Coordinated behaviors like swarming—from ant colonies to schools of fish—are found everywhere in nature. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have given a nod to nature with a next-generation robot system that’s capable of movement, exploration, transport and cooperation.
A study in Science Advances describing the new soft robotic system was co-led by L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Physics, and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in SEAS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with Professor Ho-Young Kim at Seoul National University. Their work paves new directions for future, low-power swarm robotics.
The new robots, called link-bots, are comprised of centimeter-scale, 3D-printed particles strung into V-shaped chains via notched links and are capable of coordinated, life-like movements without any embedded power or control systems. Each particle’s legs are tilted to allow the bot to self-propel when placed on a uniformly vibrating surface.
Our brain is adept at synchronizing with rhythmic sounds, whether it’s the beat of a song or the steady patter of rain. This ability helps us recognize and process sounds more effectively.
A research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main has shown that stimulation with weak electrical currents, known as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), can influence this ability. The new study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.
The study builds on previous work showing that tACS can either enhance or suppress brain rhythms depending on how it’s timed with incoming sound. In order to investigate the interaction between electrical stimulation and brain rhythms, 50 participants took part in three experiments where they listened to noisy sounds and were asked to identify short, barely perceptible pauses. The researchers then transmitted electrical rhythms to the participants’ brains via electrodes placed on their scalps several times to see how this influenced their brain activity.
Deep in the swamps of the American Southeast stands a quiet giant: the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum). These majestic trees, with their knobby “knees” and towering trunks, are more than just swamp dwellers—they’re some of the oldest living organisms in Eastern North America. Some have been around for more than 2,500 years, quietly thriving in nutrient-poor, flooded forests where most other trees would wither.
But life isn’t easy for these ancient trees. They’re under siege from a variety of threats: rising seas, insect infestations, wildfires and increasingly erratic weather patterns. Unlike most animals, trees generally don’t die of old age—they succumb to the stresses around them.
A study by Florida Atlantic University, in collaboration with Lynn University, the University of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the Georgia Museum of Natural History, reveals how dramatic shifts in climate can have long-lasting effects on even the toughest, most iconic trees—and offers a glimpse into the powerful forces that shape our natural world.
A novel suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.
We know dinosaurs were around 99 million years ago, but now new research has identified a kind of parasitic wasp that was flying around back then (and which has a strange way of catching its prey).
The species now called Sirenobethylus charybdis had a bizarre mechanism that worked like a Venus flytrap which caught the prey, and then the wasps impregnated them with their eggs, researchers noted in the journal BMC Biology.
As research continues, the term “bird brain” no longer carries a negative connotation. Avian researcher John Marzluff showcases a few amazing, problem solving (and sometimes vindictive) feats accomplished by crows in order to break down common misconceptions about avian intelligence.
John Marzluff, Ph.D., is the James W. Ridgeway Professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington. His research has been the focus of articles in the New York Times, National Geographic, Audubon, Boys Life, The Seattle Times, and National Wildlife. PBS’s NATURE featured his raven research in its production, “Ravens,” and his crow research in the film documentary, “A Murder of Crows”. His graduate and initial post-doctoral research focused on the social behavior and ecology of jays and ravens. He was especially interested in communication, social organization, and foraging behavior. His current research brings this behavioral approach to pressing conservation issues including raptor management, management of pest species, and assessment of nest predation.
His book, In the Company of Crows and Ravens (with Tony Angell, 2005 Yale U. Press) blends biology, conservation, and anthropology to suggest that human and crow cultures have co-evolved. This book won the 2006 Washington State Book Award for general nonfiction. With his wife, Colleen, he has published Dog Days, Raven Nights (2011 Yale University Press), which combines reflection with biology and the recreational pursuit of dog sledding to show how a life in science blooms. Gifts of the Crow (2012 Free Press) applies a neurobiological perspective to understand the amazing feats of corvids. He is a member of the board of editors for Acta Ornithologica, Landscape Ecology and Ecological Applications. Currently leader of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Recovery Team for the critically endangered Mariana Crow, he is also a Fellow of the American Ornithologist’s Union.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Our earliest models of reality were expressed as static structures and geometry, until mathematicians of the 16th century came up with differential algebra, a framework which allowed us to capture aspects of the world as a dynamical system. The 20th century introduced the concept of computation, and we began to model the world through state transitions. Stephen Wolfram suggests that we may be about to enter a new paradigm: multicomputation. At the core of multicomputation is the non-deterministic Turing machine, one of the more arcane ideas of 20th century computer science. Unlike a deterministic Turing machine, it does not just transition from one state to the next, but to all possible states simultaneously, resulting in structures that emerge over the branching and merging of causal paths.
Stephen Wolfram studies the resulting multiway systems as a model for foundational physics. Multiway systems can also be used as an abstraction to understand biological and social processes, economic dynamics, and model-building itself.
In this conversation, we want to explore whether mental processes can be understood as multiway systems, and what the multicomputational perspective might imply for memory, perception, decision making and consciousness.
About the Guest: Stephen Wolfram is one of the most interesting and least boring thinkers of our time, well known for his unique contributions to computer science, theoretical physics and the philosophy of computation. Among other things, Stephen is the creator of the Wolfram Language (also known as Mathematica), the knowledge engine Wolfram|Alpha, the author of the books A New Kind of Science and A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research.
We anticipate that this will be an intellectually fascinating discussion; please consider reading some of the following articles ahead of time:
To Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we humans are “the paragon of animals.” But recent advances in genetics are suggesting that humans are far from being evolution’s greatest achievement.
For example, humans have an exceptionally high proportion of fertilized eggs that have the wrong number of chromosomes and one of the highest rates of harmful genetic mutation.
In my new book, “The Evolution of Imperfection,” I suggest that two features of our biology explain why our genetics are in such a poor state. First, we evolved a lot of our human features when our populations were small, and second, we feed our young across a placenta.
A new framework for studying chiral materials puts the emphasis on electron chirality rather than on the asymmetry of the atomic structure.
Chirality is a fundamental feature of nature, manifesting across scales—from elementary particles and molecules to biological organisms and galaxy formation. An object is considered chiral if it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image. In condensed-matter physics, chirality is primarily viewed as a structural asymmetry in the spatial arrangement of atoms within a crystal lattice [1]. A perhaps less familiar fact is that chirality is also a fundamental quantum property of individual electron states [2]. Now, Tatsuya Miki from Saitama University in Japan and colleagues introduce electron chirality as a framework to quantify symmetry breaking in solids, focusing on chiral and related axial materials [3]. The researchers propose a way of measuring electron chirality with photoemission spectroscopy.
