The researchers used a type of powerful X-ray imaging in order to discover internal soft-tissue movements that were massively out of sync with the external body movements (the X-rays were used because large caterpillars are entirely opaque). Afterwards, they verified these findings by using transmission-light microscopy to see the internal soft-tissue movements of smaller, translucent caterpillars as they slowly inched their way along a glass microscope slide.

This combined imaging showed that the caterpillar’s gut slid forward in advance of the surrounding tissues. The novelty is that the caterpillar’s center of mass moves forward while the middle “legs” are anchored to the substrate. The internal gut movements are locally decoupled from visible translations of the body.

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This movement meant the abdomen typically advanced an entire step forward before the body wall caught up. The researchers described their findings as “a unique phenomenon of gut sliding”. For more information about their research read the paper that will be featured in the upcoming issue of Current Biology: “Visceral-Locomotory Pistoning in Crawling Caterpillars”.

Since the research team is also interested in engineering applications, they moved from considering the biological implications of their findings to potential uses in soft-bodied robots. The potential these robots have is large, due to their shape-shifting ability. These shape-shifting robots could be used in search-and-rescue operations, medical applications and space research applications. Let’s see if they’ll come up with something more advanced than Chem-bot – iRobot’s shape-shifting blob robot we described in one of our previous articles.

He and his collaborators have created an innovative perching mechanism where the robot flies head first into the object without being destroyed during landing. After landing it is able to attach to almost any type of surface by using its sharp prongs. It then detaches on command. The goal is to create robots that can travel in swarms over rough terrain to come to the aide of catastrophe victims.

“We are not blindly imitating nature, but using the same principles to possibly improve on it,” explained Kovac. “Simple behavioral laws such as jumping, flying and perching lead to complex control over movement without the need for high computational power.”

Jumping, gliding and perching allow greater mobility over rocky territory or destroyed urban areas. This new form of AI takes its inspiration from the insect world, but is more as an abstract reflection on their instincts and design principles than merely imitating their morphology. This simplicity allows for greater mobility since the robots are not bogged down with heavy batteries.

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The labs most recent innovation, perching a robot, saves valuable energy by allowing the robot to rest like insects or birds do. Many previous perching mechanisms include a complicated swooping maneuver to decrease momentum and land on legs, often without the ability of detaching. The mechanism avoids this problem by using two spring-loaded arms fitted with pins that dig into the surface, whether it is wood or concrete.

The snapping of the arms creates a forward momentum, allowing for a soft deceleration of the glider and avoiding mechanical damage. A remotely controlled mini-motor then detracts the pins and allows the robot to continue on its way.

“I am fascinated by the creative process,” said Kovac, “and how it is possible to use the sophistication found in nature to create something completely new.” The perching mechanism can be easily adapted to other robots. His previous robot, a quarter-gram jumping robot that can achieve heights of up to 1.4 meters (4.5 feet), could now be fitted with the new perching mechanism as well as wings, thus creating a hybrid creature that gets around much like a flying grasshopper.

Kovac imagines swarms of his robots equipped with different sensors and small cameras that could be deployed over devastated areas to transmit essential information back to rescue command centers. Who knows, we could see swarms of flying robots soaring into a blazing forest fire or other danger areas in near future. You can find more information in the research paper published in the Journal of Micro – Nano Mechatronics: “A perching mechanism for micro aerial vehicles”.

The sandfish used in the study inhabits the Sahara desert in Africa and it is approximately 10 cm (4 inches) long. It uses its long, wedge -shaped snout and countersunk lower jaw to rapidly bury into and swim within sand. The sandfish’s body has flattened sides and is covered with smooth shiny scales, its legs are short and sturdy with long and flattened fringed toes and its tail tapers to a fine point.

To conduct controlled experiments with the sandfish, Daniel Goldman, physicist at CRAB Lab of Georgia Institute of Technology, and graduate students Ryan Maladen, Yang Ding and Chen Li built a glass bead-filled container with tiny holes in the bottom through which air could be blown. The air pulses elevated the beads and caused them to settle into a loosely packed solid state. Repeated pulses of air compact the material, thus allowing the researchers to closely control the density of the material. Since they weren’t able to observe the movement of the lizard bellow the surface, they used high-speed x-ray imaging system to record animal’s movement.

“Since loosely packed media is easier to push through and closely packed is harder to push through, we thought there should be some difference in the sandfish’s locomotion,” said Goldman. “But the results surprised us because the density of the granular media did not affect how the sandfish traveled through the sand; it was always the same undulatory wavelike pattern.”

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For a given wave frequency, the swimming speed depended only on the frequency of the wave and not on the density. The researchers found that the swimming speed varied depending on the frequency of the undulations, about 2 to 4 per second. Interestingly, speed was unaffected by how compacted the sand was. The researchers determined that that was because the drag and thrust forces increase in compact sand, and thus the ratio of these forces is no different than it is in more loosely packed sand.

Working with Paul Umbanhowar of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the team plugged their results into a computer model, which they used to show that a snake-like robot with just seven body segments could travel through a granular medium like sand.

The team built a 35 centimeters (13.8 inches) long version of the robot, made from seven aluminum segments linked by six motors, all clothed in spandex to prevent the motors from becoming jammed. Afterwards, they tested the robot by burying it in a container filled with small plastic spheres.

When the robot undulated its body at a frequency similar to the lizard, they found it could move forward at speeds of up to 0.3 body lengths per wave cycle (close to 0.4 body lengths per cycle that a submerged lizard can achieve). The researchers say the robot could eventually match the lizard for speed if more jointed segments are added to make its movements smoother.

This is another great example of biomimicry that could help the development of rescue robots used to find people in deserts or in loose debris resulting from an earthquake. With its improvement and a few modifications, this robot could be used to explore under the grainy surface of planets and natural satellites. For more information, you can read the paper they publihes in Science magazine “Undulatory Swimming in Sand: Subsurface Locomotion of the Sandfish Lizard“.

The key breakthrough came in the development of a matrix that can assemble itself through interaction with a thermosensitive surface. The protein composition of that matrix can be customized to generate specific properties, and the nanofabric can then be lifted off as a sheet by altering temperature.

“To date it has been very difficult to replicate this extracellular matrix using manmade materials,” said Adam W. Feinberg, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University who will be an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall. “But we thought if cells can build this matrix at the surface of their membranes, maybe we can build it ourselves on a surface too. We were thrilled to see that we could.”

Feinberg is the lead author of paper named: Surface-Initiated Assembly of Protein Nanofabrics. Coauthor Kit Parker is a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Applied Science and Associate Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS, and a member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

The study is a major breakthrough in the field of protein nanofabrics, because current methods of creating regenerating tissue use synthetic polymers that can cause negative side effects when they degrade in the body. By contrast, nanofabrics are made from the same proteins as normal tissue, and thus the body can degrade them with no ill effects once they are no longer needed. Initial results have produced strands of heart muscle similar to the papillary muscle, which may lead to new strategies for repair and regeneration throughout the heart.

“With nanofabrics, we can control thread count, orientation, and composition, and that capability allows us to create novel tissue engineering scaffolds that direct regeneration,” said Parker. “It also enables us to exploit the nanoscale properties of these proteins in new ways beyond medical applications. There are a broad range of applications for this technology using natural, or designer, synthetic proteins.”

High-performance textiles are the second main application for this technology. By altering the type of protein used in the matrix, researchers can manipulate thread count, fiber orientation, and other properties to create fabrics with extraordinary properties. Today, an average rubber band can be stretched 500 to 600 percent, but future textiles may be stretchable by as much as 1,500 percent. Future applications for such textiles are as diverse as form-fitting clothing, bandages that accelerate healing, and industrial manufacturing.

The colors displayed on beetles, butterflies and other insects have long fascinated both physicists and biologists, but mimicking nature’s most colorful, eye-catching surfaces has proved elusive. This is partly because rather than relying on pigments, these colors are produced by light which reflects off microscopic structures on the insects’ wings.

Mathias Kolle, working with Professor Ullrich Steiner and Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the University of Cambridge, studied the Indonesian Peacock or Swallowtail butterfly (Papilio blumei), whose wing scales are composed of complex microscopic structures that resemble the inside of an egg carton. Because of their shape and the fact that they are made up of alternate layers of cuticle and air, these structures produce intense colors.

By using a combination of nanofabrication procedures (including self-assembly and atomic layer deposition), Kolle and his colleagues made structurally identical copies of the butterfly scales, and these copies produced the same vivid colors as the butterflies’ wings.

“We have unlocked one of nature’s secrets and combined this knowledge with state-of-the-art nanofabrication to mimic the intricate optical designs found in nature”, said Kolle. “Although nature is better at self-assembly than we are, we have the advantage that we can use a wider variety of artificial, custom-made materials to optimize our optical structures.”

Interestingly, the butterfly may also be using its colors to appear differently to its potential mates and predators. Seen with the right optical equipment, these patches appear bright blue, but with the naked eye they appear green. If its eyes see fellow butterflies as bright blue, while predators only see green patches in a green tropical environment, the butterfly has advantage to hide from predators at the same time as remaining visible to members of its own species.

As well as helping scientists gain a deeper understanding of the physics behind these butterflies’ colors, being able to mimic them has promising applications in security printing.

“These artificial structures could be used to encrypt information in optical signatures on banknotes or other valuable items to protect them against forgery. We still need to refine our system but in future we could see structures based on butterflies wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports”, Kolle said.

“We aim to understand the echolocation process that bats have evolved over millennia, and employ similar signals and techniques in engineering systems. We are currently looking to apply these methods to positioning of robotic vehicles, which are used for structural testing. This will provide enhanced information on the robots’ locations, and hence the location of any structural flaws they may detect”, said researcher Simon Whiteley from the Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering at the University of Strathclyde.

Whiteley and his colleagues recorded the echolocation calls of six Egyptian fruit bats that were mounted with miniature wireless microphone sensor. The bats generate these calls with “clicks” from their tongues that fill their surroundings with acoustic energy. The pace of the return of the sound waves sketches the dimensions of the bats’ environment and lets them zip around even when lighting is quite poor.

During echolocation, some bats are known to use a natural acoustic gain control. This allows them to emit high-intensity calls without deafening themselves, and then to hear the weak echoes returning from surrounding objects.

The six bats performed up to sixteen flights each along a flight corridor. Each flight was short (lasting only about three seconds), however, since the bats’ clicks last only a quarter of a millisecond, a large number of calls were recorded for the scientists to analyze. Afterwards, the researchers were able to accurately recreate the echolocation calls in their laboratory by using a custom-built ultrasonic loudspeaker.

The research was conducted as part of a larger program of research known as BIAS (Biologically Inspired Acoustic Systems) that included the Universities of Southampton and Leeds. The team believes the techniques could have a wide range of potential applications, including improving the location-finding abilities of people with hearing aids or cochlear implants, or even making medical ultrasound systems more sensitive and able to pick out different tissue types under the skin or positioning of robotic vehicles used in structural testing applications.

Since moths have to hide from predators, they search for food at dusk. While most of the other insect’s eyes shimmer, the moth’s eyes are perfectly non-reflecting. It is possible due to tiny protuberances smaller than the wavelength of light which form a periodic structure on the surface. This nanostructure creates a gentle transition between the refractive indices of the air and the cornea, providing the reduction in reflection of light and enabling moth to remain undetected.

Researchers have adopted this natural ability and adapted it to a range of different applications. Whereas conventional methods apply the anti-reflective coating in a separate step after production, the Fraunhofer scientists have found a way of reducing light reflection during actual manufacture of the part or component: “We have modified conventional injection molding in such a way that the desired nanostructure is imparted to the surface during the process,” explained Dr. Frank Burmeister, project manager at the IWM.

In order to achieve that, the researchers have developed a hard material coating which reproduces the optically effective surface structure. “We use this to coat the molding tools,” said Burmeister. “When the viscous polymer melt is injected into the mold, the nanostructures are transferred directly to the component.” Because no second process step is required, manufacturers achieve an enormous cost saving and also increase efficiency. “Normally the component would have to undergo an additional separate process to apply the anti-reflex coating,” Burmeister adds.

Normal plexiglass and some anti-reflex coatings are particularly sensitive, but the scientists are producing wipe-resistant and scratch-proof surfaces. For this purpose the injection mold is additionally flooded with an ultra-thin organic substance made of polyurethane. The substance runs into every gap and hardens, like a two-component adhesive. The result is an extremely thin nanocoating of polyurethane on which the optically effective surface structures, which are just one ten-thousandth of a millimeter thick, are also reproduced.

Working in cooperation with industrial partners, the research scientists aim to develop components for the auto industry because the material is not only attractive but it’s also hard-wearing and easy to clean. The technology could be easily applied on eyeglasses, cell phone displays, fitting or panel covers, and other transparent surfaces which are useful only if they allow viewing without light reflecting back.

The new helmet, named SuperSkin, tackles this directly using a special new technology that mimics nature’s own simple design – skull and skin. Superior in design compared to standard helmets, stringent tests show that the SuperSkin product design reduces rotational impact by an unprecedented 50% and the subsequent possibility of brain damage by 67.5%.

Managing director of IDC, Stephen Knowles, explains, “Traditionally, motorcycle helmets have been rigid in design. We needed to introduce a dynamic element of movement to dramatically reduce the rotational impact which often causes life-threatening injuries. On impact, the outer membrane is able to stretch and slide over the main helmet shell to prevent these dangerous rotational forces being transmitted to the head and brain.”

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The product development process brought together IDC’s engineers, model makers and designers to develop a skin-like membrane that would slide on the surface of the helmet without breaking on impact. CAD software provided a quick means to transforming the concept into a series of tangible designs. But central to the intensive research and development process was rapid prototyping.

Precision CNC machining paved the way for multiple impact absorbing liners for the helmet to be sculpted from a polystyrene block with optimum absorbance performance, allowing the team to test each design change along the way. The membrane was also tested in the same way.

The product design required careful selection of materials. A strong synthetic sits on top of the gel-like lubricant to form a protective layer across the surface of the helmet. State-of -the-art vacuum casting was used to create prototypes and the materials tested for resistance and strength. The chosen synthetic stretched up to eight times its original length.

Although unfortunately there is still no fail-safe protections for preventing road accidents, the consequences of these accidents can be lessened thanks to constant technological progress and inventions as SuperSkin.

Calcium carbonate is the main ingredient of chalk, which is very brittle and breaks easily when force is applied. But shells are strong and resistant to fracturing, and this is because the calcium carbonate is combined with proteins which bind the crystals together, like bricks in a wall, to make the material stronger and sometimes tougher. They have developed an effective method of combining calcite crystals with polystyrene particles which makes the material more ductile compared to its original brittle form.

Dr Stephen Eichhorn from The School of Materials at The University of Manchester, conducted the experiments in collaboration with Professor Fiona Meldrum in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, where they observed that when the reinforced material cracked, the polymer lengthened within the cracks thus acting as a well-known mechanism for absorbing energy and enhancing toughness. Researchers say their method allows the properties of the new material to be tweaked by selecting particles of different shapes, sizes and composition.

“The mechanical properties of shells can rival those of man-made ceramics, which are engineered at high temperatures and pressures. Their construction helps to distribute stress over the structure and control the spread of cracks”, Eichhorn said. “Further research and testing is still needed but our research potentially offers a straightforward method of engineering new and tough chalk-based composite materials with a wide range of useful applications.”

Their technique could be used to make ceramics with high resistance to cracking thus ensuring its usage in crack-resistant building materials and bone replacements.

The individual byssal threads that compose the byssus are stiff, but stretchy and are fashioned by the mussel in a process resembling injection molding. Byssal threads are depended upon for dissipating the energy of crashing waves and also for resisting abrasive damage from water-borne debris. To this end, threads are sheathed with a thin and knobby outer cuticle; a biological polymer, which exhibits epoxy-like hardness, while straining up to 100% without cracking.

When viewed under a scanning electron microscope, the byssal cuticles have a knobby appearance. This is because they contain numerous submicron-sized granular inclusions, which are distributed in a continuous matrix. It is believed that when the cuticle is stretched, submicron-sized tears occur in this matrix, hindering the formation of larger cracks.

Central to understanding the peculiar mechanical behaviour of the cuticle are the high concentration of iron ions in the cuticle and the presence of an uncommon modification of the amino acid tyrosine known commonly as dopa. Dopa is found at high concentrations in the main cuticle component, mussel foot protein-1 (mfp-1). Dopa is distinguished from typical amino acids due to its impressive affinity for complexing with transition metal ions, particularly iron. As Admir Masic, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces who worked on the project, explains, “when 2-3 dopa residues complex with a single iron ion, they create an incredibly stable complex that can be utilized to cross-link structural proteins.” These metal-protein complexes have a high breaking force (nearly half that of covalent bonds), but unlike covalent bonds they are reversibly breakable, making them ideal for creating sacrificial cross-links.

Using a technique known as in situ Raman spectroscopy to probe the chemical composition of the cuticle, the researchers provided the first direct evidence that the cuticle is a protein-based polymeric scaffold stabilized by dopa-iron complexes. Moreover, it was discovered that the distribution of dopa-iron complexes is clustered, with areas of high density coinciding with the granular inclusions and low density with the inter-granular matrix. These observations, coupled with previous mechanical observations suggest that the densely cross-linked granules function as hard inclusions and the less cross-linked matrix functions in a sacrificial manner, allowing bonds to break prior to catastrophic failure.

“Nature has evolved an elegant solution to a problem that engineers are still struggling with; namely, how to combine the properties of abrasion resistance and high extensibility in the same material”, says Peter Fratzl, director of the biomaterials department at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces. Apparently, the cuticle achieves this through a careful tailoring of protein-metal chemistry and the submicron organization of cross-link density. “Conceivably, this same strategy could be applied in engineered polymers and composites.”