Computers Math

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.
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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.
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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

Most quantum information technologies including quantum computers — considered a step above supercomputers — and quantum communication that cannot be hacked are based on the principle of quantum entanglement. However, entangled systems exist in a small microscopic world and are pretty fragile. Quantum metrology, which provides enhanced sensitivity over conventional measurements in precision metrology, has also mainly relied on quantum entanglement, so that it is hard to implement in real life applications. Recently, a Korean research team has proposed a method to achieve the quantum metrology precision without using entangled resources.
A POSTECH research team led by Professor Yoon-Ho Kim and Dr. Yosep Kim (Department of Physics) has discovered a weak-value amplification (WVA) method that reaches the Heisenberg limit without using quantum entanglement. Heisenberg-limit refers to the precision ultimately achievable in quantum metrology.
WVA-based metrology, which is one of the methods for measuring quantum effects, is an approach to obtain the most information on the quantum system with minimal impact. It can efficiently measure the system without collapsing the quantum state.
By using the weak value measured in this way, it is possible to amplify tiny physical effects such as ultrasmall phase shifts. Though this method has fewer errors compared to the conventional ones, it has a critical limitation of lower detection probability. Methods to overcome this limitation has been proposed by utilizing entanglement, but the difficulty in generating a large-scale quantum entanglement has been a major challenge to realize the Heisenberg-limited metrology.
The researchers have confirmed that in the weak-value amplification, the Heisenberg limit is reached without using entanglement through the iterative interaction between different quantum states. They explain that this results from the local iterative interactions between each particle of an entangled system and a meter, rather than from the quantum entanglement itself.
“This study will contribute to the practical use of quantum metrology by verifying that entanglement is not an absolute requirement for reaching the Heisenberg limit,” remarked Professor Yoon-Ho Kim who led the study.
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Materials provided by Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH). Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Future teachers see educational potential in computer games, study shows. Teacher training should therefore address their potential in the classroom.
New study results by a research team at the University of Cologne show that future teachers increasingly want to use computer games in the classroom. The study identifies particularly relevant aspects that should be addressed in teacher training programmes in order to support this intention. The study results have been published under the title ‘Teaching with digital games: How intentions to adopt digital game-based learning are related to personal characteristics of pre-service teachers’ in the British Journal of Educational Technology.
Computer games play a major role in the lives and media use of children and adolescents people. However, current school teaching rarely takes this medium into account. The future generation of teachers currently being trained at universities could change this. ‘In our current study, we focused on the teachers of tomorrow and how they can be better prepared to employ computer games in the classroom because computer games have great potential for teaching’, said Marco Rüth from the University of Cologne’s Psychology Department.
In previous studies, the authors had already shown that as a learning tool in the classroom, computer games can support students’ skills development. They also found that after using computer games in class, students can reflect critically and constructively on their experiences with the medium. Based on this, the researchers surveyed 402 teacher trainees from German-speaking universities online about their intention to integrate computer games as learning tools and as an object of reflection in their future school lessons. The team examined 21 personal characteristics, including perceived effectiveness of computer games, knowledge about computer games, and fear of using computer games in the classroom. ‘Above all, the perceived effectiveness of computer games and perceived connections of computer games to curricula play a central role in the intention of teacher trainees to actually want to use them in school lessons,’ Professor Kai Kaspar explained.
The current survey also revealed differences between the scenarios in which computer games are used: ‘If teacher trainees want to use computer games to promote the competencies of students, they pay particular attention to their own fear of using computer games and the extent to which people important to them think they should use computer games,’ explained Marco Rüth. ‘If, on the other hand, they want to use computer games for media-critical discussions, the focus was instead on the effort involved for them.’
Since computer games are currently rarely included as a relevant medium in teacher training programmes, the researchers recommend that, above all, insights into the effectiveness of computer games and their relevance to curricula should be included in teacher training programmes. Likewise, teacher trainees should be aware of potential pitfalls in practical implementation and be able to deal with them ,so that teaching competencies with computer games are promoted in the long term. ‘This would require not only adjustments to the curriculum of the teacher training programme, but also further support services and research findings so that teachers in their later school practice know exactly when and how they can use computer games effectively in the classroom,’ said Professor Kaspar.
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Materials provided by University of Cologne. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More