Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial muscles can lift 1000 times their own weight.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have recently developed a flexible and imperceptible magnetic skin that adds permanent magnetic properties to all surfaces to which it is applied. This artificial skin, presented in a paper published in Wiley’s Advanced Materials Technologies journal, could have numerous interesting applications. For instance, it could enable the development of more effective tools to aid people with disabilities, help biomedical professionals to monitor their patients’ vital signs, and pave the way for new consumer tech.

“Artificial skins are all about extending our senses or abilities,” Adbullah Almansouri, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “A great challenge in their development, however, is that they should be imperceptible and comfortable to wear. This is very difficult to achieve reliably and durably, if we need stretchable electronics, batteries, substrates, antennas, sensors, wires, etc. We decided to remove all these delicate components from the skin itself and place them in a comfortable nearby location (i.e., inside of eye glasses or hidden in a fabric).”

The artificial skin, developed under the supervision of Prof. Jürgen Kosel, is magnetic, thin and highly flexible. When it is worn by a human user, it can be easily tracked by a nearby magnetic sensor. For instance, if a user wears it on his eyelid, it allows for his eye movements to be tracked; if worn on fingers, it can help to monitor a person’s physiological responses or even to control switches without touching them.

Professor Jae Eun Jang’s team in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering has developed electronic skin technology that can detect “prick” and “hot” pain sensations like humans. This research result has applications in the development of humanoid robots and prosthetic hands in the future.

Scientists are continuously performing research to imitate tactile, olfactory and palate senses, and tactile sensing is expected to be the next mimetic technology for various applications. Currently, most tactile sensor research is focused on physical mimetic technologies that measure the pressure used for a robot to grab an object, but psychosensory tactile research on mimicking human tactile sensory responses like those caused by soft, smooth or rough surfaces has a long way to go.

Professor Jae Eun Jang’s team has developed a tactile sensor that can feel pain and temperature like humans through a joint project with Professor Cheil Moon’s team in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, Professor Ji-woong Choi’s team in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, and Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team in the Department of Robotics Engineering. Its key strengths are that it has simplified the sensor structure and can measure pressure and temperature at the same time. Furthermore, it can be applied on various tactile systems regardless of the measurement principle of the sensor.

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A DETERMINED TEENAGER with bionic arms champions diversity by showing the world it’s ‘cool to be different.’ Tilly Lockey, from County Durham, UK had both her arms amputated at 15 months old after contracting Group B meningococcal septicaemia. The 13-year-old was the first teenager in Britain to receive a pair of the 3D-printed bionic arms in 2016. Constantly in demand for her modelling work, Tilly extensively travels the world raising awareness for meningitis — the condition which almost took her life as a baby. Follow her story here:
https://www.instagram.com/tilly.lockey/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5hrVolbwN8XsWbNTRpoIMA

Continue reading “The Teen With The Bionic Arms | SHAKE MY BEAUTY” »

Wearing a flower brooch that blooms before your eyes sounds like magic. KAIST researchers have made it real with robotic muscles.

Researchers have developed an ultrathin, artificial muscle for soft robotics. The advancement, recently reported in the journal Science Robotics, was demonstrated with a robotic blooming flower brooch, dancing robotic butterflies and fluttering tree leaves on a kinetic art piece.

The robotic equivalent of a muscle that can move is called an actuator. The actuator expands, contracts or rotates like muscle fibers using a stimulus such as electricity. Engineers around the world are striving to develop more dynamic actuators that respond quickly, can bend without breaking, and are very durable. Soft, robotic muscles could have a wide variety of applications, from wearable electronics to advanced prosthetics.

When British futurist James Lovelock looks to the future, he doesn’t see humans ruling the Earth.

“Our supremacy as the prime understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to end,” he wrote in his new book “Novacene,” according to NBC News. “The understanders of the future will not be humans but what I choose to call ‘cyborgs’ that will have designed and built themselves.”

In normal vision, light falls on the retinas inside the eyes, and is immediately transduced into electrochemical signals before being uploaded to the brain through the optic nerves. So you do not see light itself, but the brain’s interpretation of electrochemical signals in the visual parts of the brain. It follows that, if your eyes do not work, but your brain is stimulated just so, your visual neurons will activate (and you will be able to see) just the same as if your eyes were in perfect condition.

Sounds easy, but can we do that? Building on decades of research in visual neuroscience, my lab, in collaboration with Susana Martinez-Conde’s, has now conducted some of the studies that validate this idea, completing some of the most important preliminary steps towards a new kind of visual prosthetic.

Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, has just posted a blog that highlights our approach. He took notice of our work when we first presented it at this year’s meeting for the Principal Investigators of the BRAIN Initiative—the NIH led government funding initiative meant to spur research along on topics like brain implants. The BRAIN Initiative funds several agencies including the NIH, including the National Science Foundation, who kindly funded the grant driving our research thus far.

This artificial skin could give robots a sense of touch.

We learn from our personal interaction with the world, and our memories of those experiences help guide our behaviors. Experience and memory are inexorably linked, or at least they seemed to be before a recent report on the formation of completely artificial memories. Using laboratory animals, investigators reverse engineered a specific natural memory by mapped the brain circuits underlying its formation. They then “trained” another animal by stimulating brain cells in the pattern of the natural memory. Doing so created an artificial memory that was retained and recalled in a manner indistinguishable from a natural one.

Memories are essential to the sense of identity that emerges from the narrative of personal experience. This study is remarkable because it demonstrates that by manipulating specific circuits in the brain, memories can be separated from that narrative and formed in the complete absence of real experience. The work shows that brain circuits that normally respond to specific experiences can be artificially stimulated and linked together in an artificial memory. That memory can be elicited by the appropriate sensory cues in the real environment. The research provides some fundamental understanding of how memories are formed in the brain and is part of a burgeoning science of memory manipulation that includes the transfer, prosthetic enhancement and erasure of memory. These efforts could have a tremendous impact on a wide range of individuals, from those struggling with memory impairments to those enduring traumatic memories, and they also have broad social and ethical implications.

In the recent study, the natural memory was formed by training mice to associate a specific odor (cherry blossoms) with a foot shock, which they learned to avoid by passing down a rectangular test chamber to another end that was infused with a different odor (caraway). The caraway scent came from a chemical called carvone, while the cherry blossom scent came from another chemical, acetophenone. The researchers found that acetophenone activates a specific type of receptor on a discrete type of olfactory sensory nerve cell.