Computers Math

It’s not a stretch to say that stretchable sensors could change the way soft robots function and feel. In fact, they will be able to feel quite a lot.
Cornell University researchers have created a fiber-optic sensor that combines low-cost LEDs and dyes, resulting in a stretchable “skin” that detects deformations such as pressure, bending and strain. This sensor could give soft robotic systems — and anyone using augmented reality technology — the ability to feel the same rich, tactile sensations that mammals depend on to navigate the natural world.
The researchers, led by Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, are working to commercialize the technology for physical therapy and sports medicine.
Their paper, “Stretchable Distributed Fiber-Optic Sensors,” published in Science. The paper’s co-lead authors are doctoral student Hedan Bai and Shuo Li.
Bai drew inspiration from silica-based distributed fiber-optic sensors and developed a stretchable lightguide for multimodal sensing (SLIMS). This long tube contains a pair of polyurethane elastomeric cores. One core is transparent; the other is filled with absorbing dyes at multiple locations and connects to an LED. Each core is coupled with a red-green-blue sensor chip to register geometric changes in the optical path of light.
The researchers designed a 3D-printed glove with a SLIMS sensor running along each finger. The glove is powered by a lithium battery and equipped with Bluetooth so it can transmit data to basic software, which Bai designed, that reconstructs the glove’s movements and deformations in real time.

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“Right now, sensing is done mostly by vision,” Shepherd said. “We hardly ever measure touch in real life. This skin is a way to allow ourselves and machines to measure tactile interactions in a way that we now currently use the cameras in our phones. It’s using vision to measure touch. This is the most convenient and practical way to do it in a scalable way.”
Bai and Shepherd are working with Cornell’s Center for Technology Licensing to patent the technology, with an eye toward applications in physical therapy and sports medicine. Both fields have leveraged motion-tracking technology but until now have lacked the ability to capture force interactions.
The researchers are also looking into the ways SLIMS sensors can boost virtual and augmented reality experiences.
“VR and AR immersion is based on motion capture. Touch is barely there at all,” Shepherd said. “Let’s say you want to have an augmented reality simulation that teaches you how to fix your car or change a tire. If you had a glove or something that could measure pressure, as well as motion, that augmented reality visualization could say, ‘Turn and then stop, so you don’t overtighten your lug nuts.’ There’s nothing out there that does that right now, but this is an avenue to do it.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF); the Air Force Office of Scientific Research; Cornell Technology Acceleration and Maturation; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture; and the Office of Naval Research.
The researchers made use of the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility and Cornell Center for Materials Research, both of which are supported by the NSF.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34ucE36zSCg&feature=emb_logo

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Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by David Nutt. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Ecotourism offers a specific travel experience: It focuses on nature, education and sustainability. Often, these destinations highlight endangered or threatened species and engage visitors in making socially responsible choices.
But a new study by researchers at the University of Georgia suggests ecotourism’s altruistic attractions may be overshadowed by another benefit: photos for social media. Recently published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism, the research could help guide tourism operators as they weigh the costs and benefits of attracting visitors who care most for natural beauty only when it can be captured on their phone.
“It’s been traditionally presumed that people are pursuing ecotourism because they are interested in making an environmentally or socially responsible choice — and this understanding is important for a host of reasons, including management and market segmentation,” said Justin Beall, the study’s lead author. “But our study throws a wrench in that a bit by showing that not only is it environmental values that are influencing people to participate in ecotourism, but people are also engaging in ecotourism so they can get good photographs to post online and present to their friends and loved ones.”
Beall, a recent graduate of the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, wrote the paper as part of his master’s thesis. Co-authors included Warnell faculty members Bynum Boley and Kyle Woosnam, as well as UGA alumnus Adam Landon, now with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Social status over sustainability
Say, for example, someone visits an ecotourism destination and shares photos and descriptions on social media. They are conveying an image of someone who cares about sustainability, the local community and education — all components of ecotourism. But, Beall said, travelers surveyed for the study revealed that how these photos look may be even more important than their own environmental values.

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“People have a tendency to do something that elevates their status — I think we all kind of do it. This idea is not new,” added Boley. “It used to be a Porsche or a wristwatch or jewelry, but now it’s a little more subtle, and channeled through travel experiences.
“So, our big debate is, do people choose ecotourism because they have strong environmental values, or is it a new way to show off to your peers that you’re cool?”
Earlier research has suggested that ecotourists have motivations beyond environmental and social values. But with the rise of smartphones and social media, factors such as self-development, relaxation or escape are taking a back seat to the potential for likes and clicks. Boley has underscored this in more recent studies, showing how social media is changing how we view and experience travel.
Now, with this latest study, it appears the influence of social media has also reached ecotourism.
Overcrowding
While the travel industry is reeling from COVID-19, visitors to remote, natural-focused destinations are up in the U.S. On the one hand, this research presents an opportunity for the ecotourism industry to market itself by highlighting scenic opportunities to potential travelers.
But then there are problems of overcrowding to consider. Too many tourists can also be a bad thing — especially when they’re visiting sensitive natural areas. The problem is compounded for ecotourism destinations, where a small staff typically manages a larger and more fragile area. For example, visitors may stray off the established trail for their own set of photos, wandering into sensitive areas.
For years, ecotourists were categorized as a highly desirable segment of the tourism market. They have money to spend, they’re environmentally conscious and they are concerned about their effects on their destination. But perhaps that’s no longer true.
“What if all of a sudden you realize most of the people who showed up to your site aren’t ecotourists that care about your site, but just want to get the picture?” Beall asked. “With ecotourism done well, you can have this sort of low-volume, high-value tourism. But if you have all these other people that are getting in on it, and they’re not concerned about their environmental impacts, where their money goes or what they do, then it could threaten the destination’s sustainability.”

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Materials provided by University of Georgia. Original written by Kristen Morales. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Modern communications technology, regardless of use, relies on a similar formula: devices send signals and information through data centers, towers and satellites en route to their final destination. The effectiveness of the communication relies on how well that information travels, and there are a variety of factors that can slow down that journey — geography, weather and more.
A new device created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin can overcome challenges like bad weather to deliver more secure, reliable communications. This could aid military communications in challenging areas, improve the ability of self-driving cars to see the environment around them and speed up wireless data for potential 6G networks.
Ray Chen, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leader of the project, made a comparison to TV satellite dishes that go out or become fuzzy during poor weather. The same thing can happen with communications technology, and that’s the problem Chen wants to fix.
Chen’s device operates in an area of the light spectrum — mid infrared — that allows signal to penetrate through clouds, rain and other weather to get to their intended target without shedding significant amounts of light.
“Low light loss means signal can travel further, and through the earth’s atmosphere, with better integrity and less power consumption,” Chen said.
Chen’s findings were recently published in the journal Optica.

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weather proof communicationsweather proof chip The device is an indium phosphide chip capable of beam steering, the act of re-directing light in the direction of a specific target. The concept allows signal to be transmitted more accurately than other methods, reducing interference and saving power.
However, beam steering has its weaknesses that hold back mass adoption; namely that devices can only bounce light in narrow directions. Chen compares it with a person with poor peripheral vision.
However, Chen’s device features much wider angles for steering light, increasing the range by about 30 degrees compared to the other options, without moving parts or side lobes of light that trail off in various directions and decrease efficiency.
“For beam steering to be safe, you want to have a full view, you don’t want to have a bunch of blind spots,” Chen said.
A lot of self-driving cars are equipped with Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology that can sense the environment around it. Typically, these take the form of large devices attached to the top of cars with spinning arrays.

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The LIDAR devices have to spin because of the limited field of vision, Chen said. And any time you rely on a moving part, there is a risk of it breaking. The chip Chen created doesn’t require moving parts because of its wider field of vision. And fewer blind spots in the technology increases safety in situations where momentary lapses can prove dangerous.
The chips can be integrated into everything from military vehicles, to satellites, to skyscrapers. Chen is working on infusing artificial intelligence into the device for environmental sensing. The mid infrared is a part of the light spectrum that humans can’t see without aids like night vision goggles, but devices in that range can pick up things like gas leaks and smoke stack emissions.
In big cities, where it’s not practical to dig deeply underground to lay fiber cables, these devices can increase internet speeds. Putting them atop skyscrapers can enable free-space optical communication, a technology that allows wireless data to travel through the air using light.
Chen’s next big step in the project involves field-testing the device and refining its packaging to enable its application in free-space optical communications.
Funding for the project came from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory. More

Bristol scientists have demonstrated a new virtual reality [VR] technique which should help in developing drugs against the SARS-CoV-2 virus — and enable researchers to share models and collaborate in new ways. The innovative tool, created by University of Bristol researchers, and published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, will help scientists around the world identify anti-viral drug leads more rapidly.
A SARS-CoV-2 enzyme known as the main protease (Mpro) is a promising target in the search for new anti-viral treatments. Molecules that stop the main protease from working — called enzyme inhibitors — stop the virus reproducing, and so could be effective drugs. Researchers across the world are working to find such molecules. A key predictor of a drug’s effectiveness is how tightly it binds to its target; knowing how a drug fits into the protein helps researchers design changes to its structure to make it bind more tightly.
Professor Adrian Mulholland from Bristol’s School of Chemistry and the study’s lead author explained: “We’ve shown that interactive virtual reality can model how viral proteins and inhibitors bind to the enzyme. Researchers can use this tool to help understand how the enzyme works, and also to see how potential drugs fit into the enzyme. This should help design and test new potential drug leads. We are sharing these models with the whole community.”
The Bristol team have developed a virtual framework for interactive ‘molecular dynamics’ simulations. It is an open source software framework, called Narupa, which uses readily available VR equipment.
In this study, the Bristol team created a 3D model structure of the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro and used interactive molecular dynamics simulations in VR (iMD-VR) to ‘step inside’ it and visualise molecules binding to the enzyme, in atomic detail. Results showed that users were able to show how a drug molecule fits within the enzyme.
Professor Mulholland added: “There are currently many efforts globally aimed at identifying drug leads for COVID-19. Our iMD-VR tools will be a valuable resource, enabling virtual collaboration for the international drug discovery community, helping to predict how potential drug leads bind to SARS-CoV-2 targets. An exciting aspect is that it also allows researchers to collaborate in new ways: using cloud computing, they can tackle a drug discovery problem together at the same time when in they are in different locations — potentially even in different countries — working simultaneously in the same virtual molecular environment.”
“Computational modelling of how drugs bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has been critical in advancing the global fight against the pandemic. Narupa takes that modelling to an entirely new level with molecular dynamics simulations in virtual reality,” said Alison Derbenwick Miller, Vice President, Oracle for Research. “We are delighted that Oracle’s high-performance cloud infrastructure supported the development of this innovative framework, and is now helping to advance globally-connected efforts to defeat COVID-19. Growing a connected community of cloud-powered researchers is exactly what Oracle for Research was designed to do.”
The study was supported by grants from the EPSRC, the Royal Society and the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Cloud credits were provided by Oracle for Research.

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A new study outlines ways colleges and universities can update their curricula to prepare the workforce for a new wave of quantum technology jobs. Three researchers, including Rochester Institute of Technology Associate Professor Ben Zwickl, suggested steps that need to be taken in a new paper in Physical Review Physics Education Research after interviewing managers at more than 20 quantum technology companies across the U.S.
The study’s authors from University of Colorado Boulder and RIT set out to better understand the types of entry-level positions that exist in these companies and the educational pathways that might lead into those jobs. They found that while the companies still seek employees with traditional STEM degrees, they want the candidates to have a grasp of fundamental concepts in quantum information science and technology.
“For a lot of those roles, there’s this idea of being ‘quantum aware’ that’s highly desirable,” said Zwickl, a member of RIT’s Future Photon Initiative and Center for Advancing STEM Teaching, Learning and Evaluation. “The companies told us that many positions don’t need to have deep expertise, but students could really benefit from a one- or two-semester introductory sequence that teaches the foundational concepts, some of the hardware implementations, how the algorithms work, what a qubit is, and things like that. Then a graduate can bring in all the strength of a traditional STEM degree but can speak the language that the company is talking about.”
The authors said colleges and universities should offer introductory, multidisciplinary courses with few prerequisites that will allow software engineering, computer science, physics, and other STEM majors to learn the core concepts together. Zwickl said providing quantum education opportunities to students across disciplines will be important because quantum technology has the opportunity to disrupt a wide range of fields.
“It’s a growing industry that will produce new sensors, imaging, communication, computing technologies, and more,” said Zwickl. “A lot of the technologies are in a research and development phase, but as they start to move toward commercialization and mass production, you will have end-users who are trying to figure out how to apply the technology. They will need technical people on their end that are fluent enough with the ideas that they can make use of it.”
Zwickl’s participation in the project was supported in part by funding RIT received from the NSF’s Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program. As a co-PI and lead on the education and workforce development for the proposal, he said he is hoping to apply many of the lessons learned from the study to RIT’s curriculum. He is in the process of developing two new introductory RIT courses in quantum information and science as well as an interdisciplinary minor in the field.

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Materials provided by Rochester Institute of Technology. Original written by Luke Auburn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

The functional genomics field, which looks at the activities of the genome and levels of gene expression rather than particular gene mutations, generally relies on aggregating information from many samples for its statistical power. This means that broadly sharing raw data is vital; however, sharing these data currently is challenging because of the privacy concerns of individuals within those datasets, leading to these data being largely inaccessible behind firewalls.
In a study publishing November 12 in the journal Cell, a team of investigators demonstrates that it’s possible to de-identify those data to ensure patient privacy. They also demonstrate how these raw data could be linked back to specific individuals through their gene variants by something as simple as an abandoned coffee cup if these sanitation measures are not put in place.
“The purpose of this study is to come up with practical ways to broadly share the raw data without creating undue privacy concerns,” says senior author Mark Gerstein, a professor of bioinformatics at Yale University.
Functional genomics research is frequently tied to a specific disease. For example, an investigation into a particular psychiatric condition might look at the expression of certain genes in a type of neuron. And, by nature of having their genetic material included in such a study, an individual’s medical status with regard to that condition could inadvertently be revealed.
This can happen through what’s known as a quasi-identifier. The way a quasi-identifier works is that if someone has enough individual data points about you, even if those data on their own are not sensitive or unique, they can be combined to create an identifier that is unique to you. In a non-genetic setting, this means if someone has your zip code, birthday, the model of car you drive, and other similar data that might not be considered private or sensitive on their own, they might eventually be able to combine them and create a unique profile that would link you to other data that you wouldn’t want public — data like financial records that were collected when you applied for a car loan. The same thing could happen if someone were able to obtain some of your genetic variants and link those variants to the presence of your genetic material in a study on a particular disease. This could in turn reveal a diagnosis, such as HIV status or an inherited cancer predisposition, that you would prefer to keep private.
In their study, the researchers constructed a “linkage attack” scenario to demonstrate how someone could make these kinds of connections from functional genomics studies’ data by using DNA obtained from a discarded coffee cup. After adding samples from two consenting participants to a functional genomics database, the researchers gathered used coffee cups from the same individuals. They sequenced genetic material left on the cups and were able to successfully match that material to the samples in the database and infer sensitive health information about the participants. The researchers were also able to use DNA information “stolen” from a genotyping database to match the identities of 421 people with phenotypic information found in a test functional-genomics dataset that the researchers constructed for 436 people.
However, the researchers also identified steps that can be taken to thwart these kinds of linkage attacks and safeguard participants’ health information when functional genomics datasets are shared. “Functional genomics is special because variants are usually not needed for data processing,” says first author Gamze Gürsoy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Gerstein lab. “Because of this, we can sanitize the variants to prevent data being linked back to the private information connected to the phenotypes included in these studies, while still retaining the utility of the data.”
To achieve this balance between privacy and data usefulness, the researchers propose a file-format manipulation that will allow raw functional genomics data to be shared while largely reducing sensitive information leakage by generalizing information about phenotypic variants. The file format is based on a widely used standard file-format system, is compatible with a range of software and pipelines, and when tested, showed little loss of utility. The researchers have also developed a framework with which other researchers can tune the level of privacy and utility balance they want to achieve with the file format based on the policies and consents of the donors.
“As more data are released for these kinds of functional genomics studies, concerns about security and privacy shouldn’t be lost,” Gerstein says. “At the dawn of the Internet, people didn’t realize how important their online activities would become. Now that type of digital privacy has become so important to us. If we move into an era where getting your genome sequenced becomes routine, we don’t want these worries about health privacy to become dominating.”
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the AL Williams Professorship fund, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Donor-Advised Fund.

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Scientists have pointed out how to create a time crystal in an intriguing class of materials, the high-temperature superconductors. They propose to drive these superconducting materials into a time crystalline state by inducing Higgs excitations via light.
When you cool down liquid water, it crystallizes into ice. Consider a bucket filled with water, for example. When the water is liquid, the water molecules can be anywhere inside the bucket. In this sense, every point inside the bucket is equivalent. Once the water freezes, however, the water molecules occupy well-defined positions in space. Thus, not every point inside the bucket is equivalent anymore. Physicists refer to this phenomenon as spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here the translation symmetry in space is broken by the formation of the crystal.
Is it possible for crystals to form in time instead of space? While it appears like an outlandish notion, it turns out that a time crystal may emerge when a physical system of many interacting particles is periodically driven. The defining feature of a time crystal is that a macroscopic observable, such as the electric current in a solid, oscillates at a frequency that is smaller than the driving frequency.
So far, time crystals have been realized in artificial model systems. But now, what about real systems? A piece of a high-temperature superconductor is such a real system — you can buy it online. It is not much to look at, with its brownish, rusty color. Yet its frictionless electron flow at temperatures up to 100 K ( 173 °C) constitutes one of the most spectacular phenomena of material science.
“We propose to turn a high-temperature superconductor into a time crystal by shining a laser on it,” explains first author Guido Homann from the Department of Physics at Universität Hamburg. The frequency of the laser needs to be tuned to the sum resonance of two fundamental excitations of the material. One of these excitations is the elusive Higgs mode, which is conceptually related to the Higgs boson in particle physics. The other excitation is the plasma mode, corresponding to an oscillatory motion of electron pairs, which are responsible for superconductivity.
Co-author Dr. Jayson Cosme from Universität Hamburg, now University of the Philippines, adds that “the creation of a time crystal in a high-temperature superconductor is an important step because it establishes this genuine dynamical phase of matter in the domain of solid-state physics.” Controlling solids by light is not only fascinating from a scientific perspective but also technologically relevant, as emphasized by group leader Prof. Dr. Ludwig Mathey. “The ultimate goal of our research is to design quantum materials on demand.” With their novel proposal, this fascinating endeavor is now advanced towards dynamical states of matter, rather than the usual static states of matter, by laying out a strategy to design time crystals instead of regular crystals, which opens up a new and surprising direction of material design.

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The development of functional nanomaterials has been a major landmark in the history of materials science. Nanoparticles with diameters ranging from 5 to 500 nm have unprecedented properties, such as high catalytic activity, compared to their bulk material counterparts. Moreover, as particles become smaller, exotic quantum phenomena become more prominent. This has enabled scientists to produce materials and devices with characteristics that had been only dreamed of, especially in the fields of electronics, catalysis, and optics.
But what if we go smaller? Sub-nanoparticles (SNPs) with particle sizes of around 1 nm are now considered a new class of materials with distinct properties due to the predominance of quantum effects. The untapped potential of SNPs caught the attention of scientists from Tokyo Tech, who are currently undertaking the challenges arising in this mostly unexplored field. In a recent study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of scientists from the Laboratory of Chemistry and Life Sciences, led by Dr Takamasa Tsukamoto, demonstrated a novel molecular screening approach to find promising SNPs.
As one would expect, the synthesis of SNPs is plagued by technical difficulties, even more so for those containing multiple elements. Dr Tsukamoto explains: “Even SNPs containing just two different elements have barely been investigated because producing a system of subnanometer scale requires fine control of the composition ratio and particle size with atomic precision.” However, this team of scientists had already developed a novel method by which SNPs could be made from different metal salts with extreme control over the total number of atoms and the proportion of each element.
Their approach relies on dendrimers, a type of symmetric molecule that branches radially outwards like trees sprouting form a common center. Dendrimers serve as a template on which metal salts can be accurately accumulated at the base of the desired branches. Subsequently, through chemical reduction and oxidation, SNPs are precisely synthesized on the dendrimer scaffold. The scientists used this method in their most recent study to produce SNPs with various proportions of indium and tin oxides and then explored their physicochemical properties.
One peculiar finding was that unusual electronic states and oxygen content occurred at an indium-to-tin ratio of 3:4. These results were unprecedented even in studies of nanoparticles with controlled size and composition, and the scientists ascribed them to physical phenomena exclusive to the sub-nanometer scale. Moreover, they found that the optical properties of SNPs with this elemental proportion were different not only from those of SNPs with other ratios, but also of nanoparticles with the same ratio. The SNPs with this ratio were yellow instead of white and exhibited green photoluminescence under ultraviolet irradiation.
Exploring material properties at the sub-nanometer scale will most likely lead to their practical application in next-generation electronics and catalysts. This study, however, is just the beginning in the field of sub-nanometer materials, as Dr Tsukamoto concludes: “Our study marks the first-ever discovery of unique functions in SNPs and their underlying principles through a sequential screening search. We believe our findings will serve as the initial step toward the development of as-yet-unknown quantum sized materials.” The sub-nanometric world awaits!

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