Friday, April 4, 2025

Making Materials Progress


Make it stop: 

'Living' ceramics utilize bacteria for gas sensing and carbon capture
Dec 2024, phys.org

The work involved first 3D printing stacked, ceramic, spiral structures that could stand on their own. The structures were printed with pits on their outer surfaces to give bacteria a place to live. The larger pits were used as a way to channel nutrients to the bacteria.

To further ensure the bacteria could feed for an extended period of time, they set the structures in shallow pools of nutrient solutions. As the water in the solutions evaporated, the nutrients were pulled up to the pits containing the nutrients via capillary action. The bacteria were then allowed to multiply, filling the pores that had been designed for them. Testing showed they could survive without further nutrients for up to two weeks.

The research team used different types of bacteria for different purposes—with photosynthetic cyanobacteria, for example, the structure could serve as a CO2 extraction device, pulling the gas from the air. They also tried Escherichia coli and found that they made the structure a formaldehyde detector.

via ETH Zurich: Alessandro Dutto et al, Living Porous Ceramics for Bacteria‐Regulated Gas Sensing and Carbon Capture, Advanced Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202412555


Self-adjusting shading system mimics pine cones for energy-autonomous weather response
Jan 2025, phys.org

"We are achieving a shading system that opens and closes autonomously in response to changes in the weather, without the need for operational energy or any mechatronic elements. The bio-material structure itself is the machine."

It's based on pine cones. In high humidity, the cellulosic materials absorb moisture and expand, causing the printed elements to curl and open. Conversely, in low humidity, the cellulosic materials release moisture and contract, causing the printed elements to flatten and close.

via University of Stuttgart Institute for Computational Design and Construction: Tiffany Cheng et al, Weather-responsive adaptive shading through biobased and bioinspired hygromorphic 4D-printing, Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54808-8


Unoccupied housing in China's urban areas emitting massive amounts of carbon, study finds
Mar 2025, phys.org

Prior research has shown that by 2021, approximately 17% of homes built in cities in China were unoccupied. Some in the field have suggested that the number has only grown since then, to between 20 and 65 million unoccupied units. This new research found that approximately 17.4% of all new residential units built between 2001 and 2018 have never been occupied. 

The total the team came up with was 55.81 million tons of carbon emissions solely due to the unoccupied housing units, which they note represent approximately 6.9% of China's total residential emissions. (One source of emissions is the footprint of the materials, and the second comes from heating and cooling, because most of the units are apartment buildings with central heating and cooling.)

via Tsinghua University: Hefan Zheng et al, Unused housing in urban China and its carbon emission impact, Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57217-7

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Thursday, April 3, 2025

Captain Tying Knots


With all the topological mention these days, we have to ask - whatever happened to knots?

String figures shed light on cultural connections and the roots of mathematical reasoning
Dec 2024, phys.org

String figure games (like cat's cradle or jacob's ladder?) involve the manipulation of a loop of string with the fingers to create complex patterns. The researchers analyzed 826 string figures from 92 cultures around the world. They found 83 recurring designs. The results show that certain figures are globally prevalent. In certain cases, this suggests ancient cultural origins potentially extending back millennia. 

The researchers applied mathematical knot theory to develop a computational method to create a DNA-like symbolic representation of each string figure. This enables the cross-cultural comparison of string figures and the construction of their "family tree."

via University of Helsinki, Aarhus University, National Museum of Denmark and Seattle University: Roope O. Kaaronen et al, A global cross-cultural analysis of string figures reveals evidence of deep transmission and innovation, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0673

Image credit: Fingers, not bad, not good enough. AI Art - Let Go - 2025

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Wednesday, April 2, 2025

The Graphene Zoo

 

From its slightly accidental inception 20 years ago, graphene has now turned into a large branch on the tree of technogenetic life.

Decoding 2D material growth: White graphene insights open doors to cleaner energy and more efficient electronics
Jan 2025, phys.org

White Graphene - the name for hexagonal boron nitride (where you blast out some of the carbon atoms from graphene and fill them with boron nitride instead)

via University of Surrey and Graz University of Technology: Anthony J. R. Payne et al, Unravelling the Epitaxial Growth Mechanism of Hexagonal and Nanoporous Boron Nitride: A First‐Principles Microkinetic Model, Small (2025). DOI: 10.1002/smll.202405404



Graphyne's transformation: A new carbon form with potential for electronics
Feb 2025, phys.org

Graphyne - It's not graphene, it's not carbon like diamonds with its 3-D lattice, it's not like graphite with its 2-D lattice, and it's not graphene with it's 1-D 2-D lattice. It's a 1-D 2-D 3-D lattice. Got it?

via Case Western Reserve University: Ali E. Aliev et al, A planar-sheet nongraphitic zero-bandgap sp2 carbon phase made by the low-temperature reaction of γ-graphyne, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413194122


Synthetic diamond with hexagonal lattice outshines the natural kind with unprecedented hardness
Feb 2025, phys.org

Synthetic hexagonal diamonds - heating graphene samples to high temperatures while inside a high-pressure chamber. By adjusting the parameters of their setup, the researchers found they could get the graphene to grow into a synthetic diamond with hexagonal lattices.

via Umeå University and materials scientists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in China such as Jilin University: Desi Chen et al, General approach for synthesizing hexagonal diamond by heating post-graphite phases, Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02126-9


Olympicene molecular chains create quantum spin systems with spintronics applications
Mar 2025, phys.org

Olympicenes - open-shell nanographenes (shaped like the Olympics logo)

via Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics: Chenxiao Zhao et al, Spin excitations in nanographene-based antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 Heisenberg chains, Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02166-1

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Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Headlines From the Front Lines


It may be April Fool's, but the headlines are real.

Iberian nailed head ritual was more complex than expected, isotope analysis reveals
Feb 2025, phys.org

Not trying to be anti-literacy here, it's just that sometimes the headline is all you need. (Although this particular headline below requires the accompanying image.)

via Autonomous University of Barcelona: Rubén de la Fuente-Seoane et al, Territorialisation and human mobility during the Iron Age in NE Iberia: An approach through Isotope Analyses of the Severed Heads from Puig Castellar (Barcelona, Spain) and Ullastret (Girona, Spain), Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105035



Antioxidant carbon dot nanozymes alleviate depression in rats by restoring the gut microbiome
Sep 2024, phys.org

Some headlines just make me feel like how a cracked windshield can become the the quintessential heavy metal band name font, but for like a mad scientist type of science thing. 

via Henan Joint International Research Laboratory of Nanomaterials for Energy and Catalysis at Xuchang University: Huimin Jia et al, Antioxidant Carbon Dots Nanozymes Alleviate Stress-induced Depression by Modulating Gut Microbiota, Langmuir (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.4c02481


Google reacts angrily to report it will have to sell Chrome
Nov 2024, BBC News


'Alzheimer's in dish' model shows promise for accelerating drug discovery
Nov 2024, phys.org

(Alzheimer's isn't funny but Alzheimer's-in-a-dish is funny.)

via Massachusetts General Hospital: Yeganeah, PN et al. Integrative Pathway Analysis across Humans and 3D Cellular Models Identifies the p38 MAPK-MK2 Axis as a Therapeutic Target for Alzheimer's Disease, Neuron (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.10.029.


Topological quantum processor uses Majorana zero modes for fault-tolerant computing
Feb 2025, phys.org

It's got all the words - majorana fermion, topological things, and quantum computers - but I still don't buy it because it's Microsoft and they lie about shit all the time. In fact, I'm going to assume that specifically because it's a Microsoft press release, that it was engineered to have all these words on purpose. Shall we say, a kind of artificial headline generator trained on hype words more than the actual work that was done. 

(Actual scientists working in academia are not convinced, by the way.)

via UC Santa Barbara and Microsoft Station Q: David Aasen et al, Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.12252


Biohybrid hand uses sushi-like rolls of lab-grown human muscle to move objects
Feb 2025, phys.org

via University of Tokyo: XINZHU REN et al, Biohybrid hand actuated by multiple human muscle tissues, Science Robotics (2025). DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adr5512.


Engineers develop a fully 3D-printed electrospray engine that can power tiny satellites
Feb 2025, phys.org

via MIT: Hyeonseok Kim et al, High‐Impulse, Modular, 3D‐Printed CubeSat Electrospray Thrusters Throttleable via Pressure and Voltage Control, Advanced Science (2025). DOI: 10.1002/advs.202413706

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Monday, March 31, 2025

Does It Compute


AKA All Computers All the Time

Right now a computer is a box that sits on your desk. It's plugged in. Maybe it's a little box, one you keep in your pocket. That one's not plugged in, but it does need power. Soon, the computer will not be a thing. Instead, all things will be a computer. Maybe it's better to say that all things will compute. And like instead of saying 'there's an app for that' we might hear instead 'does it compute'? Like, "Can you pass me the paper towel?" "Does it compute?" Or, "Hey I just got a new haircut." "But does it compute?" 

First - The Fiber Computer:

Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and 'understand' the wearer
Feb 2025, phys.org

It's an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, Bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

"Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most, if not all, of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear."

via MIT, RISD, Brown, Stanford, Soldier Nanotechnologies: Yoel Fink, A single-fibre computer enables textile networks and distributed inference, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08568-6. 



Materials can remember a sequence of events in an unexpected way
Jan 202,5 phys.org

Material memory is like wrinkles on a crumpled piece of paper. These memories are stored in disordered solids in which the arrangement of particles seems random but actually contains details about past deformations. Materials should not be able to form return-point memory when the force only occurs in one direction. For example, a bridge might sag slightly as cars drive over it, but it doesn't curve upwards once the cars are gone.

The researchers boiled down the components of the system—such as the particles in a solid or the microscopic domains in a magnet—into abstract elements called hysterons. "Hysterons are elements of a system that may not immediately respond to external conditions, and can stay in a past state."

The hysterons in the model interact either in a cooperative way, where a change in one encourages a change in the other, or in a non-cooperative "frustrated" way, where a change in one discourages a change in the other. Frustrated hysterons are the key to forming and recovering a sequence in a system with asymmetric driving.

"We think this is a way to design artificial systems with this special kind of memory, starting with the simplest mechanical systems not much more complicated than a bendy straw, and hopefully working up to something like an asymmetrical combination lock."

via Penn State: Chloe Lindeman et al, Generalizing multiple memories from a single drive: The hysteron latch, Science Advances (2025). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adr5933


Soap's maze-solving skills could unlock secrets of the human body
Jan 2025, phys.org

"Surfactants—the molecules found in soap—can naturally find its way through a maze"

We're talking about things acting like people. Imagine discovering that chairs can figure out how to best position themselves in a theater. Or the straps on your backpack can figure out the best length for positioning the pack on your back depending on the weight and the way you walk etc. Your pencil can figure out how to write a better sentence for convincing your roommate to do the dishes. I'm just trying to imagine what this all means.  

"When we put soap into a liquid filled maze, the natural surfactants already present in the liquid interact, creating an omniscient view of the maze, so the soap can intuitively find the correct path, ignoring all other irrelevant paths. This behavior occurs due to very subtle but powerful physics where the two types of surfactants generate tension forces that guide the soap to the exit."

Yes, they called soap bubbles omniscient. 

via Department of Mathematics at the University of Manchester: Richard Mcnair et al, Exogenous–Endogenous Surfactant Interaction Yields Heterogeneous Spreading in Complex Branching Networks, Physical Review Letters (2025). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.034001

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Sunday, March 30, 2025

On Language the Universal Autoencoder

 
  
The 'Arrow of Time' effect: LLMs are better at predicting what comes next than what came before
Sep 2024, phys.org

Their performance at predicting the previous word is always a few percent worse than at predicting the next word. This phenomenon is universal across languages, and can be observed with any large language model."

"In theory, there should be no difference between the forward and backward directions, but LLMs appear to be somehow sensitive to the time direction in which they process text. Interestingly, this is related to a deep property of the structure of language that could only be discovered with the emergence of large language models in the last five years."

via EPFL Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne: Vassilis Papadopoulos et al, Arrows of Time for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2401.17505



Ouch! Study investigates pain vocalizations and interjections across 131 languages
Nov 2024, phys.org

Each of the three emotions yielded consistent and distinct vowel signatures across cultures. Pain interjections also featured similar open vowels, such as "a," and wide falling diphthongs, such as "ai" in "Ayyy!" and "aw" in "Ouch!"

However, for disgusted and joyful emotions, in contrast to vocalizations, the interjections lacked regularities across cultures. The researchers expressed surprise at this latter finding.

Is this because disgust is cultural, or at least not entirely physical, and heavily mediated by culture, as compared to actual pain? This is commonly understood in the realm of olfactory perception, where some people think the smell of revolting, rotten fish is delicious (they're Norwegian). Or the smell of vomit (they're Italian, Parmesan to be specific), or the smell of the inside of the skin folds of a homeless person who hasn't been able to bathe in months (they're called New Yorkers, and they kind of long for the smell of the subway, which contains these volatiles). In fact, anything that's fermented is so close to rotten food, that unless you've been culturally conditioned to like it, you won't, at least not at first. Cilantro, I'm looking at you too. 

via CNRS et Université Lumière Lyon, School of Social Sciences at University of Western Australia, and Institute of Psychology at University of Wrocław: Vowel signatures in emotional interjections and nonlinguistic vocalizations expressing pain, disgust and joy across languages, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2024). DOI: 10.1121/10.0032454


Words activate hidden brain processes shaping emotions, decisions and behavior
Jan 2025, phys.org

Words have meaning, but they also have emotional meaning:

"There's no single brain region handling this activity, and it's not as simple as one chemical representing one emotion."

(These studies were done thanks to the participation of patients being treated for epilepsy.)

The researchers discovered emotionally charged words - whether positive, negative, or neutral - modulate neurotransmitter release. By measuring the sub-second dynamics of the releases, they identified distinct patterns tied to emotional tone, anatomical regions, and which hemisphere of the brain was involved.

"The surprising result came from the thalamus. This region hasn't been thought to have a role in processing language or emotional content, yet we saw neurotransmitter changes in response to emotional words. This suggests that even brain regions not typically associated with emotional or linguistic processing might still be privy to that information. For instance, parts of the brain responsible for mobilizing movement might benefit from having access to emotionally significant information to guide behavior."

Note: The words used in the study were drawn from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database, which rates words by positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence.

via Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute: Seth R. Batten et al, Emotional words evoke region- and valence-specific patterns of concurrent neuromodulator release in human thalamus and cortex, Cell Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2024.115162

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Saturday, March 29, 2025

The Artist Within


The first tremblings of terror come from a computer program that can write a legal brief, and then argue in real time against a trained human lawyer. But that's obvious. Diagnosing cancer by looking at an x-ray? Pssh. Saw that coming. 

The way technology co-evolves with our species is by getting in the middle of the more creative processes, because that's insidious, which means we don't notice, and so we can't stop it.

The advance of creative pursuit is circuitous, it's unmeasurable, and subject to unannounced yet dramatic shifts in paradigmatic underpinnings. In fact, nobody is even arguing that it's a kind of progress. Your benchmarks, your metrics - they have no power here. A state board of medical examiners will tell you how good this year's crop of doctors perform on their exams etc. There is no national artist database counting the overall social effects of Banksy's automated self-destructive artwork, or Kehinde Wiley's painting of Barack Obama. Because that's not how that works. 

When you let the robot into the house - the temple that is your body and the mind that controls it - it does things there. And because this isn't a real place, it's hard for us to keep track of what's happening. 

These things start small, and they don't seem like a big deal, because who cares if a robot is making art, or even suggestions for making art. I mean it's not like it's making executive orders from the Presidential Office, right? And the willingness to use an automated industrial process to reproduce imagery, let's say via Japanese woodcuts or Andy Warhol's prints, vs "requiring" that a human, perhaps a shaman, maybe just an "artist", to make each image from their own hands, what did that do to us as a species? Did that change us more than allowing in-vitro fertilization for reproduction? Or birth control pills? I doubt it. Then again, maybe they're related (for example by changing the way we value and rely on "real" humans among us). 

We can't answer these questions very well, but we can probably agree that this is where shit gets weird:

Graph-based AI model finds hidden links between science and art to suggest novel materials
Nov 2024, phys.org

They analyze a collection of 1,000 scientific papers about biological materials and turn them into a knowledge map in the form of a graph, using "category theory". The graph revealed how different pieces of information are connected and was able to find groups of related ideas and key points that link many concepts together.

Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and "Symphony No. 9," suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity.

In another experiment, the graph-based AI model recommended creating a new biological material inspired by the abstract patterns found in Wassily Kandinsky's painting, "Composition VII." The AI suggested a new mycelium-based composite material. "The result of this material combines an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos and order, adjustable property, porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionality."


Above image: Mycelium-based biological material inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition VII - Markus Buehler at MIT - 2025 [link]

via MIT: Markus J Buehler, Accelerating scientific discovery with generative knowledge extraction, graph-based representation, and multimodal intelligent graph reasoning, Machine Learning: Science and Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1088/2632-2153/ad7228

Thumbnail image credit: Graffiti from Berlin Wall stone section - Chew Yen Fook Nikon Small World - 2024

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