Aurelia Butler

A new study has found that artificial intelligence (AI) apps helped protect small and medium-sized businesses against many of the risks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic — yet only a quarter of small firms currently use them.
The research, undertaken by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and published in the journal Information Systems Frontiers, surveyed 317 small and medium sized firms based in London. The study found the use of AI-powered apps was associated with a 3.1% reduced risk to business during the pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created risks for economies and business operations, with customers stopping, reducing, or postponing purchases, thereby affecting supply chains and resulting in difficulties in sourcing alternative suppliers.
Business risks were defined by a 60-point scale developed by the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) that measures the pandemic’s impact on staffing, processes such as working patterns, reduced profits, and threats to partnerships.
AI software utilised by businesses include chatbots to allow swift interaction with customers, apps that identify damaging fake reviews, and apps that use algorithms to improve customer targeting based on their habits, social media activities and profiles, online activities, and past transactions.
The study found the use of AI apps to offer personalised shopping suggestions was associated with 2% lower business risks to profits caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of AI apps to target audience online was associated with 1.2% lower overall business risk.
However, the research revealed that only 26% of small enterprises were utilising AI applications, considerably lower than the 70.4% of medium-sized businesses.
Lead author Professor Nick Drydakis, Director of the Centre for Pluralist Economics at Anglia Ruskin University, said: “SMEs can invest in AI technologies to track users’ habits and provide recommendations, improve customer’s purchasing decisions, search results, media communication, trade raise sales, improve organisational performance, and lower costs.
“AI can help SMEs to adapt to unprecedented conditions, meaning they can leverage technology to meet new types of demand, move at speed to pivot business operations, boost efficiency and reduce their business risks.
“We found that SMEs’ business risks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic declined with the use of AI applications across a ten-item scale including marketing, sales, communication, predictions, pricing and cash flow, fake reviews, cybersecurity, recruitment, and legal services.
“The outcomes proved true regardless of enterprise size, turnover, and years of operation, indicating that AI applications have helped SMEs to adapt to unprecedented conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It seems investment in AI apps could be a smart move for the three quarters of small businesses that do not currently utilise them.” More

The flexible arm, which was designed and created at Imperial College London, can twist and turn in all directions, making it readily customisable for potential applications in manufacturing, spacecraft maintenance, and even injury rehabilitation.
Instead of being constrained by rigid limbs and firm joints, the versatile arm is readily bendable into a wide variety of shapes. In practice, people working alongside the robot would manually bend the arm into the precise shape needed for each task, a level of flexibility made possible by the slippery layers of mylar sheets inside, which slide over one another and can lock into place. However, configuring the robot into specific shapes without guidance has proven to be difficult for users.
To enhance the robot’s user-friendliness, researchers at Imperial’s REDS (Robotic manipulation: Engineering, Design, and Science) Lab have designed a system for users to see in AR how to configure their robot. Wearing mixed reality smartglasses and through motion tracking cameras, users see templates and designs in front of them superimposed onto their real-world environment. They then adjust the robotic arm until it matches the template, which turns green on successful configuration so that the robot can be locked into place.
Senior author of the paper Dr Nicolas Rojas, of Imperial’s Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “One of the key issues in adjusting these robots is accuracy in their new position. We humans aren’t great at making sure the new position matches the template, which is why we looked to AR for help.
“We’ve shown that AR can simplify working alongside our malleable robot. The approach gives users a range of easy-to-create robot positions, for all sorts of applications, without needing so much technical expertise.”
The researchers tested the system on five men aged 20-26 with experience in robotics but no experience with manipulating malleable robots specifically. The subjects were able to adjust the robot accurately, and the results are published in Robotics & Automation Magazine.
Although the pool of participants was narrow, the researchers say their initial findings show that AR could be a successful approach to adapting malleable robots following further testing and user training.
Bent into shape
Potential applications include manufacturing, and building and vehicle maintenance. Because the arm is lightweight, it could also be used on spacecraft where low-weight instruments are preferred. It is also gentle enough that it could be used in injury rehabilitation, helping a patient perform an exercise while their physiotherapist performs another.
Co-first authors PhD researchers Alex Ranne and Angus Clark, also of the Dyson School of Design Engineering, said: “In many ways it can be seen as a detached, bendier, third arm. It could help in many situations where an extra limb might come in handy and help to spread the workload.”
The researchers are still in the process of perfecting the robot as well as its AR component. Next, they will look into introducing touch and audio elements to the AR to boost its accuracy in configuring the robot.
They are also looking into strengthening the robots. Although their flexibility and softness makes them easier to configure and maybe even safer to work alongside humans, they are less rigid while in the locked position, which could affect precision and accuracy.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Imperial College London. Original written by Caroline Brogan. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

These ancient creatures can squeeze through the tiniest cracks, fit snugly into tight spaces and survive in harsh environments: There aren’t many spaces that are off-limits to an insect.
That’s why researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have created tiny bug-inspired robots that can carry out tasks in hard-to-reach spaces and inhospitable environments.
“These robots could be used to access confined areas for imaging or environmental evaluation, take water samples, or perform structural evaluations,” said Junfeng Gao, who led the work as a PhD student in industrial engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering. “Anywhere you want to access confined places—where a bug could go but a person could not—these machines could be useful.”
For many creatures under a certain size—like trap-jaw ants, mantis shrimp, and fleas—jumping across a surface is more energy-efficient than crawling. Those impulsive movements were replicated in the robots, which are made of a polymeric artificial muscle. 
“It’s akin to loading an arrow into a bow and shooting it—the robots latch on to build up energy and then release it in an impulsive burst to spring forward,” explained M. Ravi Shankar, professor of industrial engineering at Pitt whose lab led the research. “Usually, actuation in the artificial muscles we work with is fairly slow. We were drawn to the question, ‘How do we take this artificial muscle and use it to generate a jumping actuation rather than slow actuation?’” 
The answer lay in the interplay of molecular order and geometry.
“The curved composite shape of the polymer muscle allows it to build energy when it is powered. The way the molecules are aligned in the muscle draws inspiration from the natural world, where their combined actuation builds energy into the structure,” said Mohsen Tabrizi, co-author of the study and PhD student in industrial engineering at the Swanson School. “This is accomplished using no more than a few volts of electricity.”
The versatile movement and lightweight structure enables the robots—which are about the size of a cricket—to move along moving surfaces like sand as easily as hard surfaces, and even to hop across water.
The paper, “Molecularly Directed, Geometrically Latched, Impulsive Actuation Powers Sub-Gram Scale Motility,” (DOI: 10.1002/admt.202100979) was published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies and was coauthored by Junfeng Gao, Arul Clement, Mohsen Tabrizi, and M. Ravi Shankar.
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Pittsburgh. Original written by Maggie Lindenberg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Just as electrons flow through an electrical conductor, magnetic excitations can travel through certain materials. Such excitations, known in physics as “magnons” in analogy to the electron, could transport information much more easily than electrical conductors. An international research team has now made an important discovery on the road to such components, which could be highly energy-efficient and considerably smaller.
At present the transport and control of electrical charges forms the basis for most electronic components. A major disadvantage of this technology is that the flow of electric currents generates heat due to the electrical resistance. Considering the gargantuan number of electronic components in use worldwide, the loss of energy is immense.
An energy-efficient alternative may be the use of spin waves to transport and process information, because they do not produce nearly as much waste heat. Such components could also be much more compact. Scientists around the world are thus looking for materials in which magnetic spin waves can be used to transport information.
An international research consortium with significant participation of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now taken an important step forward in this search. Their observations of spin waves on circular paths in certain magnetic materials could also represent a breakthrough for quantum technologies that use waves to transport information.
Propagation of magnetic waves in materials
When you throw a stone into water, you bring the water molecules out of their equilibrium position. They start to oscillate, and a circular wave spreads out. In a very similar way, the magnetic moments in some materials can be made to oscillate. In this process, the magnetic moment performs a gyroscopic motion with respect to its rest position. The precession of one moment affects the vibration of its neighbor, and so the wave propagates. More

Creating synthetic life could be easily within our grasp soon based on a comparison with the evolution of computer chips.
Computer programming and gene synthesis appear to share little in common. But according to University of Cincinnati professor Andrew Steckl, an Ohio Eminent Scholar, leaps forward in technology in the former make him optimistic that wide scale gene manufacture is achievable.
Steckl and his student, Joseph Riolo, used the history of microchip development and large scale computer software platforms as a predictive model to understand another complex system, synthetic biology. Steckl said the project was inspired by comments by another student in his group, Eliot Gomez.
“No analogy is perfect. DNA doesn’t meet certain definitions of digital code,” Riolo said, “but there are a lot of ways the genome and software code are comparable.”
According to the UC study, synthetic biology has the potential to be “the next epochal technological human advancement following microelectronics and the internet.” Its applications are boundless, from creating new biofuels to developing new medical treatments.
Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first synthetic organism in 2010 when they transplanted an artificial genome of Mycoplasma mycoides into another bacterial cell. This relatively simple artificial genome took 15 years to develop at a cost of more than $40 million. More

High-fidelity touch has the potential to significantly expand the scope of what we expect from computing devices, making new remote sensory experiences possible. The research on these advancements, led by a pair of researchers from the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, could help touchscreens simulate virtual shapes.
Dr. Cynthia Hipwell is studying friction at the finger-device level, while Dr. Jonathan Felts is researching friction in the interaction between single skin cells and the glass of the touchscreen interface. The two are bringing together their respective areas of expertise to apply friction principles at the microscopic level to finger-device interaction mechanics.
Hipwell highlighted the significance of the pursuit by comparing it to the technologies currently available for conveying immersive and accurate information through high-fidelity audio and video.
“We can view digitally recorded or remotely transmitted audio and video on a screen with great detail,” said Hipwell, Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr. ’45 Chair II professor. “We do not yet have that same capability with touch on a touchscreen. Imagine you could feel the skin of a snake that lives on another continent or the fabric of clothes you want to buy online.”
Another application of this technology, which has received high levels of interest recently, is the augmentation of immersive virtual environments, such as the proposed metaverse.
“The touch sensations that would be required to really immerse yourself into a reality that is fully digital requires huge advancements in touch perception,” said Felts, associate professor and Steve Brauer, Jr. ’02 Faculty Fellow. “What we’ve done is essentially created an entirely new way to modulate the perception of touch that hasn’t existed before.”
The team is working to show that it is possible to mimic the unique mechanical and thermal sensations associated with different surface textures and shapes. Their recent publication in the journal Science Robotics demonstrates the potential for translating these sensations on a touchscreen by using temperature variation alone, rather than expressing them through ultrasonic vibrations or electroadhesion methods.
“We were actually surprised by the magnitude of the friction increase we were able to achieve,” Hipwell said. “Its magnitude is competitive with current surface haptic devices, meaning that there is another option for friction modulation in surface-haptic device rendering.”
Another exciting development, Hipwell said, is that their research has shown that it is possible to localize the friction to the outer layer of the skin and, at least at swipe speeds, control friction without making the device feel hot.
As the research continues, Felts said many of the questions remaining involve how readily the approach can be incorporated into consumer devices and commercialized.
“Can it be scaled down? Can it respond quickly enough? Can it mimic a wide range of surfaces? Can it be affordable? We think these are fair criticisms, yet we look forward to using this phenomenon to improve our basic understanding of haptic feedback and pursuing miniaturization and commercialization avenues,” he said.
The team is continuing their work to address challenges facing the approach by further exploring the complexities of the finger-device interface and variations that occur due to environmental and skin-property differences. They also hope to look at design improvements for miniaturization and integration into touchscreens.
Story Source:
Materials provided by Texas A&M University. Original written by Steve Kuhlmann. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Imagine Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 1” played on a strand of DNA.
This scenario is not as impossible as it seems. Too small to withstand a rhythmic strum or sliding bowstring, DNA is a powerhouse for storing audio files and all kinds of other media.
“DNA is nature’s original data storage system. We can use it to store any kind of data: images, video, music — anything,” said Kasra Tabatabaei, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a coauthor on this study.
Expanding DNA’s molecular makeup and developing a precise new sequencing method enabled a multi-institutional team to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform.
The team’s paper appeared in Nano Letters in February 2022.
In the age of digital information, anyone brave enough to navigate the daily news feels the global archive growing heavier by the day. Increasingly, paper files are being digitized to save space and protect information from natural disasters. More

Does coffee improve memory? Do carrots boost vision? Does vitamin D deficiency increase the risk for COVID-19?
It depends.
The same research question can yield vastly different answers depending on how a study is designed, which variables are measured, and how results are analyzed. Because of the hodgepodge of approaches used to decipher the interplay between variables, association studies — those that explore how one thing affects another — are notoriously prone to error or “bias.” Finding a false link where none exists or missing one if it does can thwart the pursuit of critical scientific questions and solutions, lead researchers down the wrong path and generate contradictory results that confuse peer scientists and the public alike.
To help remedy such problems, a team of computational scientists from Harvard Medical School has developed an auditing tool called vibration of effects (VoE). The tool, first described in PLoS Biology in September 2021, has now been deployed to analyze reported links between various gut microbes and six diseases in 15 previously published studies comprising samples from 2,434 patients with colon cancer, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cirrhosis of the liver.
The newly published research is the final installment in a three-paper series and represents the culmination of the team’s two-year journey undertaken at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and conducted with collaborators working remotely across the country.
The results of the latest study, published March 2 in PLoS Biology, reveals that a full one-third of 581 reported microbe-disease associations were inconsistent, with outcomes changing depending on how the design was tweaked and which other variables were included in the analysis. More