavily invested in solid form screening platforms.
Quantitatively measuring the free energy differences between crystalline forms is no small challenge. Metastable crystal forms can be difficult to prepare in pure form and they are frequently susceptible to converting to more stable forms. Thus, having the ability to computationally model free energies means that the risks posed by physical instability can be understood and mitigated for all systems, including those that are experimentally intractable. The lack of reliable experimental benchmark data has been a major bottleneck in developing computational methods for accurately predicting solid-solid free energy differences. Reports in the literature are sparse and much of the experimental data on free energy determinations for molecules of pharmaceutical interest is simply not in the public domain.
To overcome this challenge, experts in academia and industry have compiled the first ever reliable experimental benchmark of solid-solid free energy differences for chemically diverse, industrially relevant systems. They then predicted these free energy differences using several methods pioneered by the group of Prof. Alexandre Tkatchenko within the Department of Physics and Materials Science at the University of Luxembourg, and further improved by Dr. Marcus Neumann and his team of researchers at Avant-garde Materials Simulation. Without using any empirical input, these calculations leveraging high performance computing (HPC) were able to predict and explain data from seven pharmaceutical companies with surprising accuracy. The potential future implications of this work are manifold, and this latest development is just one of many potential application of quantum mechanical calculations in the pharmaceutical industry.
“I am thrilled to see how computational methods developed in my academic group have been quickly adopted to reliably predict the energetics of drug crystal forms in the pharmaceutical industry in a matter of years, breaking the traditional barrier between research and industrial innovation,” remarks Prof. Tkatchenko.
“We owe a fair part of our success to the visionaries among our customers who have enabled us to create an industrial working environment with an academic touch that promotes creativity based on core values such as honesty, integrity, perseverance, team-spirit and genuine care for people and the environment,” points out Dr Marcus Neuman, founder and CEO of AMS.
“Building links between fundamental science, high performance computing, and major industry players in order to make a lasting impact for the future of health is no small feat,” said Prof. Jens Kreisel, Rector of the University of Luxembourg. “We take very seriously our mission of nurturing an ecosystem where researchers can drive societal change for good.” More

Over the past decade, AI has permeated nearly every corner of science: Machine learning models have been used to predict protein structures, estimate the fraction of the Amazon rainforest that has been lost to deforestation and even classify faraway galaxies that might be home to exoplanets.
But while AI can be used to speed scientific discovery — helping researchers make predictions about phenomena that may be difficult or costly to study in the real world — it can also lead scientists astray. In the same way that chatbots sometimes “hallucinate,” or make things up, machine learning models can sometimes present misleading or downright false results.
In a paper published online today (Thursday, Nov. 9) in Science, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, present a new statistical technique for safely using the predictions obtained from machine learning models to test scientific hypotheses.
The technique, called prediction-powered inference (PPI), uses a small amount of real-world data to correct the output of large, general models — such as AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures — in the context of specific scientific questions.
“These models are meant to be general: They can answer many questions, but we don’t know which questions they answer well and which questions they answer badly — and if you use them naively, without knowing which case you’re in, you can get bad answers,” said study author Michael Jordan, the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of statistics at UC Berkeley. “With PPI, you’re able to use the model, but correct for possible errors, even when you don’t know the nature of those errors at the outset.”
The risk of hidden biases
When scientists conduct experiments, they’re not just looking for a single answer — they want to obtain a range of plausible answers. This is done by calculating a “confidence interval,” which, in the simplest case, can be found by repeating an experiment many times and seeing how the results vary. More

Most anyone who’s used noise-canceling headphones knows that hearing the right noise at the right time can be vital. Someone might want to erase car horns when working indoors, but not when walking along busy streets. Yet people can’t choose what sounds their headphones cancel.
Now, a team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed deep-learning algorithms that let users pick which sounds filter through their headphones in real time. The team is calling the system “semantic hearing.” Headphones stream captured audio to a connected smartphone, which cancels all environmental sounds. Either through voice commands or a smartphone app, headphone wearers can select which sounds they want to include from 20 classes, such as sirens, baby cries, speech, vacuum cleaners and bird chirps. Only the selected sounds will be played through the headphones.
The team presented its findings Nov. 1 at UIST ’23 in San Francisco. In the future, the researchers plan to release a commercial version of the system.
“Understanding what a bird sounds like and extracting it from all other sounds in an environment requires real-time intelligence that today’s noise canceling headphones haven’t achieved,” said senior author Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “The challenge is that the sounds headphone wearers hear need to sync with their visual senses. You can’t be hearing someone’s voice two seconds after they talk to you. This means the neural algorithms must process sounds in under a hundredth of a second.”
Because of this time crunch, the semantic hearing system must process sounds on a device such as a connected smartphone, instead of on more robust cloud servers. Additionally, because sounds from different directions arrive in people’s ears at different times, the system must preserve these delays and other spatial cues so people can still meaningfully perceive sounds in their environment.
Tested in environments such as offices, streets and parks, the system was able to extract sirens, bird chirps, alarms and other target sounds, while removing all other real-world noise. When 22 participants rated the system’s audio output for the target sound, they said that on average the quality improved compared to the original recording.
In some cases, the system struggled to distinguish between sounds that share many properties, such as vocal music and human speech. The researchers note that training the models on more real-world data might improve these outcomes.
Additional co-authors on the paper were Bandhav Veluri and Malek Itani, both UW doctoral students in the Allen School; Justin Chan, who completed this research as a doctoral student in the Allen School and is now at Carnegie Mellon University; and Takuya Yoshioka, director of research at AssemblyAI. More

From Wi-Fi-connected home security systems to smart toilets, the so-called Internet of Things brings personalization and convenience to devices that help run homes. But with that comes tangled electrical cords or batteries that need to be replaced. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Energy Materials have brought solar panel technology indoors to power smart devices. They show which photovoltaic (PV) systems work best under cool white LEDs, a common type of indoor lighting.
Indoor lighting differs from sunlight. Light bulbs are dimmer than the sun, and sunlight comprises ultraviolet, infrared and visible light, whereas indoor lights typically shine light from a narrower region of the spectrum. Scientists have found ways to harness power from sunlight, using PV solar panels, but those panels are not optimized for converting indoor light into electrical energy. Some next-generation PV materials, including perovskite minerals and organic films, have been tested with indoor light, but it’s not clear which are the most efficient at converting non-natural light into electricity; many of the studies use various types of indoor lights to test PVs made from different materials. So, Uli Würfel and coworkers compared a range of different PV technologies under the same type of indoor lighting.
The researchers obtained eight types of PV devices, ranging from traditional amorphous silicon to thin-film technologies such as dye-sensitized solar cells. They measured each material’s ability to convert light into electricity, first under simulated sunlight and then under a cool white LED light. Gallium indium phosphide PV cells showed the greatest efficiency under indoor light, converting nearly 40% of the light energy into electricity. As the researchers had expected, the gallium-containing material’s performance under sunlight was modest relative to the other materials tested due to its large band gap. A material called crystalline silicon demonstrated the best efficiency under sunlight but was average under indoor light.Gallium indium phosphide has not been used in commercially available PV cells yet, but this study points to its potential beyond solar power, the researchers say. However, they add that the gallium-containing materials are expensive and may not serve as a viable mass product to power smart home systems. In contrast, perovskite mineral and organic film PV cells are less expensive and do not have stability issues under indoor lighting conditions. Additionally, in the study, the researchers identified that part of the indoor light energy produced heat instead of electricity — information that will help optimize future PVs to power indoor devices.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (U.K.), the European Regional Development Fund, the Welsh European Funding Office, First Solar Inc., the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, and the German Research Foundation. More

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory used their expertise in quantum biology, artificial intelligence and bioengineering to improve how CRISPR Cas9 genome editing tools work on organisms like microbes that can be modified to produce renewable fuels and chemicals.
CRISPR is a powerful tool for bioengineering, used to modify genetic code to improve an organism’s performance or to correct mutations. The CRISPR Cas9 tool relies on a single, unique guide RNA that directs the Cas9 enzyme to bind with and cleave the corresponding targeted site in the genome. Existing models to computationally predict effective guide RNAs for CRISPR tools were built on data from only a few model species, with weak, inconsistent efficiency when applied to microbes.
“A lot of the CRISPR tools have been developed for mammalian cells, fruit flies or other model species. Few have been geared towards microbes where the chromosomal structures and sizes are very different,” said Carrie Eckert, leader of the Synthetic Biology group at ORNL. “We had observed that models for designing the CRISPR Cas9 machinery behave differently when working with microbes, and this research validates what we’d known anecdotally.”
To improve the modeling and design of guide RNA, the ORNL scientists sought a better understanding of what’s going on at the most basic level in cell nuclei, where genetic material is stored. They turned to quantum biology, a field bridging molecular biology and quantum chemistry that investigates the effects that electronic structure can have on the chemical properties and interactions of nucleotides, the molecules that form the building blocks of DNA and RNA.
The way electrons are distributed in the molecule influences reactivity and conformational stability, including the likelihood that the Cas9 enzyme-guide RNA complex will effectively bind with the microbe’s DNA, said Erica Prates, computational systems biologist at ORNL.
The best guide through a forest of decisions
The scientists built an explainable artificial intelligence model called iterative random forest. They trained the model on a dataset of around 50,000 guide RNAs targeting the genome of E. coli bacteria while also taking into account quantum chemical properties, in an approach described in the journal Nucleic Acids Research. More