Fully Fungible Body Futures

All of the sudden, the digital twin is here. It's not a perennial topic in science fiction, it's not something that has ever been posted here, at least not until the past year. And it's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal; in fact, we're not even sure what it's for. (It has been around since the 1970's though, used to understand NASA spaceships).

The one thing it is -- it's easy to understand. You make a digital version of yourself, modeled in a computer, living in a simulation, if you will, and constantly updated with real-time data, so that we can run experiments on it ---instead of running the experiments on you---. 

If you're a cancer patient, with all the bits and pieces that make you who you are, and we want to know if our cancer treatment will work in concert or against all those bits and pieces of yourself, we could always just give you the treatment and see what happens, right? Isn't there a better way? Yes, now there is. 

And one day, sometime between when you get a much better result from your cancer treatment and when the entire human race has been uploaded to low earth orbit satellite router networks, we will watch as these twins, or doubles, or avatars (or self-replicates) become more important than the bodies they serve. 

Unrelated image credit: Oort Cloud Pablo Carlos Budassi via Wikimedia

Creating 'digital twins' at scale to improve drone deliveries

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-digital-twins-scale-drone-deliveries.html

A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call.

Kapteyn and colleagues sought out a unifying mathematical representation of the relationship between a digital twin and its associated physical asset that was not specific to a particular application or use. The researchers' model mathematically defines a pair of physical and digital dynamic systems, coupled together via two-way data streams as they evolve over time. 

"I think this idea of maintaining a persistent set of computational models that are constantly being updated and evolved alongside a physical asset over its entire life cycle is really the essence of digital twins," says Kapteyn.

via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Michael G. Kapteyn et al, A probabilistic graphical model foundation for enabling predictive digital twins at scale, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00069-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43588-021-00069-0

Tumor avatars' predict patients' response to immunotherapy

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-tumor-avatars-patients-response-immunotherapy.html

This is just a simple explanation of how digital twin technology works in medicine:

"We first cut patient tumor samples into small pieces and then treat these 'tumor avatars' outside the patient's body with different therapies, to see which one works."

via Netherlands Cancer Institute: An ex vivo tumor fragment platform to dissect response to PD-1 blockade in cancer, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01398-3 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01398-3

Digital twins for cancer patients could be 'paradigm shift' for predictive oncology

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-digital-twins-cancer-patients-paradigm.html

We've also been hearing this term used in reference to NFTs, in the context that you will soon need to establish a digital deed for yourself, before someone else does it for you, if you know what I'm saying.

But back to the story at hand:

Cancer Patient Digital Twins (CDPTs) would reflect a patient's molecular, physiological and lifestyle characteristics as they evolve over time and across different treatments, and help "usher in a new age in medicine" by increasing the probability of optimal care, the authors concluded.

It would address changes across timescales from the molecular level to the population level, and as the patient's disease state evolves, the digital twin would incorporate real-time observational data to predict future states.

Researchers envision clinicians will use CPDTs to perform virtual experiments, simulating the patient's disease trajectory under different treatments. At each visit with a clinician, the predictions would be compared with real-life measurements to assess the digital twin's performance and update it in a "continuous learning" loop to inform patient decision making.

via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Tina Hernandez-Boussard et al, Digital twins for predictive oncology will be a paradigm shift for precision cancer care, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01558-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41591-021-01558-5

Post Script:

Who owns "digitaltwin.com" you ask?

General Electric - Digital Twin Creation - GE builds highly complex physical assets essential to critical infrastructure including energy production and distribution, air and locomotive transport, and healthcare.  A Digital Twin is developed and informed by a massive amount of design, manufacture, inspection, repair, online sensor and operational data and employs a collection of high-fidelity computational physics-based models and advanced analytics to forecast the health and performance of the asset over its lifetime.  The accuracy of the Digital Twin’s representation grows over time as more data refines the model and similar assets are deployed with their own Digital Twins.  Data are gathered continually to maintain an up-to-date model.  The Digital Twin provides detailed knowledge of the asset, forecasts based on “what if” scenarios and a live reference from which to build applications to optimize services, performance, efficiency, maintenance, supply chain, business operations and more.

Contact Us To Build Your Digital Twin

Notes:

Polish singer claims to be the first in the world to sell off digitalised parts of her BODY as NFTs with her 'rarest parts' including 'G-spot, nipples and lips' starting at £73,000. Daily Mail. Sep 2021. [link]

The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier (2021) is a virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic, a witty variation on the doppelgänger theme. It's not about the concept of digital twins, but I thought it might fit here regardless. [goodreads link]

Digital Body Brokers and Future Futures (aka The Intergalactic Bodynet), 2021

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/06/digital-body-brokers-and-future-futures.html

Full Steam Ahead (aka the Kufizoid, the Kufi-probe), 2021

http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/06/full-steam-ahead.html

Anthromimetic Cosmogenesis (aka the Virtual Facebook World), 2021

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/01/anthromimetic-cosmogenesis.html

Optomimetics

Seeing the invisible: Tiny crystal films could make night vision an everyday reality

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://sciencex.com/news/2021-06-invisible-tiny-crystal-night-vision.html

"ultra-thin layers of nanocrystals to make infrared light visible"

via The Australian National Univ: Rocio Camacho-Morales et al, Infrared upconversion imaging in nonlinear metasurfaces, Advanced Photonics (2021). DOI: 10.1117/1.AP.3.3.036002

http://dx.doi.org/10.1117/1.AP.3.3.036002

Non-line-of-sight imaging with picosecond temporal resolution

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-non-line-of-sight-imaging-picosecond-temporal-resolution.html

Described this a few years ago, trying to be hyperimaginative; it's already happening.

It's called non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, and in this particular version, which should scare the living shit out of you, it can record time-of-flight information of single photons. In other words, it can see outside it's own field of vision, in real time, to see things around the corner, and outside the room. Like if you were to crop part of the picture out, for example, or to cover part of the camera lens, this would be able to guess what's there because the photons from "over there" are shooting across the room, passing the field of vision of the camera lens. And because we can now see those shooting photons, we can trace back where they came from, and reconstruct three-dimensional images of all kinds of things that we aren't even looking at.

via Chinese Academy of Sciences: Bin Wang et al, Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging with Picosecond Temporal Resolution, Physical Review Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.053602

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.053602

Smartphone camera can illuminate bacteria causing acne, dental plaques

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-smartphone-camera-illuminate-bacteria-acne.html

To identify potentially harmful bacteria on skin and in oral cavities:

Wang's team augmented the smartphone camera's capabilities by attaching a small 3D-printed ring containing 10 LED black lights around a smartphone case's camera opening. The researchers used the LED-augmented smartphone to take images of the oral cavity and skin on the face of two research subjects.

"The LED lights 'excite' a class of bacteria-derived molecules called porphyrins, causing them to emit a red fluorescent signal that the smartphone camera can then pick up," said lead author Qinghua He, a UW doctoral student in bioengineering.

I am learning today that "oral cavity" is another word for mouth.

via University of Washington: Qinghua He et al, Smartphone-enabled snapshot multispectral autofluorescence imaging and its application for bacteria assessments in skin and oral cavity, Optics and Lasers in Engineering (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.optlaseng.2021.106546

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.optlaseng.2021.106546

Real-time video of scenes hidden around corners is now possible

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-real-time-video-scenes-hidden-corners.html

The video of the stuffed animal was created by capturing light reflected off a wall to the toy and bounced back again in a science-fiction-turned-reality technique known as non-line-of-sight imaging.

Do you really need to know how it works? We can see around corners; we can see the photons from things that are not in the picture, but they're bouncing off surfaces that are in the picture, and we collect all those photons, and recreate the image with them. 

This type of thing is called "hidden-scene imaging".

via University of Wisconsin-Madison with funding from DARPA and NSF: Ji Hyun Nam et al, Low-latency time-of-flight non-line-of-sight imaging at 5 frames per second, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26721-x

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26721-x

Haptic feedback sleeve and goggles allow blind people to 'see' with their arm

Feb 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-haptic-feedback-sleeve-goggles-people.html

Synesthesia by design

via Center for Digital Technology and Management, Technical University of Munich: Manuel Zahn, Armaghan Ahmad Khan, Obstacle avoidance for blind people using a 3D camera and a haptic feedback sleeve. arXiv:2201.04453v1 [cs.HC], arxiv.org/abs/2201.04453

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04453

The benefits of peripheral vision for machines

Mar 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-benefits-peripheral-vision-machines.html

Kind of like "Junk DNA"?

The results suggest that designing a machine-learning model to include some form of peripheral processing could enable the model to automatically learn visual representations that are robust to some subtle manipulations in image data. 

via MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines: Anne Harrington, Arturo Deza, Finding biological plausibility for adversarially robust features via metameric tasks. 2022.

https://openreview.net/forum?id=yeP_zx9vqNm

Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-camera-size-salt-grain.html

"nano-antenna metasurface configurations"

via Princeton University: Ethan Tseng et al, Neural nano-optics for high-quality thin lens imaging, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26443-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-26443-0

No Man's Game

No Man's Sky is a procedurally generated spacefaring video game. You explore the universe, maybe find a nice place to settle down, build yourself a home, and drift off into the eternal digital bliss of a digital anthroposphere.

What makes this game special is that, like the real universe, the places you can explore are veritably endless. That's because they weren't designed in advance; it doesn't exist until you go there. The universe is generated in real-time, as you play. It's not created by a designer, it's created by an algorithm, using fractals to scale things far in and far out with equal levels of detail. That's how procedural generation works. Until it doesn't.  

One day, the developers of this game decided it needed an upgrade, so they augmented the procedural generation algorithm. They gave the worlds more detailed weather patterns and more complex lifeforms, taller mountains, deeper oceans, more richness, more diversity. But every time you fix something, you risk breaking something else. And that's what happened here. A story as futuristic as intergalactic space travel itself:

Displaced No Man’s Sky fans are now using a galactic Zillow

Sep 25 2020, Polygon

https://www.polygon.com/2020/9/25/21456048/no-mans-sky-origins-displaced-players-update-planet-changes-community

After finally finding a planet that reminded him of Earth with a mellow breeze, he settled in and spent more time building his own personal base. Then, he logged into No Man’s Sky to find that the newest Origins update had changed his planet to be more like a tepid, hell-like wasteland.

“I was one of these people on the hunt to find the perfect Earth like planet, and after spending soooo many hours hunting for it, then spending so many hours building a few big builds on it... it all seems for nothing now.”

Long-time community members have organized a new system to find beautiful homeworlds for a fresh start. Macneill runs a group called No Man Sky’s Habitable Planets. The group was originally intended for nomads who were okay with uprooting for a new home, but Origins made their mission much more urgent for many players.

“Looking for a new planet to call home? This group is dedicating [sic] to exploring the vast universe for the most perfect and habitable planets,” the Reddit page reads. “NO STORMS NO SENTINELS!!” “The goal was to have enough planets in our page so that someone could ideally just search what they want ‘green grass, blue skies’ and a planet with their desired features would come up.” Macneill told Polygon over Reddit.

Another player who is looking for a new home after aggressive fauna swarmed her base with the Origins update, now has a home in a world that looks abandoned. Fortunately, she can now just go on the Habitable Planets project and scroll through a selection of planets.

“It’s a little like Tinder,” Emily laughs. “I’m like, brown water? Ew, no. Mountain ranges? I don’t want to deal with that. Purple planet? Yeah, that’s cute, swipe right!”

Written a couple days earlier, a developer lamenting their consternation over destroying entire worlds worth of human endeavor with a single update:

“People have made their homes, they’ve lived in this universe,” Murray said. “I would be working on things like making mountains taller, and you’d see online that somebody has dedicated a planet to a lost loved one and built a base for them. And I’ve got my head in my hands thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy that planet if we do this.’”

Murray said that “some of the biome diversity,” will change universe-wide, but that “the fundamental shape of the terrain will stay the same on existing planets.”

-Sep 2020, Polygon

Funny, as I read this, as a real person in the real world, all I can think about is that it sounds a lot like what's happening right now because of the climate apocalypse - the northeastern portion of the United States is one of the fastest changing climates in the world, with my town in particular having seen 2 different 500-year storms in the last 10 years (Irene and Ida), both dropping over 9 inches of rain in one day, which is almost triple what we see in any given month. Superstorm Sandy knocked down 100-years worth of trees in one day. If I lived in No Man's Sky, I would be looking for a new planet by now.

Post Script:

I finally figured out why the healthy fascination with random number generators (RNGs) here on Network Address; something tells me they're important, and will become a critical part of our world in the coming years, and here is one good example of why.

Randomness has a lot to do with the variety seen in procedurally generated worlds, which goes all the way back to rolling dice for Dungeons and Dragons. The game starts with a "random seed" from which the initial conditions of the algorithm are set in motion.* 

*And when you hear "initial conditions" you should think complexity theory and emergent behavior.

This is great for making totally unexpected and exciting virtual worlds, but it's also foretelling of the epidemic of electronic drugs that is today ensnaring our elderly citizens, armed services veterans, and new mothers via social media. We should have learned our lesson with machine gambling aka slot machines, but we didn't, and so we now have this:

Procedural generation is often used in loot systems of quest-driven games, such as action role-playing games and massive multiplayer online role playing games. Though quests may feature fixed rewards, other loot, such as weapons and armor, may be generated for the player based on the player-character's level, the quest's level, their performance in the quest, and other random factors. This often leads to loot having a rarity quality applied to reflect when the procedural generation system has produced an item with better-than-average attributes. For example, the Borderlands series is based on its procedural generation system which can create over a million unique guns and other equipment.

-Procedural Generation

The randomness is an illusion, because absolutely minute parameters of the algorithm are changed in order to take advantage of the way our brains are hardwired. You can act like you're more powerful than the algorithm, or you can think that because you know how it works, you won't be a sucker. But then you would be wrong. 

A procedurally generated penis bouquet in No Man's Sky.

For Further Reading on Electronic Drugs:

Random Instantiation Generator, Jun 2021

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2021/06/random-instantiation-generator.html

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll, 2012. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design

Jesse Schell: When games invade real life, DICE Summit, 2010

https://www.ted.com/talks/jesse_schell_when_games_invade_real_life

Anthropomorphizing Machines

Self-driving Waymo cars clog up dead-end San Francisco street

Oct 2021, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58928706

Residents in a "dead-end" street in San Francisco say they are being plagued by an influx of self-driving vehicles.

Waymo says the vehicles are just "obeying road rules" designed to limit traffic in certain residential streets. A resident said the human "safety drivers" supervising the automated cars "don't have much to say other than the car is programmed and they're just doing their job".

A spokesman for Waymo said the cars sometimes made a detour because of the presence nearby of one of San Francisco's "slow streets", which aim to limit traffic in certain residential areas. "We continually adjust to dynamic San Francisco road rules. In this case, cars traveling north of California on 15th Avenue have to take a u-turn due to the presence of 'slow streets' signage on Lake," the company said.

About the Image: Boris Artzybasheff (25 May 1899 – 16 July 1965) was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 1919 he arrived in New York City and began work as an engraver. His illustrations appeared first in the the 1922 edition of Verotchka’s Tales by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak and The Undertaker’s Garland by John Peale Bishop. In 1928, Artzybasheff illustrated Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon by Dhan Gopal Mukerji, a work awarded the Newbery Medal, a prize named in honour of 18th-century British bookseller John Newbery and awarded annually by the Association for Library Service to the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

-Machinalia: Boris Artzybasheff’s Fantastic Visions of Living Machines, Flashbak Magazine, 2021

Post Script:

Robots Have Feelings Too aka In Other News Suicide Is Funny Again

Jul 2017, Network Address

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2017/07/robots-have-feelings-too.html

When Robots Become Human

Jun 2018, Network Address

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2018/06/when-robots-become-human.html

This Side of Science

Science, it's full of surprises. But I am most excited when the scientists themselves are the ones surprised. The two most exciting words I can read in the news are "scientific accident", and you'll see them below. 

First up, a long-time mystery of the universe, swept under the rug by Einstein himself, some might even call it Einstein Fudge. You know it as the cosmological constant, and it says that the universe is constantly expanding. We don't understand why the cosmological constant is there or what it's really doing, but we can't make sense of the universe without it. Until now. 

Image credit: Light Bulb Fail, Milos Jokic, Getty Images, 2019

New study proposes expansion of the universe directly impacts black hole growth

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-expansion-universe-impacts-black-hole.html

Black holes grow along with the expansion of the universe. Black holes gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself. Masses of black holes could grow in lockstep with the universe, a phenomenon that Croker and his team call cosmological coupling.

The most well-known example of cosmologically-coupled material is light itself, which loses energy as the universe grows. "We thought to consider the opposite effect," said research co-author and UH Mānoa Physics and Astronomy Professor Duncan Farrah.

"It was a such a simple idea, I was surprised it worked so well."

via University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Chicago, and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: Kevin S. Croker et al, Cosmologically Coupled Compact Objects: A Single-parameter Model for LIGO–Virgo Mass and Redshift Distributions, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2021). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac2fad

http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac2fad

Granddaughters and great-granddaughters of men who start to smoke before puberty, have more body fat than expected

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-granddaughters-great-granddaughters-men-puberty-body.html

I'm just saying, how the do you even figure this out. Who is sitting there right now putting this hypothesis together in their head.

via University of Bristol: Human transgenerational observations of regular smoking before puberty on fat mass in grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-04504-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04504-0

What we knew about water was right after all

Feb 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-knew.html

Like the discovery of lead in the air - when something is everywhere, it's hard to notice it at all.  In this case, it seems the fact that this experiment was never done in a desert environment is all that was keeping us from the answer. 

Frankenpaste:

Probing chemical transformations at the air-water interface is challenging due to the lack of surface-specific techniques or computational models, but now they found water spontaneously transforms into 30–110 micromolar hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as microdroplets. The textbook understanding of water is thus challenged by how the mild temperature and pressure conditions, together with the absence of catalysts, co-solvents and significant applied energy, could break covalent O–H bonds; it was previously thought to be from ultrahigh electric fields. 

It was ambient ozone -- Although ozone minimally dissolves in water, the enhanced surface area of microdroplets allows more ozone to be dissolved and quickly react to form H2O2.

"There had to be something related to the geography of the place, an environmental difference between our location in Saudi Arabia and California," Gallo Jr says.

via King Abdullah University of Science and Technology: Nayara H. Musskopf et al, The Air–Water Interface of Water Microdroplets Formed by Ultrasonication or Condensation Does Not Produce H2O2, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02953

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02953

Life may actually flash before your eyes on death

Feb 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60495730

First-ever recording of a dying brain discovered by accident. 

"This was actually totally by chance, we did not plan to do this experiment or record these signals."

-BBC

This is also one of the reasons why it is important to care for every human equally, regardless of what happened to them. You're born without an immune system? We're keeping you alive. Paraplegic? We're giving you wifi for your body. 

You have epilepsy? We're going to slap some electrodes to your head and monitor your brainwaves for a really, really long time, and figure out how to help you. Unless you have a heart attack in the headset, in which case we'll watch what happens, and use your accident to further the advancement of science. 

via Department of Neurosurgery, Henan Provincial People’s Hospital, Division of Neurosurgery, Vancouver General Hospital: Vicente Raul et al. Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 14 2022. DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.813531.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2022.813531

Researchers report game-changing technology to remove 99% of carbon dioxide from air

Feb 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-game-changing-technology-carbon-dioxide-air.html

Just some very clever thinking. 

Hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, an economical and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells used today, have a shortcoming that has kept them off the road—they are extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air. Essentially, the carbon dioxide makes it hard for a HEM fuel cell to breathe. This defect quickly reduces the fuel cell's performance and efficiency by up to 20%, rendering the fuel cell no better than a gasoline engine.

"Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, assistant professor for research in chemical and biomolecular engineering and paper co-author.

While this isn't good for the fuel cell, the team knew if they could leverage this built-in "self-purging" process in a separate device upstream from the fuel cell stack, they could turn it into a carbon dioxide separator.

They found a way to embed the power source for the electrochemical technology inside the separation membrane. The approach involved internally short-circuiting the device.

via University of Delaware: Lin Shi et al, A shorted membrane electrochemical cell powered by hydrogen to remove CO2 from the air feed of hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells, Nature Energy (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-021-00969-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00969-5

Unrelated Post Script:

Parasite that replaces a fish's tongue caught at Texas state park

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-parasite-fish-tongue-caught-texas.html

The tongue-eating louse makes its way into the fish's mouth through its gills, where it consumes the mucus that forms on the inside of the fish's mouth, and completely replaces the organ in another creature, although it doesn't harm its host.

Also, it has eyes; the parasitic zombie tongue has its own eyes.

Building the Future

Cosmic concrete developed from space dust and astronaut blood

Sep 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-cosmic-concrete-space-astronaut-blood.html

A common protein from blood plasma — human serum albumin — could act as a binder for simulated moon or Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material. The resulting novel material, termed AstroCrete, is a concrete-like material made of extra-terrestrial dust along with the blood, sweat and tears of astronauts. Scientists found that incorporating urea — which is a biological waste product that the body produces and excretes through urine, sweat and tears — could further increase the compressive strength by over 300%.

Note this is not the spit-bricks theorized by the Graphene Center at Manchester, which are related to their Concretene, a concrete-like mixture that uses graphene.

via University of Manchester: Aled D. Roberts et al, Blood, sweat and tears: extraterrestrial regolith biocomposites with in vivo binders, Materials Today Bio (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.mtbio.2021.100136

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mtbio.2021.100136

Image credit: iRyanBell via Fractal Forums, Scifi Madelbox, 2020

Wood

Mandelboxmenger006 by krzysztofmarczak on Deviant Art

Pioneering new process creates versatile moldable wood

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-versatile-moldable-wood.html

After extracting the lignin—a polymer which binds the cell walls inside wood that give it strength—which softens it, and then closing the fibers via evaporation, the research team re-swelled the wood by "shocking" it with water.

"The rapid water-shock process forms a distinct partially open, wrinkled cell wall structure that provides space for compression as well as the ability to support high strain, allowing the material to be easily folded and molded".

"The resulting 3D-Molded Wood is six-times stronger than the starting wood and comparable to widely used lightweight materials like aluminum alloys."

via University of Bristol: Shaoliang Xiao et al, Lightweight, strong, moldable wood via cell wall engineering as a sustainable structural material, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abg9556

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abg9556

Researchers make hardened wooden knives that slice through steak

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-hardened-wooden-knives-slice-steak.html

• Makes wood 23 times harder, and a knife made from the material is nearly three times sharper than a stainless-steel dinner table knife
• Can produce wooden nails as sharp as conventional steel nails but unaffected by rusting
• Partially delignification is the first step (get all the lingin out), then heat and pressurize it to get all the water out, making it more dense; last step is to coat it in mineral oil for general protection
• Made by boiling the wood at 100°C in a bath of chemicals, which could potentially be reused from batch to batch, whereas ceramics requires heating above 1,000°C

via University of Maryland: Teng Li, Hardened Wood as a Renewable Alternative to Steel and Plastic, Matter (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2021.09.020

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2021.09.020

New lignin based material to replace fossil plastics and adhesives

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-lignin-based-material-fossil-plastics.html

I thought this was interesting because the hardened wood mentioned above removes the lignin and uses only the cellulose. This one is lingin-based. Closing the loop. 

via Stockholm University: Adrian Moreno et al, Catalyst-Free Synthesis of Lignin Vitrimers with Tunable Mechanical Properties: Circular Polymers and Recoverable Adhesives, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c17412

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsami.1c17412

Using fungus feeding on a woody waste product to create living building blocks

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-fungus-woody-product-blocks.html

They feed wood waste to the fungus Ganoderma, which grows to almost completely fill the shape of its container, and which is still alive when put to use, so that it can be attached to others by "growing together". 

"Functional macro-objects"

via Columbia University, Ecovative Design and MIT: Ross M. McBee et al, Engineering living and regenerative fungal–bacterial biocomposite structures, Nature Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01123-y

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01123-y

Windows

Alef for Fractal Forums - Fractal a Fossil Trilobite - 2018

Scientists invent energy-saving glass that 'self-adapts' to heating and cooling demand

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-12-scientists-energy-saving-glass-self-adapts-cooling.html

Vanadium dioxide nanoparticles composite, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), and low-emissivity coating. No electrical components.

During summer, the glass suppresses solar heating (near infrared light), while boosting radiative cooling (long-wave infrared)—a natural phenomenon where heat emits through surfaces towards the cold universe—to cool the room. In the winter, it does the opposite to warm up the room.

via Nanyang Technological University: Shancheng Wang et al, Scalable thermochromic smart windows with passive radiative cooling regulation, Science (2021). DOI: 10.1126/science.abg0291

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.abg0291

New research introduces adaptable smart window design that can heat or cool a house

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-smart-window-cool-house.html

"PCM-based tuneable low-e glass panels"

We don't think about it much I bet, but windows are a huge part of the energy problem. You don't notice it because it's not like it's an open hole in the wall letting all the cold air into your house. You can't exactly feel it, because it's happening at a rate too small for you to detect, but it's there. The air in a room on the other of a window is getting much colder much faster than the air on the other side of an insulated wall. You just can't compare - windows suck at blocking the temperature. The more windows you have and the worse their insulation value (from having less panes or damaged seals), the more energy there is pouring out of that part of your building envelope. Luckily there's a lot of interesting work being done in this area.

Smart windows -- they are tunable, so you can select which part of the sunlight you want to let pass. In the winter it can absorb the infrared, in the summer it can reflect it, and all by simply re-tuning the frequency of the material. Meanwhile, the visible part is unchanged. I imagine these advances in smart envelope science will be an essential part of new "sustainable" design projects from here out. 

via University of Pittsburgh: Nathan Youngblood et al, Reconfigurable Low-Emissivity Optical Coating Using Ultrathin Phase Change Materials, ACS Photonics (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.1c01128

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acsphotonics.1c01128

Mandatory Graphene News

Bathing in Reds - Taurus Arts Fractal Forums - 2017

Researchers move closer to controlling two-dimensional graphene

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-closer-two-dimensional-graphene.html

Doped graphene. Doping controls the flow of electricity by injecting electron-adjusting dopants to introduce either negatively charged electrons or positively charged "holes" where electrons used to be. Doping for silicon doesn't work for graphene, but there's a new way to do it:

One promising direction is to alter graphene's electronic and optical properties by changing the pattern of the tungsten oxyselenide, and to imprint electrical circuits directly on the graphene itself. The team is also working to integrate the doped material into novel photonic devices, with potential applications in transparent electronics, telecommunications systems, and quantum computers.

via Columbia University: Min Sup Choi et al, High carrier mobility in graphene doped using a monolayer of tungsten oxyselenide, Nature Electronics (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-021-00657-y

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00657-y

Nanomaterial 'aerographene' used to create extremely powerful pumps

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-nanomaterial-aerographene-extremely-powerful.html

More graphene things:

New method for the generation of controllable electrical explosions, repeatedly heating and cooling the air contained inside to very high temperatures in an extremely short period of time. Theoretically, it only takes 450 grams of this material to lift an elephant. This enables extremely powerful pumps, compressed air applications or sterilizing air filters in miniature.

via Kiel University: Fabian Schütt et al, Electrically powered repeatable air explosions using microtubular graphene assemblies, Materials Today (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.mattod.2021.03.010

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2021.03.010

Origami, kirigami inspire mechanical metamaterials designs

Nov 2021,  phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-origami-kirigami-mechanical-metamaterials.html

Where there's graphene, there's origami:

"Origami and kirigami are, by nature, mechanical metamaterials, because their properties are mainly determined by how the crease patterns and/or cuts are made and just slightly depend on the material that folds the origami or kiragami," said author Hanqing Jiang.

Nothing is new, no matter how new it sounds -- Two-dimensional materials? Materials that are so thin, only one atom thick, that they behave in ways completely unknown to science, and have made us create a new branch of science just to help us understand them? 

That's what graphene did when it hit the scene in 2004. But it turns out origami and kirigami have been 2-D the whole time!

via American Institute of Physics: "Mechanical metamaterials based on origami and kirigami" Applied Physics Reviews, aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0051088

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0051088

The Future - Ubiquitous Intelligence

Sabine62 via Fractal Forums - Roqen's Domain Mashup - 2018

Creating an artificial material that can sense, adapt to its environment

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-artificial-material-environment.html

"Developed an artificial material, called a metamaterial, which can respond to its environment, independently make a decision, and perform an action not directed by a human being."

The mechanical design of their new artificial material incorporates three main functions also displayed by materials found in nature—sensing; information processing; and actuation, or movement.

Some examples of these natural materials include the quick reaction of a Venus fly trap's leafy jaws to capture an insect, chameleons changing the color of their skin to blend into their surroundings, and pine cones adjusting their shapes in response to changes in air humidity, Huang said.

The material uses a computer chip to control or manipulate the processing of information that's needed to perform the requested actions, then uses the electrical power to convert that energy into mechanical energy. The researchers' next step is to implement their idea in a real-world environment.

via University of Missouri and University of Chicago: Yangyang Chen et al, Realization of active metamaterials with odd micropolar elasticity, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26034-z

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34642324/

Post Script:

Sustainable, biodegradable, vegan glitter—from your fruit bowl

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-sustainable-biodegradable-vegan-glitterfrom-fruit.html

Using structural color, and old trick used in biology (like butterfly wings), but new to industrial color technology, this thing uses cellulose nanocrystal films, and can be produced at the industrial scale.

Biodegradable glitter sounds like an oxymoron, but I'll take it.

via University of Cambridge: Silvia Vignolini, Large-scale fabrication of structurally coloured cellulose nanocrystal films and effect pigments, Nature Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-021-01135-8

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01135-8

Looking Back

Nothing says "this profile was actually taken from a porn site" like a girl looking back at you over her shoulder. 

Back in the day when I first started to explore the online dating world, I was compelled to create a special folder of screenshots for obviously fake profile pictures. If you've never been - the majority of the profiles on dating sites are fake.* 

*Female profiles that is.

Image credit: Mia Goth in Ti West's X

I spent four years in college studying art history, which means a lot of time thinking about pictures - what they mean, what they don't mean, why they were made, how they were made, etc. Decoding body language, hand gestures, and eye gaze is now an automatic reflex. Some would call it visual literacy. If there was an actual game where you had to identify the fake dating profile, I would call it an advantage. 

Over time, as I swiped profile after profile right into my "fake" folder, I noticed a pattern. It's a pattern that fake-profile-makers must have noticed long before me. They know what works best - a girl looking back at you, over her shoulder, is a sure way to override your authenticity meter, making you click that profile in the hopes that maybe she's looking at YOU! You stud!!

Nowadays, anytime I see the back of a nude shoulder in the wild, I hear my "fake profile" alarm go off in my head.

Tech Support

Post Script:

Miss Airport Security 2011 - aka Scan me like one of your french girls

Post Post Script:

Bot Holiday - Traffic stats from both Network Address and Limbic Signal drop to zero circa March 2022

Circuitously related - I've been joking forever that the only people who visit this blog are Russian bots. Well it turns out that as of March of 2022, my traffic has gone to zero. Coincidence? I think not.

For further reading, see this article from the Guardian, where they source none other than the authors of Memetic Warfare.