Lifeboat Foundation

From action heroes to villainous assassins, biohybrid robots made of both living and artificial materials have been at the center of many sci-fi fantasies, inspiring today’s robotic innovations. It’s still a long way until human-like robots walk among us in our daily lives, but scientists from Japan are bringing us one step closer by crafting living human skin on robots. The method developed, presented June 9 in the journal Matter, not only gave a robotic finger skin-like texture, but also water-repellent and self-healing functions.

“The finger looks slightly ‘sweaty’ straight out of the culture medium,” says first author Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. “Since the finger is driven by an electric motor, it is also interesting to hear the clicking sounds of the motor in harmony with a finger that looks just like a real one.”

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A recent experiment detailed in the journal Nature is challenging our picture of how electrons behave in quantum materials. Using stacked layers of a material called tungsten ditelluride, researchers have observed electrons in two-dimensions behaving as if they were in a single dimension—and in the process have created what the researchers assert is a new electronic state of matter.

“This is really a whole new horizon,” said Sanfeng Wu, assistant professor of physics at Princeton University and the senior author of the paper. “We were able to create a new electronic phase with this experiment—basically, a new type of metallic state.”

Our current understanding of the behavior of interacting electrons in metals can be described by a theory that works well with two-and three-dimensional systems, but breaks down when describing the interaction of electrons in a single dimension.

Did life begin on Earth, or did it come from space? Amino acids, peptides and proteins may have an off-world origin giving credence to panspermia.

Twenty amino acids discovered in the sample materials returned provide evidence to support the evolving panspermia hypothesis.

Circa 2017

Imagine living in a cocoon-like house without corners.

A team of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with one colleague from MIT and another from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a biomimetic elastomeric robot skin that has tactile sensing abilities. Their work has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Roboticists continue to work on improving robot abilities and to make them more human-like. In this new effort, the researchers gave a robot arm the ability to detect such sensations as a pat, tickling, wind, or something stroking its surface. They accomplished this by partially imitating human skin.

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Elon Musk accused Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his right to information about fake accounts on the platform, calling it in a letter to the company on Monday a “clear material breach” of the terms of their merger agreement.

“Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” the letter, signed by Skadden Arps attorney Mike Ringler, says.

Twitter shares were down 5% on Monday morning.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a stretchable and waterproof €˜fabric €™ that turns energy generated from body movements into electrical energy.

A crucial component in the fabric is a polymer that, when pressed or squeezed, converts mechanical stress into electrical energy. It is also made with stretchable spandex as a base layer and integrated with a rubber-like material to keep it strong, flexible, and waterproof.

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Nanosheets are finely structured two-dimensional materials and have great potential for innovation. They are fixed on top of each other in layered crystals, and must first be separated from each other so that they can be used, for example, to filter gas mixtures or for efficient gas barriers. A research team at the University of Bayreuth has now developed a gentle, environmentally-friendly process for this difficult process of delamination that can even be used on an industrial scale. This is the first time that a crystal from the technologically attractive group of zeolites has been made usable for a broad field of potential applications.

The delamination process developed in Bayreuth under the direction of Prof. Dr. Josef Breu is characterized by the fact that the structures of the nanosheets isolated from each other remain undamaged. It also has the advantage that it can be used at normal room temperature. The researchers present their results in detail in Science Advances.

The two-dimensional nanosheets, which lie on top of each other in layered crystals, are held together by electrostatic forces. In order for them to be used for technological applications, the electrostatic forces must be overcome, and the nanosheets detached from each other. A method particularly suitable for this is osmotic swelling, in which the nanosheets are forced apart by water and the molecules and ions dissolved in it. So far, however, it has only been possible to apply it to a few types of crystals, including some clay minerals, titanates, and niobates. For the group of zeolites, however, whose nanosheets are highly interesting for the production of functional membranes due to their silicate-containing fine structures, the mechanism of osmotic swelling has not yet been applicable.

MIT researchers can now control the physical and mechanical properties of lab-grown plant materials. This could enable an environmentally friendly process to produce wood-like structures with specific properties, like stiffness or density, tailored to certain applications.