Lifeboat Foundation

In a global first, scientists have demonstrated that molecular robots are able to accomplish cargo delivery by employing a strategy of swarming, achieving a transport efficiency five times greater than that of single robots.

Swarm robotics is a new discipline, inspired by the cooperative behavior of living organisms, that focuses on the fabrication of robots and their utilization in swarms to accomplish complex tasks. A swarm is an orderly collective behavior of multiple individuals. Macro-scale swarm robots have been developed and employed for a variety of applications, such as transporting and accumulating cargo, forming shapes, and building complex structures.

A team of researchers, led by Dr. Mousumi Akter and Associate Professor Akira Kakugo from the Faculty of Science at Hokkaido University, has succeeded in developing the world’s first working micro-sized machines utilizing the advantages of swarming. The findings were published in the journal Science Robotics. The team included Assistant Professor Daisuke Inoue, Kyushu University; Professor Henry Hess, Columbia University; Professor Hiroyuki Asanuma, Nagoya University; and Professor Akinori Kuzuya, Kansai University.

DeepMind software that can predict the 3D shape of proteins is already changing biology.

Scientists believe they have found evidence of microbes that were thriving near hydrothermal vents on Earth’s surface just 300m years after the planet formed – the strongest evidence yet that life began far earlier than is widely assumed.

If confirmed, it would suggest the conditions necessary for the emergence of life are relatively basic.

A new PV module makes electricity from thermal radiation. Imagine that.

The electromagnetic spectrum is comprised of thousands upon thousands of frequencies. Sound and light are all part of the spectrum, as are the frequencies that make radio and television broadcasts possible. Today’s solar panels harvest light waves from a small part of the EM spectrum and turn them into electricity, but there are many other frequencies like thermal radiation that could someday stimulate new kinds of photovoltaic cells to generate electricity as well.

Researchers at Stanford have recently published a study in the journal Applied Physics Letters that describes a new type of cell that converts thermal radiation into electricity. When the sun goes down, living organisms and physical structures like buildings, road, and sidewalks radiate heat back into the atmosphere. We call this radiational cooling and it is those electromagnetic waves the Stanford researchers say can be put to work making electricity.

Continue reading “New Photovoltaic Cell Makes Electricity From Thermal Radiation” »

Chemical biology professor, Suyang Xu, works to crack the secrets of new states of matter.

Throughout human history, most of our efforts to store information, from knots and oracle bones to bamboo markings and the written word, boil down to two techniques: using characters or shapes to represent information. Today, huge amounts of information are stored on silicon wafers with zeros and ones, but a new material at the border of quantum chemistry and quantum physics could enable vast improvements in storage.

Continue reading “This scientist is unlocking the potential of quantum technologies. Here’s how” »

Lyons, B., Isaac, E., Choi, N.H. et al. The Simularium Viewer: an interactive online tool for sharing spatiotemporal biological models. Nat Methods (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01442-1

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Chemical engineers and materials scientists are continuously looking for the following groundbreaking material, chemical, or medication. The emergence of machine-learning technologies has accelerated the discovery process, which may typically take years. Ideally, the objective is to train a machine-learning model on a few known chemical samples and then let it build as many manufacturable molecules of the same class with predictable physical attributes as feasible. You can develop new molecules with ideal characteristics if you have all of these components and the know-how to synthesize them.

However, current approaches need large datasets for training models. Many class-specific chemical databases only contain a few example compounds, restricting their capacity to generalize and construct biological molecules that might be generated in the real world.

This issue was addressed by a team of researchers from MIT and IBM by employing a generative graph model to create new synthesizable compounds within the same training data’s chemical class. The research was presented in a research paper. They model the production of atoms and chemical bonds as a graph and create a graph grammar — a linguistic analog of systems and structures for word ordering — that provides a set of rules for constructing compounds like monomers and polymers.

Using the characteristic movement pattern of microbes to detect them on mars and the icy moons.

Microbial Motility.

The dissemination of synthetic biology into materials science is creating an evolving class of functional, engineered living materials that can grow, sense and adapt similar to biological organisms.

Nature has long served as inspiration for the design of materials with improved properties and advanced functionalities. Nonetheless, thus far, no synthetic material has been able to fully recapitulate the complexity of living materials. Living organisms are unique due to their multifunctionality and ability to grow, self-repair, sense and adapt to the environment in an autonomous and sustainable manner. The field of engineered living materials capitalizes on these features to create biological materials with programmable functionalities using engineering tools borrowed from synthetic biology. In this focus issue we feature a Perspective and an Article to highlight how synergies between synthetic biology and biomaterial sciences are providing next-generation engineered living materials with tailored functionalities.