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Waren Ruder used a mathematical model to demonstrate that bacteria can control the behavior of an inanimate device like a robot.
Credit: Virginia Tech

In a paper published July 16 in Scientific Reports, which is part of the Nature Publishing Group, a Virginia Tech scientist used a mathematical model to demonstrate that bacteria can control the behavior of an inanimate device like a robot.
"Basically we were trying to find out from the mathematical model if we could build a living microbiome on a nonliving host and control the host through the microbiome," said Ruder, an assistant professor of biological systems engineering in both the College of Agriculture and Life sciences and the College of Engineering.
"We found that robots may indeed be able to have a working brain," he said.
For future experiments, Ruder is building real-world robots that will have the ability to read bacterial gene expression levels in E. coli using miniature fluorescent microscopes. The robots will respond to bacteria he will engineer in his lab.
On a broad scale, understanding the biochemical sensing between organisms could have far reaching implications in ecology, biology, and robotics.
In agriculture, bacteria-robot model systems could enable robust studies that explore the interactions between soil bacteria and livestock. In healthcare, further understanding of bacteria's role in controlling gut physiology could lead to bacteria-based prescriptions to treat mental and physical illnesses. Ruder also envisions droids that could execute tasks such as deploying bacteria to remediate oil spills.
The findings also add to the ever-growing body of research about bacteria in the human body that are thought to regulate health and mood, and especially the theory that bacteria also affect behavior.
The study was inspired by real-world experiments where the mating behavior of fruit flies was manipulated using bacteria, as well as mice that exhibited signs of lower stress when implanted with probiotics.
Ruder's approach revealed unique decision-making behavior by a bacteria-robot system by coupling and computationally simulating widely accepted equations that describe three distinct elements: engineered gene circuits in E. coli, microfluid bioreactors, and robot movement.
The bacteria in the mathematical experiment exhibited their genetic circuitry by either turning green or red, according to what they ate. In the mathematical model, the theoretical robot was equipped with sensors and a miniature microscope to measure the color of bacteria telling it where and how fast to go depending upon the pigment and intensity of color.
The model also revealed higher order functions in a surprising way. In one instance, as the bacteria were directing the robot toward more food, the robot paused before quickly making its final approach -- a classic predatory behavior of higher order animals that stalk prey.
Ruder's modeling study also demonstrates that these sorts of biosynthetic experiments could be done in the future with a minimal amount of funds, opening up the field to a much larger pool of researchers.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research funded the mathematical modeling of gene circuitry in E. coli, and the Virginia Tech Student Engineers' Council has provided funding to move these models and resulting mobile robots into the classroom as teaching tools.
Ruder conducted his research in collaboration with biomedical engineering doctoral student Keith Heyde, who studies phyto-engineering for biofuel synthesis.
"We hope to help democratize the field of synthetic biology for students and researchers all over the world with this model," said Ruder. "In the future, rudimentary robots and E. coli that are already commonly used separately in classrooms could be linked with this model to teach students from elementary school through Ph.D.-level about bacterial relationships with other organisms."
Ruder spoke about his development in a recent video.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Virginia Tech. The original item was written by Amy Loeffler. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Marian Wilson, an assistant professor in the College of Nursing, tracked 43 people with chronic non-cancer pain as they went through an eight-week course of online tools to manage psychological, social and health issues associated with chronic pain. Compared to a similar-sized control group, the participants reported that they adopted more practices to change negative thinking patterns and use relaxation techniques to help control pain.
"With negative emotions, you often have that physical response of tension," said Wilson. "So we really want people with pain to learn they have control and mastery over some of those physical symptoms. Meditation and relaxation can help with that."
Such techniques are hard for patients to get in traditional care settings but can go a long way to make them more confident about managing their pain, she said. Several studies have found that such confidence, called "self-efficacy," is linked to a higher quality of life, the ability to return to work and higher levels of activity, she said.
"Maybe that pain is never going to go away but you can divert your attention from it," said Wilson. "You can focus on more positive things and you can absolutely get that thought on a back burner rather than fixating on it."
She found that four out of five online program participants made progress toward goals to reduce or eliminate pain or other unspecified medications, as opposed to roughly half the control group.
"Unique to our study was the discovery that more appropriate use of opioid medicines could be an unintended consequence of participation," Wilson and her colleagues write in the journal Pain Management Nursing.
The authors note that 60 percent of the more than 15,000 opioid-overdose deaths each year in the United States are from medications obtained through legitimate prescriptions. Opioids also can become less effective over time while actually increasing a user's perception of pain.
"For many patients, more and more evidence is coming out that if we can get them off the opiates, or reduce their use and help them become more active, they'll actually feel better," Wilson said. "Plus they won't be at risk for death from opioid overdose, which they're at risk for now because you often have to keep increasing the opioid dose to get the same pain relief."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Washington State University. The original item was written by Eric Sorensen. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Originally used by 19th-century photographers to create the illusion of depth in their pictures, stereomicroscopy since has evolved to become a staple of the film and videogame industries. Only recently has it become more prevalent in medicine, one factor that makes these findings particularly important.
Using 3D-pattern stereomicroscopy with mouse models, School of Medicine researchers reported that they able to develop entire topographical views of the inside of the intestinal system, rather than two-dimensional visuals of individual sections or tissue or cell samples. This more expansive and detailed picture allowed them to identify distinct patterns related both to health and disease within those structures -- patterns that they could not see using traditional approaches.
As part of the study, the researchers developed a catalogue of specific profiles for abnormalities in those with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Not only do these profiles provide a depth of information not attainable by other means, but they also can accelerate the process of determining the condition or illness that is plaguing the patient.
"This is really exciting for us because for the first time, we have a technique that provides a better way to examine these lesions," said senior author Fabio Cominelli, MD, chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Liver Disease and the Hermann Menges, Jr. Chair in Internal Medicine, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. "The traditional, two-dimensional histology views do not tell us what is going on in the entire tissue. The precision of this 3D technology will allow us to visualize the location of lesions along the entire intestinal tract to learn the exact cause of the inflammation."
Cominelli, also director of the Digestive Health Institute at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, has assembled a team of investigators to focus research on inflammatory diseases of the digestive tract, particularly Crohn's disease, inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis. One of those team members, Alexander Rodriguez-Palacios, DVM, PhD, made the breakthrough possible by identifying a novel way to use a stereomicroscope, a device often used in microsurgery. Typically physicians have been limited to endoscopy or histology in studying these diseases; recognizing their shortcomings, the team sought other means of gaining better understanding of the nature of different diseases. The more they knew about different conditions, the thinking went, the more effective they could be in helping patients.
""Currently, we have treatments that can make the patient feel better, but we are not able to achieve a sustained positive response in patients," Cominelli said. "The goal for developing new therapies now is to have lesions disappear, or possibly prevent lesions from appearing in the first place."
Cominelli, Rodriguez-Palacios, and their colleagues set out to test the efficacy of this alternative approach by studying the inflammatory-diseased intestinal tracts of more than 800 mice from 16 strains of the animals. During the course of their study, the scientists saw distinct patterns of lesions develop in the different kinds of mice. These different patterns point to genetic origins for the various inflammatory intestinal diseases.
"What we saw were unique structural characteristics in inflamed tissue and in normal tissue," Rodriguez-Palacios said. "Before, a lesion was just a lesion. We found that these lesions had a particular configuration. Now we can tell the different kinds of lesions and patterns of lesions that make a difference in the disease. Nobody has ever done that before."
Through 3D microscopy, investigators found two mouse models that most resemble inflammatory bowel disease in humans. The SAMP mouse has cobblestone lesions typical of human Crohn's disease, and the TNF mouse has enlarged and distorted intestinal villa typical of inflammatory bowel disease. (Villa are finger-like projections protruding from the intestinal wall to aid in nutrient absorption.)
By studying both mouse models using 3D stereoscopy, investigators hope to make informed predictions about how these inflammatory bowel diseases develop and progress in humans. They also plan to observe the natural history of the illness, from early onset through end stages. They also aim to uncover what causes these intestinal diseases, what genes are expressed, underexpressed or overexpressed, and what intricacies are involved in the microbe environment of the gut.
"We will use the 3D stereoscopy to study these mouse models extensively to understand what causes the disease in mice," Cominelli said, "[and then] correlate that understanding to human patients and then develop new therapies."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Case Western Reserve University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

However, while electrical and electronic equipment have never been more efficient, economical or in demand, consumers' desire to own the best and the latest is contributing to an environmental issue of increasing seriousness and concern.
"E-waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams in developing, emerging and developed regions and it covers all electrical and electronic equipment and parts discarded by consumers," says Dr Sunil Herat, Associate Editor of the journal Waste Management & Research and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
"According to figures published in the Global E-waste Monitor 2014 and compiled by the United Nations University, last year an estimated 41.8 million metric tonnes of e-waste was discarded throughout the world.
"This comprised mostly end-of-life kitchen, laundry and bathroom equipment such as microwave ovens, washing machines and dishwashers, although mobile phones, computers and printers also featured.
"That figure is estimated to rise by almost 20 per cent to 50 million metric tonnes in 2018, which is why waste management practitioners are seeking new technologies and approaches to deal with e-waste."
Dr Herat will discuss e-waste when he addresses the Sixth Regional 3R Forum in Asia and the Pacific, organised by the United Nations Centre for Regional Development and to be held in the Maldives from August 16-19.
He says that while the emphasis so far has been on end-of-life IT equipment such as computers and mobile phones, a focus on a broader spectrum of household e-waste is required if its growth is to be slowed.
A recent study commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand Recycling Platform and conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that Australia generates one of the highest per capita volumes of e-waste in the world. Of 19.71kg per person per year, almost 30 per cent comes from digital and audio-visual items.
The study also showed that growing incorporation of smart technology into common household items is regarded as the main cause of increases in the global e-waste streams from homes.
"This gives rise to important issues such as how we prepare for the growth in household e-wastes; whether existing take-back programs -- which currently exist in only a few countries -- are sufficient to handle new demands; and whether regulations are sufficient to ensure small household e-waste items are not mixed with residual waste contents in traditional household bins," says Dr Herat.
"Furthermore, the sheer range of household electrical and electronics items these days brings with it the use of rare earths and precious metals within circuits and chips, all of which can increase subsequent waste management challenges when items become obsolete and are discarded."
Dr Herat says there are significant benefits from expanding the coverage of e-waste products beyond the traditional computers, mobile phones and televisions. These include more efficient recycling and material recovery processes and the encouraging of private sector investment in recycling and recovery technologies.
"Crucially, e-waste policies must have a consumer focus, particularly regarding small e-waste items," he says.
"In Finland, for example, the government encourages recycling of small household e-waste items by treating them differently from large items. In Japan, consumers do not have to pay the recycling fee for small household items. In the Netherlands, a "pay-as-you-throw" system has seen a significant reduction in small household e-waste items occurring in household waste streams.
"Also, a unit-based recycling target is preferable to a weight-based target because the latter may result in greater incentive to recycle only large household items."
However, the biggest challenge facing e-waste policy makers is in developing countries.
"Most developing countries do not practise waste segregation at the source," says Dr Herat.
"This means that municipal solid waste can contain up to 3 per cent hazardous wastes, including e-waste. This can increase concentrations of heavy metals in leachate and contribute to environmental pollution.
"Governments can also struggle to collect funds from producers or imports if goods are smuggled in, or if small, shop-assembled products enjoy a large share of the market.
"A further challenge arises from systems that create incentives for collectors and recyclers to seek extra subsidies by exaggerating the amount of e-waste they collect. Competition between the formal and informal recycling sector is another impediment."
Despite such issues, Dr Herat says change is essential and inevitable.
"What is certain is that the e-waste management landscape is about to transform its traditional focus on computers and mobile phones to a broader range of more sophisticated household e-waste items," he says.
"With the exception of a few countries, most of us are about to face the reality of this latest challenge."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Griffith University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The review into the polices of 34 countries, carried out by Dr Mary Redmayne, from the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, found varying degrees of advice about children's exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF).
RF-EMFs are emitted from technology including WiFi, tablets and mobile phones. Associated with an increased risk of some brain tumours in heavy and long-term phone users, RF-EMFs have also been linked to biological changes including increased production of free radicals in the body. Dr Redmayne said that whilst this, and other observed effects, were not in themselves 'health effects' if the body did not have the chance to repair the related damage and restore balance it could eventually lead to a variety of health effects.
"Where RF-EMF is responsible for this imbalance, then the chance to repair is most likely to come with periods of minimal RF-EMF exposure such as at night time, when WiFi can be turned off and devices can be put in flight mode or switched off. Such steps to minimise children's exposure are recommended in many countries including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, and Switzerland" she said.
Dr Redmayne said there was continuing concern among researchers and the public about the possible detrimental effects for young people from their exposure to RF-EMFs.
"In recent years there has been an amazingly rapid uptake in the use of mobile phones and other wireless devices. Increasingly younger children are using these devices, and we know they are more vulnerable to environmental harm than adults," she said.
"However safety regulations and guidelines in most parts of the world only consider short-term heat and shock effects, and have not traditionally considered chronic or very low exposure," Dr Redmayne said.
The review found a wide variety of different protocols and guidelines in the 34 countries. Australia's legislation is based on scientific research, but limited to acute heating effects, such as heat-damage, shocks and burns. It does not consider effects from long-term or low exposures because the science for how these occur is not understood. However, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency does suggest reducing children's exposure.
Russia and China's regulations went further by advising that exposures are low enough so that they do not prompt the body's processes to take protective action, both in the short and long term. Exposure levels in Russia and China were based on scientific research done in each respective country.
Some countries set lower, but manageable maximum exposure levels, as a precautionary approach.
The review also found some official bodies, including the European Parliament and the European Environment Agency, now recommend those aged under 18 to increase the distance of the head and body from devices including using a headset or speaker phone, use a wired landline, and sending text messages rather than calling. Several countries advised schools and pre-schools to prefer wired over WiFi/WLAN (such as Austria, France, Israel, Germany, Russia) and to offer education in schools on RF-EMF exposure issues (Russia, Tunisia, Turkey).
Dr Redmayne said the wide range of policy approaches can be confusing to parents and educational facilities wanting to know what is the best thing to do for their children.
"The message on RF-EMFs is really in the same category as health advice around diet and exercise: it's important to be aware and take steps to minimise exposure to radiofrequencies as part of daily life."
Dr Redmayne recommended using and storing a device at least 20cm away from the body, and when using devices offline then to put them in flight mode, turn WiFi off at night, and to avoid keeping devices in the bedroom.
The review was published in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Monash University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

The research paper "You Can Lead a Horse to Water But You Cannot Make Him Learn: Smartphone Use in Higher Education" appeared in a recent edition of the British Journal of Educational Technology. The research reveals the self-rated impact of smartphones among the users.
"Smartphone technology is penetrating world markets and becoming abundant in most college settings," said Philip Kortum, assistant professor of psychology at Rice and the study's co-author. "We were interested to see how students with no prior experience using smartphones thought they impacted their education."
The research revealed that while users initially believed the mobile devices would improve their ability to perform well with homework and tests and ultimately get better grades, the opposite was reported at the end of the study.
The longitudinal study from 2010 to 2011 focused on 24 first-time smartphone users at a major research university in Texas. Prior to the study, the participants were given no training on smartphone use and were asked to answer several questions about how they thought a smartphone would impact their school-related tasks. The students then received iPhones, and their phone use was monitored during the following year. At the end of the study, the students answered the same questions.
When participants were asked to rate their feelings on the following statements specifically related to learning outcomes, such as homework, test-taking and grades, they provided the following answers (one represents "strongly disagree" and five represents "strongly agree"):

• My iPhone will help/helped me get better grades -- In 2010 the average answer was 3.71; in 2011 the average answer was 1.54.
• My iPhone will distract/distracted me from school-related tasks -- In 2010 the average answer was 1.91; in 2011 the average answer was 4.03.
• The iPhone will help/helped me do well on academic tests -- In 2010 the average answer was 3.88; in 2011 the average answer was 1.68.
• The iPhone will help/helped me do well with my homework -- In 2010 the average answer was 3.14; in 2011 the average answer was 1.49.

Kortum noted that the study did not address the structured use of smartphones in an educational setting. He said that the study's findings have important implications for the use of technology in education.
"Previous studies have provided ample evidence that when smartphones are used with specific learning objects in mind, they can significantly enhance the learning experience," Kortum said. "However, our research clearly demonstrates that simply providing access to a smartphone, without specific directed learning activities, may actually be detrimental to the overall learning process."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A group of researchers at KAIST has developed a wireless-power transfer (WPT) technology that allows mobile devices to be charged at any location and in any direction, even if the devices are away from the power source, just as Wi-Fi works for Internet connections. With this technology, so long as mobile users stay in a designated area where the charging is available, e.g., the Wi-Power zone, the device, without being tethered to a charger, will pick up power automatically, as needed.
The research team led by Professor Chun T. Rim of the Nuclear and Quantum Engineering Department at KAIST has made great strides in WPT development. Their WPT system is capable of charging multiple mobile devices concurrently and with unprecedented freedom in any direction, even while holding the devices in midair or a half meter away from the power source, which is a transmitter. The research result was published in the June 2015 on-line issue of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, which is entitled "Six Degrees of Freedom Mobile Inductive Power Transfer by Crossed Dipole Tx (Transmitter) and Rx (Receiver) Coils."
Professor Rim's team has successfully showcased the technology on July 7, 2015 at a lab on KAIST's campus. They used high-frequency magnetic materials in a dipole coil structure to build a thin, flat transmitter (Tx) system shaped in a rectangle with a size of 1m2. Either 30 smartphones with a power capacity of one watt each or 5 laptops with 2.4 watts each can be simultaneously and wirelessly charged at a 50 cm distance from the transmitter with six degrees of freedom, regardless of the devices' three-axes positions and directions. This means that the device can receive power all around the transmitter in three-dimensional space. The maximum power transfer efficiency for the laptops was 34%. The researchers said that to fabricate plane Tx and Rx coils with the six-degree-of-freedom characteristic was a bottleneck of WPT for mobile applications.
Dipole Coil Resonance System (DCRS)
The research team used the Dipole Coil Resonance System (DCRS) to induce magnetic fields, which was developed by the team in 2014 for inductive power transfer over an extended distance. The DCRS is composed of two (transmitting and receiving) magnetic dipole coils, placed in parallel, with each coil having a ferrite core and connected with a resonant capacitor. Comparing to a conventional loop coil, the dipole coil is very compact and has a less dimension. Therefore, a crossed dipole structure has 2-dimension rather than 3-dimension of a crossed loop coil structure. The DCRS has a great advantage to transfer power even when the resonance frequency changes in the range of 1% (Q factor is below 100). The ferrite cores are optimally designed to reduce the core volume by half, and their ability to transfer power is nearly unaffected by human bodies or surrounding metal objects, making DCRS ideal to transmit wireless power in emergency situations. In a test conducted in 2014, Professor Rim succeeded in transferring 209 watts of power wirelessly to the distance of five meters.
Greater Flexibility and Safer Charging
The research team rearranged the two dipole coils from a parallel position to cross them in order to generate rotating magnetic fields, which was embedded in the Tx's flat platform. This has made it possible for mobile devices to receive power from any direction.
Although wireless-power technology has been applied to smartphones, it could not offer any substantial advantages over traditional wired charging because the devices still require close contact with the transmitter, a charging pad. To use the devices freely and safely, including in public spaces, the WPT technology should provide mobile users with six degrees of freedom at a distance. Until now, all wireless-charging technologies have had difficulties with the problem of short charging distance, mostly less than 10 cm, as well as charging conditions that the devices should be placed in a fixed position. For example, the Galaxy S6 could only be charged wirelessly in a fixed position, having one degree of freedom. The degree of freedom represents mobile devices' freedom of movement in three-dimensional space.
In addition, the DCRS works at a low magnetic field environment. Based on the magnetic flux shielding technology developed by the research team, the level of magnetic flux is below the safety level of the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) guideline (27µT) for general public exposure to electromagnetic field (EMF).
Professor Rim said, "Our transmitter system is safe for humans and compatible with other electronic devices. We have solved three major issues of short charging distance, the dependence on charging directions, and plane coil structures of both Tx and Rx, which have blocked the commercialization of WPT."
Currently, the research team and KAIST's spin-off company, TESLAS, Inc., have been conducting pilot projects to apply DCRS in various places such as cafes and offices.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU64pMyJioc

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

A new study published in Nature Nanotechnology proposes a novel nanotechnology-based strategy to improve water filtration. The research project involves the minute vibrations of carbon nanotubes called "phonons," which greatly enhance the diffusion of water through sanitation filters. The project was the joint effort of a Tsinghua University-Tel Aviv University research team and was led by Prof. Quanshui Zheng of the Tsinghua Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics and Prof. Michael Urbakh of the TAU School of Chemistry, both of the TAU-Tsinghua XIN Center, in collaboration with Prof. Francois Grey of the University of Geneva.
Shake, rattle, and roll
"We've discovered that very small vibrations help materials, whether wet or dry, slide more smoothly past each other," said Prof. Urbakh. "Through phonon oscillations -- vibrations of water-carrying nanotubes -- water transport can be enhanced, and sanitation and desalination improved. Water filtration systems require a lot of energy due to friction at the nano-level. With these oscillations, however, we witnessed three times the efficiency of water transport, and, of course, a great deal of energy saved."
The research team managed to demonstrate how, under the right conditions, such vibrations produce a 300% improvement in the rate of water diffusion by using computers to simulate the flow of water molecules flowing through nanotubes. The results have important implications for desalination processes and energy conservation, e.g. improving the energy efficiency for desalination using reverse osmosis membranes with pores at the nanoscale level, or energy conservation, e.g. membranes with boron nitride nanotubes.
Crowdsourcing the solution
The project, initiated by IBM's World Community Grid, was an experiment in crowdsourced computing -- carried out by over 150,000 volunteers who contributed their own computing power to the research.
"Our project won the privilege of using IBM's world community grid, an open platform of users from all around the world, to run our program and obtain precise results," said Prof. Urbakh. "This was the first project of this kind in Israel, and we could never have managed with just four students in the lab. We would have required the equivalent of nearly 40,000 years of processing power on a single computer. Instead we had the benefit of some 150,000 computing volunteers from all around the world, who downloaded and ran the project on their laptops and desktop computers.
"Crowdsourced computing is playing an increasingly major role in scientific breakthroughs," Prof. Urbakh continued. "As our research shows, the range of questions that can benefit from public participation is growing all the time."
The computer simulations were designed by Ming Ma, who graduated from Tsinghua University and is doing his postdoctoral research in Prof. Urbakh's group at TAU. Ming catalyzed the international collaboration. "The students from Tsinghua are remarkable. The project represents the very positive cooperation between the two universities, which is taking place at XIN and because of XIN," said Prof. Urbakh.
Other partners in this international project include researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology of University College London; the University of Geneva; the University of Sydney and Monash University in Australia; and the Xi'an Jiaotong University in China. The researchers are currently in discussions with companies interested in harnessing the oscillation know-how for various commercial projects.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by American Friends of Tel Aviv University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

In the journal Nature Communications, scientists from the TU Wien (Vienna) and the Free University of Berlin now present a quantum tomography method, which makes it possible to measure and describe the state of a large quantum system very precisely with just a few measurements. The basic idea behind this new technique is simple: even though the system can be in one of unimaginably many quantum states, it is a very good approximation to ignore most of them.
Many Particles, Many States
The result of a coin toss is either heads or tails. The behaviour of quantum particles, however, is much more complicated. When a quantum system can be in two different states, any mixture of these states is also a physically allowed state. Therefore it is much more complicated to describe the state of a quantum particle than it is to describe the state of a coin lying on the table.
"The larger the number of particles, the more complicated the description of the systems becomes," says Professor Jörg Schmiedmayer from the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology (VCQ) at TU Wien. "The storage capacity required to describe a quantum state grows exponentially with the number of particles. For a system of several hundred quantum particles, there are more possible quantum states than there are atoms in the universe. It is absolutely impossible to write down such a state or to do calculations with it."
But exactly knowing the quantum state is not always necessary. The new theoretical method, developed in Berlin by Professor Jens Eisert's research group, uses a special kind of description for the quantum states -- the so called "continuous matrix product states" (cMPS). This special class of states only represents a vanishingly small fraction of all possible states, but from a physical point of view they are particularly important. "This class contains states with realistic quantum entanglement," says Jens Eisert. "Exotic, complicated entanglement patterns between many quantum particles may in principle be possible, but in practice they do not show up in physical systems. That is why we can limit ourselves to the cMPS in our calculations."
For any possible quantum state, there is a cMPS arbitrarily close to the true quantum state. No matter which state is really occupied by the system -- the error that occurs by only taking into account the cMPS can be made arbitrarily small. "It is like fractions in mathematics," says Eisert. "The rational numbers, which can be written as fractions, only represent a tiny part of all real numbers. But for any real number, a fractional number can be found which comes arbitrarily close." The number pi is not a fractional number -- but the approximation for pi used by a pocket calculator is. For all practical purposes, this is good enough.
Measurements Yielding a Quantum Picture
By restricting oneself to the cMPS, it becomes possible to read out the state of a large quantum system in an experiment. "We cannot gain complete knowledge about the system from a finite number of measurements, but that is also not what we need," says Tim Langen, who led the experiments in Schmiedmayer's research group. "With our new method, we can reconstruct the quantum state from only a few measurements. The precision is so high that we can use this approximate state to predict the result of further measurements." This technique is called "quantum tomography" -- much like computer tomography in a hospital, where several pictures are used to calculate a 3D model, quantum tomography uses several measurements to calculate a picture of the quantum state.
The new method does not only open up new possibilities for many-body quantum physics. It could also path the way to new quantum simulators -- quantum systems, which are prepared in such a way that they can be used to simulate other quantum systems that cannot be controlled by standard methods. "When two different quantum systems can be described with the same basic formulas, then we can learn a lot about one system by studying the other," says Schmiedmayer. "We can control thousands of atoms on our quantum chip, this system is thus very well suited for future quantum simulations."

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Vienna University of Technology. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Magnetic skyrmions are tiny, nanometer-sized magnetic-spin vortices that emerge on the surface of magnetic materials. Because they are so small, they could potentially be used as extremely dense memory devices, with the presence or absence of skyrmions, or the direction of spin, being used to denote bits in computer calculations. Achieving this could lead to the advent of a new class of low-power-consumption devices dubbed "spintronics," as well as ultra-low consumption, high-density magnetic memory.
However, skyrmions are not always easy to use. Though they occur ubiquitously in magnets, in a diverse range of circumstances, they are not always easy to control. The ultimate dream of researchers has been to create stable skyrmions -- which do not decay -- in a set chirality, so that their chirality can be manipulated to represents data for storage devices
Skyrmions emerging from a process called the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction have been considered to be particularly promising, as they are small (under 150 nanometers) and have a fixed direction of spin, so that they could host a large number of stable skyrmions which could be manipulated by electrical currents, and hence could be used to create high-density storage. Such stable skyrmions have been found in certain crystal structures, but in the materials studied so far, such as Cu2OSeO3, the skyrmions emerge most strongly in low temperatures, requiring low-temperature manipulation.
For the present study, the scientists decided to look at a type of magnetic material made up of cobalt, zinc, and manganese, whose structure seemed likely to host stable skyrmions. Using a variety of techniques, they were able to show indeed that when a magnetic field was applied, the material showed the clear presence of skyrmion crystals in both a bulk shape and when shaped into a thin plate. These skyrmions were both stable and chiral -- meaning that they spun in a set direction -- so that they could be manipulated to encode information depending on the chirality.
According to Yusuke Tokunaga of CEMS, who performed the work, "We are quite excited about these results, as they may answer the long-held expectation that we can find skyrmion hosting systems in a variety of new materials. In addition, the fact that we have shown that skyrmions can be stabilized at room temperature and above opens the road to looking for ways to integrate skyrmions into spintronics devices without complicated cooling systems.
The research was done by CEMS scientists in collaboration with scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institut and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the University of Tokyo in Japan.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by RIKEN. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Today we live in a world of flat-screen displays we use all day -- whether it's the computer in the office, a smartphone on the train home, the TV or iPad on the couch in the evening. The world we live in is not flat, though; it's made of hills and valleys, people and objects. Imagine if we could use our fingertips to manipulate the display and drag features out of it into our 3D world.
Such a vision led to the launch in January 2013 of GHOST (Generic, Highly-Organic Shape-Changing Interfaces), an EU-supported research project designed to tap humans' ability to reason about and manipulate physical objects through the interfaces of computers and mobile devices.
'This will have all sorts of implications for the future, from everyday interaction with mobile phones to learning with computers and design work,' explained GHOST coordinator Professor Kasper Hornbæk of the University of Copenhagen. 'It's not only about deforming the shape of the screen, but also the digital object you want to manipulate, maybe even in mid-air. Through ultrasound levitation technology, for example, we can project the display out of the flat screen. And thanks to deformable screens we can plunge our fingers into it.'
Shape-changing displays you can touch and feel
This breakthrough in user interaction with technology allows us to handle objects, and even data, in a completely new way. A surgeon, for instance, will be able to work on a virtual brain physically, with the full tactile experience, before performing a real-life operation. Designers and artists using physical proxies such as clay can mould and remould objects and store them in the computer as they work. GHOST researchers are also working with deformable interfaces such as pads and sponges for musicians to flex to control timbre, speed and other parameters in electronic music.
Indeed, GHOST has produced an assembly line of prototypes to showcase shape-changing applications. 'Emerge' is one which allows data in bar charts to be pulled out of the screen by fingertips. The information, whether it's election results or rainfall patterns, can then be re-ordered and broken down by column, row or individually, in order to visualise it better. The researchers have also been working with 'morphees', flexible mobile devices with lycra or alloy displays which bend and stretch according to use. These can change shape automatically to form screens to shield your fingers when you type in a pincode, for example, or to move the display to the twists and turns of a game. And such devices can be enlarged in the hand to examine data closer and shrunk again for storing away in a case or pocket.
Tactile technology reaching the market
One of the GHOST partners, the University of Bristol, has spun off a startup, now employing 12 people, called UltraHaptics, to develop technology being studied in GHOST that uses ultrasound to create feeling in mid-air. The company has attracted seed investment in the UK and further funding from the Horizon 2020 programme.
'GHOST has made a lot of progress simply by bringing the partners together and allowing us to share our discoveries,' commented Prof Hornbæk. 'Displays which change shape as you are using them are probably only five years off now. If you want your smartphone to project the landscape of a terrain 20 or 30 cm out of the display, that's a little further off -- but we're working on it!'
GHOST, which finishes at the end of this year, involves four partners in the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Denmark, and receives EUR 1.93 million from the EU's Future and Emerging Technologies programme.

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Quantum computing -- which aims to use particles on the atomic scale to make calculations and store the results -- has the potential to solve some key problems much faster than current computers.
To make quantum computing a reality, scientists must find a system that remains stable long enough to make the calculations. While this is an extremely short time frame, only thousandths of a second, the particles involved are so small that they are easily influenced by their surroundings. If the motion of the particles is disturbed, even a little, it throws off the whole calculation.
Nuclei are promising contenders for quantum memory because they are not easily influenced by their surroundings. However, that also makes them extremely difficult to manipulate. Many quantum physicists have tried with little success.
"In usual materials it is very difficult to control nuclei directly," said Prof. Denis Konstantinov, who runs the Quantum Dynamics Unit at OIST.
Instead of trying control the nucleus directly, the researchers focused on a "middle man" of sorts -- the electrons orbiting the nucleus.
The nucleus has a tiny internal magnet, called a "magnetic moment," and the electrons orbiting around it also have magnetic moments that are about 1,000 times larger. Those magnets interact with each other, which is called the "hyperfine interaction."
The hyperfine interaction is stronger in some materials than others. The researchers found that a crystal made of manganese and some other elements has a strong hyperfine interaction. This enabled them to manipulate the nuclei by first targeting the electrons.
Information in quantum computing is conveyed by photons, which are individual particles of light, which also make up other nonvisible electromagnetic waves, such as ultraviolet and microwaves. The information transmitted is actually the quantum state of the photon. The quantum state of the photon needs to be transferred to another particle so it will last long enough for the computation to take place.
In this experiment, the researchers beamed microwaves through a manganese carbonate crystal. The magnetic field of the microwaves interacted with the magnetic moments of the electrons that are orbiting around the nuclei of the manganese atoms. The electrons' movements started to change, which in turn altered the movement of the nuclei because they are connected by the hyperfine interaction. The quantum state of the microwave photon was transferred to the nuclei when the nuclei's internal magnets flipped to point in the opposite direction.
This all has to happen very quickly before the quantum state of the photon changes. To transmit the information and flip the nuclei fast enough, there has to be a strong connection between the microwaves and nuclei via the electrons.
"To our knowledge, our experiment is the first demonstration of the strong coupling between microwave photons and nuclear spins," said Leonid Abdurakhimov, a post-doctoral scholar at OIST and first author of the paper.
Next, the team plans to cool down the system to nearly -273 C, or -500 F, to see if they can strengthen the connection and extend the time information can be stored by minimizing temperature fluctuations.
"We are making the first and important steps towards using an ensemble of nuclear spins for quantum memory," Konstantinov said. "We now have a whole class of materials that can be used for this purpose. Future experiments promise to be quite exciting."

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Equally striking, if less well known, are the so-called squeezed quantum states: Normally, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that one cannot measure the values of certain pairs of physical quantities, such as the position and velocity of a quantum particle, with arbitrary precision. Nevertheless, nature allows a barter trade: If the particle has been appropriately prepared, then one of the quantities can be measured a little more exactly if one is willing to accept a less precise knowledge of the other quantity. In this case the preparation of the particle is known as "squeezing" because the uncertainty in one variable is reduced (squeezed).
Schrödinger's cat and squeezed quantum states are both important physical phenomena that lie at the heart of promising technologies of the future. Researchers at the ETH were now able successfully to combine both in a single experiment.
Squeezing and shifting
In their laboratory, Jonathan Home, professor of experimental quantum optics and photonics, and his colleagues catch a single electrically charged calcium ion in a tiny cage made of electric fields. Using laser beams they cool the ion down until it hardly moves inside the cage. Now the researchers reach into their bag of tricks: they "squeeze" the state of motion of the ion by shining laser light on it and by skilfully using the spontaneous decay of its energy states. Eventually the ion's wave function (which corresponds to the probability of finding it at a certain point in space) is literally squashed: now the physicists have a better idea of where the ion is located in space, but the uncertainty in its velocity has increased proportionately. "This state squeezing is an important tool for us," Jonathan Home explains. "Together with a second tool -- the so-called state-dependent forces -- we are now able to produce a "squeezed Schrödinger cat."
To that end the ion is once more exposed to laser beams that move it to the left or to the right. The direction of the forces induced by the laser depends on the internal energy state of the ion. This energy state can be represented by an arrow pointing up or down, also called a spin. If the ion is in an energy superposition state composed of "spin up" and "spin down," the force acts both to the left and to the right. In this way, a peculiar situation is created that is similar to Schrödinger's cat: the ion now finds itself in a hybrid state of being on the right (cat is alive) and on the left (cat is dead) at the same time. Only when one measures the spin does the ion decide whether to be on the right or on the left.
Stable cats for quantum computers
The Schrödinger cat prepared by professor Home and his collaborators is special in that the initial squeezing makes the ion states "left" and "right" particularly easy to distinguish. At the same time, it is also pretty large as the two ion states are far apart. "Even without the squeezing our "cat" is the largest one produced to date," Home points out. "With the squeezing, the states "left" and "right" are even more distinguishable -- they are as much as sixty times narrower than the separation between them." All this isn't just about scientific records, however, but also about practical applications. Squeezed Schrödinger cats are particularly stable against certain types of disturbances that would normally cause the cats to lose their quantum properties and become ordinary felines. That stability could, for instance, be exploited in order to realize quantum computers, which use quantum superposition states to do their calculations. Furthermore, ultra-precise measurements could be made less sensitive to unwanted external influences.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by ETH Zurich. The original item was written by Oliver Morsch. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Now researchers at the University of Chicago's Institute for Molecular Engineering (IME) have made a crucial step toward nuclear spintronic technologies. They have gotten nuclear spins to line themselves up in a consistent, controllable way, and they have done it using a high-performance material that is practical, convenient, and inexpensive.
"Our results could lead to new technologies like ultra-sensitive magnetic resonance imaging, nuclear gyroscopes, and even computers that harness quantum mechanical effects," said Abram Falk, the lead author of the report on the research, which was featured as the cover article of the June 17 issue of Physical Review Letters. Falk and colleagues in David Awschalom's IME research group invented a new technique that uses infrared light to align spins. And they did so using silicon carbide (SiC), an industrially important semiconductor.
Nuclear spins tend to be randomly oriented. Aligning them in a controllable fashion is usually a complicated and only marginally successful proposition. The reason, explains Paul Klimov, a co-author of the paper, is that "the magnetic moment of each nucleus is tiny, roughly 1,000 times smaller than that of an electron."
This small magnetic moment means that little thermal kicks from surrounding atoms or electrons can easily randomize the direction of the nuclear spins. Extreme experimental conditions such as high magnetic fields and cryogenic temperatures (-238 degrees Fahrenehit and below) are usually required to get even a small number of spins to line up. In magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), for example, only one to 10 out of a million nuclear spins can be aligned and seen in the image, even with a high magnetic field applied.
Using their new technique, Awschalom and his associates aligned more than 99 percent of spins in certain nuclei in silicon carbide (SiC). Equally important, the technique works at room temperature -- no cryogenics or intense magnetic fields needed. Instead, the research team used light to "cool" the nuclei.
While nuclei do not themselves interact with light, certain imperfections, or "color-centers," in the SiC crystals do. The electron spins in these color centers can be readily optically cooled and aligned, and this alignment can be transferred to nearby nuclei. Had the group tried to achieve the same degree of spin alignment without optical cooling they would have had to chill the SiC chip physically to just five millionths of a degree above absolute zero (-459.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Getting spins to align in room-temperature silicon carbide brings practical spintronic devices a significant step closer, said Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Spintronics and Quantum Information. The material is already an important semiconductor in the high-power electronics and opto-electronics industries. Sophisticated growth and processing capabilities are already mature. So prototypes of nuclear spintronic devices that exploit the IME researchers' technique may be developed in the near future. Said Awschalom: "Wafer-scale quantum technologies that harness nuclear spins as subatomic elements may appear more quickly than we anticipated." -- Carla Reiter
Funding and support: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Science Foundation, Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Sweden's National Supercomputer Center.

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The new study presents a solution to a long-standing roadblock to increasing data transmission rates in optical fiber: beyond a threshold power level, additional power increases irreparably distort the information travelling in the fiber optic cable.
"Today's fiber optic systems are a little like quicksand. With quicksand, the more you struggle, the faster you sink. With fiber optics, after a certain point, the more power you add to the signal, the more distortion you get, in effect preventing a longer reach. Our approach removes this power limit, which in turn extends how far signals can travel in optical fiber without needing a repeater," said Nikola Alic, a research scientist from the Qualcomm Institute, the corresponding author on the Science paper and a principal of the experimental effort.
In lab experiments, the researchers at UC San Diego successfully deciphered information after it travelled a record-breaking 12,000 kilometers through fiber optic cables with standard amplifiers and no repeaters, which are electronic regenerators.
The new findings effectively eliminate the need for electronic regenerators placed periodically along the fiber link. These regenerators are effectively supercomputers and must be applied to each channel in the transmission. The electronic regeneration in modern lightwave transmission that carries between 80 to 200 channels also dictates the cost and, more importantly, prevents the construction of a transparent optical network. As a result, eliminating periodic electronic regeneration will drastically change the economy of the network infrastructure, ultimately leading to cheaper and more efficient transmission of information.
The breakthrough in this study relies on wideband "frequency combs" that the researchers developed. The frequency comb described in this paper ensures that the signal distortions -- called the "crosstalk" -- that arises between bundled streams of information travelling long distances through the optical fiber are predictable, and therefore, reversible at the receiving end of the fiber.
"Crosstalk between communication channels within a fiber optic cable obeys fixed physical laws. It's not random. We now have a better understanding of the physics of the crosstalk. In this study, we present a method for leveraging the crosstalk to remove the power barrier for optical fiber," explained Stojan Radic, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego and the senior author on the Science paper. "Our approach conditions the information before it is even sent, so the receiver is free of crosstalk caused by the Kerr effect."
The photonics experiments were performed at UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute by researchers from the Photonics Systems Group led by Radic.
Pitch Perfect Data Transmission
The UC San Diego researchers' approach is akin to a concert master who tunes multiple instruments in an orchestra to the same pitch at the beginning of a concert. In an optical fiber, information is transmitted through multiple communication channels that operate at different frequencies. The electrical engineers used their frequency comb to synchronize the frequency variations of the different streams of optical information, called the "optical carriers" propagating through an optical fiber. This approach compensates in advance for the crosstalk that occurs between the multiple communication channels within the same optical fiber. The frequency comb also ensures that the crosstalk between the communication channels is reversible.
"After increasing the power of the optical signals we sent by 20 fold, we could still restore the original information when we used frequency combs at the outset," said UC San Diego electrical engineering Ph.D. student Eduardo Temprana, the first author on the paper. The frequency comb ensured that the system did not accumulate the random distortions that make it impossible to reassemble the original content at the receiver.
The laboratory experiments involved setups with both three and five optical channels, which interact with each other within the silica fiber optic cables. The researchers note that this approach could be used in systems with far more communication channels. Most of today's fiber optic cables include more than 32 of these channels, which all interact with one another.
In the Science paper, the researchers describe their frequency referencing approach to pre-compensate for nonlinear effects that occur between communication channels within the fiber optic cable. The information is initially pre-distorted in a predictable and reversible way when it is sent through the optical fiber. With the frequency comb, the information can be unscrambled and fully restored at the receiving end of the optical fiber.
"We are pre-empting the distortion effects that will happen in the optical fiber," said Bill Kuo, a research scientist at the Qualcomm Institute, who was responsible for the comb development in the group.
The same research group published a theoretical paper last year outlining the fact that the experimental results they are now publishing were theoretically possible.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego. The original item was written by Liezel Labios. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

"We essentially created a virtual Beta Pictoris in the computer and watched it evolve over millions of years," said Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who co-developed the simulation. "This is the first full 3-D model of a debris disk where we can watch the development of asymmetric features formed by planets, like warps and eccentric rings, and also track collisions among the particles at the same time."
In 1984, Beta Pictoris became the second star known to be surrounded by a bright disk of dust and debris. Located only 63 light-years away, Beta Pictoris is an estimated 21 million years old, or less than 1 percent the age of our solar system. It offers astronomers a front-row seat to the evolution of a young planetary system and it remains one of the closest, youngest and best-studied examples today. The disk, which we see edge on, contains rock and ice fragments ranging in size from objects larger than houses to grains as small as smoke particles. It's a younger version of the Kuiper belt at the fringes of our own planetary system.
Nesvold and her colleague Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented the findings Thursday during the "In the Spirit of Lyot 2015" conference in Montreal, which focuses on the direct detection of planets and disks around distant stars. A paper describing the research has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
In 2009, astronomers confirmed the existence of Beta Pictoris b, a planet with an estimated mass of about nine times Jupiter's, in the debris disk around Beta Pictoris. Traveling along a tilted and slightly elongated 20-year orbit, the planet stays about as far away from its star as Saturn does from our sun.
Astronomers have struggled to explain various features seen in the disk, including a warp apparent at submillimeter wavelengths, an X-shaped pattern visible in scattered light, and vast clumps of carbon monoxide gas. A common ingredient in comets, carbon monoxide molecules are destroyed by ultraviolet starlight in a few hundred years. To explain why the gas is clumped, previous researchers suggested the clumps could be evidence of icy debris being corralled by a second as-yet-unseen planet, resulting in an unusually high number of collisions that produce carbon monoxide. Or perhaps the gas was the aftermath of an extraordinary crash of icy worlds as large as Mars.
"Our simulation suggests many of these features can be readily explained by a pair of colliding spiral waves excited in the disk by the motion and gravity of Beta Pictoris b," Kuchner said. "Much like someone doing a cannonball in a swimming pool, the planet drove huge changes in the debris disk once it reached its present orbit."
Keeping tabs on thousands of fragmenting particles over millions of years is a computationally difficult task. Existing models either weren't stable over a sufficiently long time or contained approximations that could mask some of the structure Nesvold and Kuchner were looking for.
Working with Margaret Pan and Hanno Rein, both now at the University of Toronto, they developed a method where each particle in the simulation represents a cluster of bodies with a range of sizes and similar motions. By tracking how these "superparticles" interact, they could see how collisions among trillions of fragments produce dust and, combined with other forces in the disk, shape it into the kinds of patterns seen by telescopes. The technique, called the Superparticle-Method Algorithm for Collisions in Kuiper belts (SMACK), also greatly reduces the time required to run such a complex computation.
Using the Discover supercomputer operated by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation at Goddard, the SMACK-driven Beta Pictoris model ran for 11 days and tracked the evolution of 100,000 superparticles over the lifetime of the disk.
As the planet moves along its tilted path, it passes vertically through the disk twice each orbit. Its gravity excites a vertical spiral wave in the disk. Debris concentrates in the crests and troughs of the waves and collides most often there, which explains the X-shaped pattern seen in the dust and may help explain the carbon monoxide clumps.
The planet's orbit also is slightly eccentric, which means its distance from the star varies a little every orbit. This motion stirs up the debris and drives a second spiral wave across the face of the disk. This wave increases collisions in the inner regions of the disk, which removes larger fragments by grinding them away. In the real disk, astronomers report a similar clearing out of large debris close to the star.
"One of the nagging questions about Beta Pictoris is how the planet ended up in such an odd orbit," Nesvold explained. "Our simulation suggests it arrived there about 10 million years ago, possibly after interacting with other planets orbiting the star that we haven't detected yet."
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSioxuHa2dg

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The research team, from the University's Department of Engineering Mathematics, have designed a smart materials system, inspired by biological chromatophores, which creates patterns that change and morph over time and mimic biological patterning.
The paper, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, describes the design, mathematical modelling, simulation and analysis of a dynamic biomimetic pattern generation system.
The researchers have shown the artificial skin, made from electroactive dielectric elastomer, a soft, compliant smart material, can effectively copy the action of biological chromatophores. Chromatophores are small pigmented cells embedded on cephalopods skin which can expand and contract and that work together to change skin colour and texture.
The system achieves the dynamic pattern generation by using simple local rules in the artificial chromatophore cells, so that they can sense their surroundings and manipulate their change. By modelling sets of artificial chromatophores in linear arrays of cells, the researchers explored whether the system was capable of producing a variety of patterns.
The researchers found that it is possible to mimic complex dynamic patterning seen in real cephalopods such as the Passing Cloud display, which is when bands of colour spread as waves across the skin. This visual effect acts to distract and divert predators.
Aaron Fishman, Visiting Fellow in Engineering Mathematics, said: "Our ultimate goal is to create artificial skin that can mimic fast acting active camouflage and be used for smart clothing such as cloaking suits and dynamic illuminated clothing.
"The cloaking suit could be used to blend into a variety of environments, such as in the wild. It could also be used for signalling purposes, for example search and rescue operations when people who are in danger need to stand out."
The researchers investigated making bio-inspired artificial skin embedded with artificial chromatophores using thin sheets (five to ten millimetre) of dielectric elastomer -- a soft, rubbery material that can be electrically controlled to be compliant.
In the future the team will consider changing the system to improve propagation control and to generate new patterns using other local rules. They will also carry out a more extensive analysis of the different pattern types that can be achieved under alternative system parameters, as well as developing the model to simulate patterns in two-dimensional array systems. The researchers expect this could produce more patterns, which could resemble those in the natural world.
A video showing the camouflaging in action is available on YouTube, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSKqySApDk0.

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19 people tested, 100% success rate
Nine disabled people and ten healthy people in Italy, Germany and Switzerland took part in the task of piloting a robot with their thoughts. For several weeks, each of the subjects put on an electrode-studded hat capable of analysing their brain signals. They then instructed the robot to move, transmitting their instructions in real time via internet from their home country. By virtue of its video camera, screen and wheels, the robot, located in a laboratory of Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), was able to film as it moved while displaying the face of the remote pilot via Skype. The person at the controls, as if moving in place of the robot, was able to interact with whoever the robot crossed paths with. "Each of the 9 subjects with disabilities managed to remotely control the robot with ease after less than 10 days of training," said Professor Millán.
Shared control between human and machine
The brain-machine interface developed by the researchers goes even further. The robot is able to avoid obstacles by itself, even when it is not told to. To avoid getting overly tired, the pilot can also take a break from giving indications. If it doesn't receive more indications, the robot will continue on the indicated path until it receives the order to stop. In this way, control over the robot is shared between the human and the computer, allowing the pilot to rest while navigating.
No difference between healthy and disabled subjects
In the end, the tests revealed no difference in piloting ability between healthy and disabled subjects. In the second part of the tests, the disabled people with residual mobility were asked to pilot the robot with the movements they were still capable of doing, for example by simply pressing the side of their head on buttons placed nearby. They piloted the robot just as if they were uniquely using their thoughts, further proof of the effectiveness of the system.
Mature technology available
The positive results of this research bring to a close the European project called TOBI (Tools for Brain-Computer Interaction), which began in 2008. Will robots soon become a fact of daily life for people suffering from a disability? Too soon to say, according to Professor Millán. "For this to happen, insurance companies will have to help finance these technologies."
See a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI6WbcXEWgI

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"Most robots use two fingers and to pick things up they have to squeeze," said Jaeyoun (Jay) Kim, an Iowa State University associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "But these tentacles wrap around very gently."
And that makes them perfect hands and fingers for small robots designed to safely handle delicate objects.
The spiraling microrobotic tentacles are described in a research paper recently published in the journal Scientific Reports. Kim is the lead author. Co-authors are In-Ho Cho, an Iowa State assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering; and Jungwook Paek, who recently earned his Iowa State doctorate in electrical and computer engineering and is moving to post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
The paper describes how the engineers fabricated microtubes just 8 millimeters long and less than a hundredth of an inch wide. They're made from PDMS, a transparent elastomer that can be a liquid or a soft, rubbery solid. Kim, whose research focus is micro-electro-mechanical systems, has worked with the material for about a decade and has patented a process for making thin wires from it.
The paper also describes how the researchers sealed one end of the tube and pumped air in and out. The air pressure and the microtube's asymmetrical wall thickness created a circular bend. They further describe how they added a small lump of PDMS to the base of the tube to amplify the bend and create a two-turn spiraling, coiling action.
And that's just what the engineers wanted: "Spiraling tentacles are widely utilized in nature for grabbing and squeezing objects," the engineers wrote in the paper. "There have been continuous soft-robotic efforts to mimic them…, but the life-like, multi-turn spiraling motion has been reproduced only by centimeter-scale tentacles so far. At millimeter and sub-millimeter scales, they could bend only up to a single turn."
It took a lot of problem solving to create the extra turn in the microrobotic tentacles. "Yes, we scratched our heads a lot," Kim said.
The engineers had to develop new production techniques to create the microtubes. They had to figure out how to peel the microtubes off a production template. And they had to use computer modeling to find a way to create more coiling.
Kim said the resulting microrobotic tentacle is "S-cubed -- soft, safe and small." He said that makes it ideal for medical applications because the microrobotic tentacles can't damage tissues or even blood vessels.
The current study was supported by Kim's six-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation.
Kim said the project is a nice combination of two new trends in robotics: "There's microrobotics, where people want to make robots smaller and smaller. And there's soft robotics, where people don't want to make robots out of iron and steel. This project is an overlap of both of those fields. I want to pioneer new work in the field with both microscale and soft robotics."

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Quantum teleportation is a method of communicating information from one location to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached. Instead, the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) share a pair of entangled elementary particles -- in this experiment, photons, the smallest units of light -- that transmit information through their shared quantum state. In simplified terms, Alice encodes information in the form of the quantum state of her photon. She then sends a key to Bob over traditional communication channels, indicating what operation he must perform on his photon to prepare the same quantum state, thus teleporting the information.
Quantum teleportation has been achieved by a number of research teams around the globe since it was first theorized in 1993, but current experimental methods require extensive resources and/or only work successfully a fraction of the time.
Now, by taking advantage of the mathematical properties intrinsic to the shape of a donut -- or torus, in mathematical terminology -- a research team led by physicist Paul Kwiat of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has made great strides by realizing "superdense teleportation." This new protocol, developed by coauthor physicist Herbert Bernstein of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, effectively reduces the resources and effort required to teleport quantum information, while at the same time improving the reliability of the information transfer.
In superdense teleportation of quantum information, Alice (near) selects a particular set of states to send to Bob (far), using the hyperentangled pair of photons they share. The possible states Alice may send are represented as the points on a donut shape, here artistically depicted in sharp relief from the cloudy silhouette of general quantum state that surrounds them. To transmit a state, Alice makes a measurement on her half of the entangled state, which has four possible outcomes shown by red, green, blue, and yellow points. She then communicates the outcome of her measurement (in this case, yellow, represented by the orange streak connecting the two donuts) to Bob using a classical information channel. Bob then can make a corrective rotation on his state to recover the state that Alice sent.
With this new protocol, the researchers have experimentally achieved 88 percent transmission fidelity, twice the classical upper limit of 44 percent. The protocol uses pairs of photons that are "hyperentangled" -- simultaneously entangled in more than one state variable, in this case in polarization and in orbital angular momentum -- with a restricted number of possible states in each variable. In this way, each photon can carry more information than in earlier quantum teleportation experiments.
At the same time, this method makes Alice's measurements and Bob's transformations far more efficient than their corresponding operations in quantum teleportation: the number of possible operations being sent to Bob as the key has been reduced, hence the term "superdense."
Kwiat explains, "In classical computing, a unit of information, called a bit, can have only one of two possible values -- it's either a zero or a one. A quantum bit, or qubit, can simultaneously hold many values, arbitrary superpositions of 0 and 1 at the same time, which makes faster, more powerful computing systems possible.
"So a qubit could be represented as a point on a sphere, and to specify what state it is, one would need longitude and latitude. That's a lot of information compared to just a 0 or a 1."
"What makes our new scheme work is a restrictive set of states. The analog would be, instead of using a sphere, we are going to use a torus, or donut shape. A sphere can only rotate on an axis, and there is no way to get an opposite point for every point on a sphere by rotating it -- because the axis points, the north and the south, don't move. With a donut, if you rotate it 180 degrees, every point becomes its opposite. Instead of axis points you have a donut hole. Another advantage, the donut shape actually has more surface area than the sphere, mathematically speaking -- this means it has more distinct points that can be used as encoded information."
Lead author, Illinois physics doctoral candidate Trent Graham, comments, "We are constrained to sending a certain class of quantum states called 'equimodular' states. We can deterministically perform operations on this constrained set of states, which are impossible to perfectly perform with completely general quantum states. Deterministic describes a definite outcome, as opposed to one that is probabilistic. With existing technologies, previous photonic quantum teleportation schemes either cannot work every time or require extensive experimental resources. Our new scheme could work every time with simple measurements."
This research team is part of a broader collaboration that is working toward realizing quantum communication from a space platform, such as the International Space Station, to an optical telescope on Earth. The collaboration -- Kwiat, Graham, Bernstein, physicist Jungsang Kim of Duke University in Durham, NC, and scientist Hamid Javadi of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA -- recently received funding from NASA Headquarter's Space Communication and Navigation program (with project directors Badri Younes and Barry Geldzahler) to explore the possibility.
"It would be a stepping stone toward building a quantum communications network, a system of nodes on Earth and in space that would enable communication from any node to any other node," Kwiat explains. "For this, we're experimenting with different quantum state properties that would be less susceptible to air turbulence disruptions."
The team's recent experimental findings are published in the May 28, 2015 issue of Nature Communications, and represent the collaborative effort Kwiat, Graham, and Bernstein, as well as physicist Tzu-Chieh Wei of State University of New York at Stony Brook, and mathematician Marius Junge of the University of Illinois.

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by University of Illinois College of Engineering. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.