Tag Archives: Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Biohybrid fish made from human cardiac cells could lead to artificial hearts

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Biohybrid fish on a hook (Photo credit to Michael Rosnach, Keel Yong Lee, Sung-Jin Park, Kevin Kit Parker)

A February 10, 2022 news item on ScienceDaily announces research on a biohybrid fish,

Harvard University researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from Emory University, have developed the first fully autonomous biohybrid fish from human stem-cell derived cardiac muscle cells. The artificial fish swims by recreating the muscle contractions of a pumping heart, bringing researchers one step closer to developing a more complex artificial muscular pump and providing a platform to study heart disease like arrhythmia.

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A February 10, 2022 Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences news release (also on EurekAlert) by Leah Burrows explains how this research could lead to an artificial heart (Note: Links have been removed),

“Our ultimate goal is to build an artificial heart to replace a malformed heart in a child,” said Kit Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and senior author of the paper.  “Most of the work in building heart tissue or hearts, including some work we have done, is focused on replicating the anatomical features or replicating the simple beating of the heart in the engineered tissues. But here, we are drawing design inspiration from the biophysics of the heart, which is harder to do. Now, rather than using heart imaging as a blueprint, we are identifying the key biophysical principles that make the heart work, using them as design criteria, and replicating them in a system, a living, swimming fish, where it is much easier to see if we are successful.”

The research is published in Science. 

The biohybrid fish developed by the team builds off previous research from Parker’s Disease Biophysics Group. In 2012, the lab used cardiac muscle cells from rats to build a jellyfish-like biohybrid pump and in 2016 the researchers developed a swimming, artificial stingray also from rat heart muscle cells.

In this research, the team built the first autonomous biohybrid device made from human stem-cell derived cardiomyocytes. This device was inspired by the shape and swimming motion of a zebrafish. Unlike previous devices, the biohybrid zebrafish has two layers of muscle cells, one on each side of the tail fin. When one side contracts, the other stretches. That stretch triggers the opening of a mechanosensitive protein channel, which causes a contraction, which triggers a stretch and so on and so forth, leading to a closed loop system that can propel the fish for more than 100 days. 

“By leveraging cardiac mechano-electrical signaling between two layers of muscle, we recreated the cycle where each contraction results automatically as a response to the stretching on the opposite side,” said Keel Yong Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-first author of the study. “The results highlight the role of feedback mechanisms in muscular pumps such as the heart.”

The researchers also engineered an autonomous pacing node, like a pacemaker, which controls the frequency and rhythm of these spontaneous contractions. Together, the two layers of muscle and the autonomous pacing node enabled the generation of continuous, spontaneous, and coordinated, back-and-forth fin movements.

“Because of the two internal pacing mechanisms, our fish can live longer, move faster and swim more efficiently than previous work,” said Sung-Jin Park, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Disease Biophysics Group at SEAS and co-first author of the study. “This new research provides a model to investigate mechano-electrical signaling as a therapeutic target of heart rhythm management and for understanding pathophysiology in sinoatrial node dysfunctions and cardiac arrhythmia.”

Park is currently an Assistant Professor at the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University School of Medicine.

Unlike a fish in your refrigerator, this biohybrid fish improves with age. Its muscle contraction amplitude, maximum swimming speed, and muscle coordination all increased for the first month as the cardiomyocyte cells matured.  Eventually, the biohybrid fish reached speeds and swimming efficacy similar to zebrafish in the wild. 

Next, the team aims to build even more complex biohybrid devices from human heart cells. 

“I could build a model heart out of Play-Doh, it doesn’t mean I can build a heart,” said Parker. “You can grow some random tumor cells in a dish until they curdle into a throbbing lump and call it a cardiac organoid. Neither of those efforts is going to, by design, recapitulate the physics of a system that beats over a billion times during your lifetime while simultaneously rebuilding its cells on the fly. That is the challenge. That is where we go to work.”

The research was co-authored by David G. Matthews, Sean L. Kim, Carlos Antonio Marquez, John F. Zimmerman, Herdeline Ann M. Ardona, Andre G. Kleber and George V. Lauder. 

It was supported in part by National Institutes of Health National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences grant UH3TR000522, and National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center grant DMR-142057.

Before giving you a link and a citation for the paper, here’s a little more information about the work from a February 10, 2022 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) news release on EurekAlert announcing publication of the paper in their journal Science, Note: A link has been removed,

An autonomously swimming biohybrid fish, designed with a focus on two key regulatory features of the human heart, has revealed the importance of feedback mechanisms in muscular pumps (such as the heart). The findings could one day help inform the development of an artificial heart made from living muscle cells. Biohybrid systems – devices containing both biological and artificial components – are an effective way to investigate the physiological control mechanisms in biological organisms and to discover bio-inspired robotic solutions to a host of pressing concerns, including those related to human health. When it comes to natural fluid transport pumps, like those that circulate blood, the performance of biohybrid systems has been lacking, however.  Here, researchers considered whether two functional regulatory features of the heart — mechanoelectrical signaling and automaticity — could be transferred to a synthetic analog of another fluid transport system: a swimming fish. Lee et al. developed an autonomously swimming fish constructed from a bilayer of human cardiac cells; the muscular bilayer was integrated using tissue engineering techniques. Lee and team were able to control muscle contractions in the biohybrid fish using external optogenetic stimulation, allowing the fish analog to swim. In tests, the biohybrid fish outperformed the locomotory speed of previous biohybrid muscular systems, the authors say. It maintained spontaneous activity for 108 days. By contrast, say the authors, biohybrid fish equipped with single-layered muscle showed deteriorating activity within the first month. The data in this study demonstrate the potential of muscular bilayer systems and mechanoelectrical signaling as a means to promote maturation of in vitro muscle tissues, write Lee and colleagues. “Taken together,” the authors conclude, “the technology described here may represent foundational work toward the goal of creating autonomous systems capable of homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioral control.”

For reporters interested in trends, this work builds upon previous work published in a July 2016 study in Science, in which Sung-jin Park et al. used cardiac cells from rats to develop a self-propelling ray fish analog.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

An autonomously swimming biohybrid fish designed with human cardiac biophysics by Keel Yong Lee, Sung-Jin Park, David G. Matthews. Sean L. Kim, Carlos Antonio Marquez, John F. Zimmerman, Herdeline Ann M. Ardoña, Andre G. Kleber, George V. Lauder and Kevin Kit Parker. Science • 10 Feb 2022 • Vol 375, Issue 6581 • pp. 639-647 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abh0474

This paper is behind a paywall.

SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) technology repels blood and bacteria from medical devices

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Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a coating for medical devices that helps to address some of these devices’ most  troublesome aspects. From an Oct. 12, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily,

From joint replacements to cardiac implants and dialysis machines, medical devices enhance or save lives on a daily basis. However, any device implanted in the body or in contact with flowing blood faces two critical challenges that can threaten the life of the patient the device is meant to help: blood clotting and bacterial infection.

A team of Harvard scientists and engineers may have a solution. They developed a new surface coating for medical devices using materials already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The coating repelled blood from more than 20 medically relevant substrates the team tested — made of plastic to glass and metal — and also suppressed biofilm formation in a study reported in Nature Biotechnology. But that’s not all.

The team implanted medical-grade tubing and catheters coated with the material in large blood vessels in pigs, and it prevented blood from clotting for at least eight hours without the use of blood thinners such as heparin. Heparin is notorious for causing potentially lethal side-effects like excessive bleeding but is often a necessary evil in medical treatments where clotting is a risk.

“Devising a way to prevent blood clotting without using anticoagulants is one of the holy grails in medicine,” said Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and senior author of the study. Ingber is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as professor of bioengineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

An Oct. 12, 2014 Wyss Institute news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes the inspiration for this work,

The idea for the coating evolved from SLIPS, a pioneering surface technology developed by coauthor Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., who is a Wyss Institute Core Faculty member and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at Harvard SEAS. SLIPS stands for Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces. Inspired by the slippery surface of the carnivorous pitcher plant, which enables the plant to capture insects, SLIPS repels nearly any material it contacts. The liquid layer on the surface provides a barrier to everything from ice to crude oil and blood.

“Traditional SLIPS uses porous, textured surface substrates to immobilize the liquid layer whereas medical surfaces are mostly flat and smooth – so we further adapted our approach by capitalizing on the natural roughness of chemically modified surfaces of medical devices,” said Aizenberg, who leads the Wyss Institute’s Adaptive Materials platform. “This is yet another incarnation of the highly customizable SLIPS platform that can be designed to create slippery, non-adhesive surfaces on any material.”

The Wyss team developed a super-repellent coating that can be adhered to existing, approved medical devices. In a two-step surface-coating process, they chemically attached a monolayer of perfluorocarbon, which is similar to Teflon. Then they added a layer of liquid perfluorocarbon, which is widely used in medicine for applications such as liquid ventilation for infants with breathing challenges, blood substitution, eye surgery, and more. The team calls the tethered perfluorocarbon plus the liquid layer a Tethered-Liquid Perfluorocarbon surface, or TLP for short.

In addition to working seamlessly when coated on more than 20 different medical surfaces and lasting for more than eight hours to prevent clots in a pig under relatively high blood flow rates without the use of heparin, the TLP coating achieved the following results:

  • TLP-treated medical tubing was stored for more than a year under normal temperature and humidity conditions and still prevented clot formation
  • The TLP surface remained stable under the full range of clinically relevant physiological shear stresses, or rates of blood flow seen in catheters and central lines, all the way up to dialysis machines
  • It repelled the components of blood that cause clotting (fibrin and platelets)
  • When bacteria called Pseudomonas aeruginosa were grown in TLP-coated medical tubing for more than six weeks, less than one in a billion bacteria were able to adhere. Central lines coated with TLP significantly reduce sepsis from Central-Line Mediated Bloodstream Infections (CLABSI). (Sepsis is a life-threatening blood infection caused by bacteria, and a significant risk for patients with implanted medical devices.)

Out of sheer curiosity, the researchers even tested a TLP-coated surface with a gecko – the superstar of sticking whose footpads contain many thousands of hairlike structures with tremendous adhesive strength. The gecko was unable to hold on.

“We were wonderfully surprised by how well the TLP coating worked, particularly in vivo without heparin,” said one of the co-lead authors, Anna Waterhouse, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. “Usually the blood will start to clot within an hour in the extracorporeal circuit, so our experiments really demonstrate the clinical relevance of this new coating.”

While most of the team’s demonstrations were performed on medical devices such as catheters and perfusion tubing using relatively simple setups, they say there is a lot more on the horizon.

“We feel this is just the beginning of how we might test this for use in the clinic,” said co-lead author Daniel Leslie, Ph.D., a Wyss Institute Staff Scientist, who aims to test it on more complex systems such as dialysis machines and ECMO, a machine used in the intensive care unit to help critically ill patients breathe.

I first featured SLIPS technology in a Jan. 15, 2014 post about its possible use for stain-free, self-cleaning clothing. This Wyss Institute video about the latest work featuring the use of  SLIPS technology in medical devices also describes its possible use in pipelines and airplanes,

You can find research paper with this link,

A bioinspired omniphobic surface coating on medical devices prevents thrombosis and biofouling by Daniel C Leslie, Anna Waterhouse, Julia B Berthet, Thomas M Valentin, Alexander L Watters, Abhishek Jain, Philseok Kim, Benjamin D Hatton, Arthur Nedder, Kathryn Donovan, Elana H Super, Caitlin Howell, Christopher P Johnson, Thy L Vu, Dana E Bolgen, Sami Rifai, Anne R Hansen, Michael Aizenberg, Michael Super, Joanna Aizenberg, & Donald E Ingber. Nature Biotechnology (2014) doi:10.1038/nbt.3020 Published online 12 October 2014

This paper is behind a paywall but there is a free preview available via ReadCube Access.

SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) lead the way to stain-free, self-cleaning clothes

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Thanks to the researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, I have discovered a new word, omniphobicity. Before getting to this new word, here’s a little more information about the project which spawned the word. According to a Jan. 14, 2014 news item on Nanowerk,

The researchers behind SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) have demonstrated a spate of sleek applications of the super-slick coating since unveiling it in a 2011 issue of Nature – and they just expanded its repertoire even more.

The Jan. ??, 2014 Harvard University Wyss Institute news release, which originated the news item, provides additional information about the SLIPS (Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces) technology explaining the engineers have taken their inspiration from the pitcher plant rather the lotus, as is more common,

The team from Harvard’s Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has demonstrated the uncanny ability of SLIPS – inspired by the pitcher plant – to repel nearly any material it contacts: water, ice, oil, saltwater, wax, blood, and more. They have demonstrated its versatility under extreme conditions of pH and temperature, and have successfully used SLIPS to coat everything from refrigeration coils to lenses, windows, and ceramics. What’s more, in 2012 they won an R&D 100 Award for the technology from R&D Magazine. This annual award honors the year’s 100 most significant products, the so-called game-changers of the technology scene.

Here’s what an image illustrating the pitcher plant and SLIPS,

Inspired by the Nepenthes pitcher plant... [Image credit: New Scientist; Bohn & Federie, PNAS 101, 14138-14143, 2004] Courtesy Wyss Institute

Inspired by the Nepenthes pitcher plant… [Image credit: New Scientist; Bohn & Federie, PNAS 101, 14138-14143, 2004] Courtesy Wyss Institute

The team’s latest work features cotton and polyster fabrics (from the news release),

And now, as reported January 10 [2014] in a special issue celebrating the 25th year of the journal Nanotechnology, the team has modified everyday cotton and polyester fabrics to exhibit traditional antifouling SLIPS behavior. The advance could meet the need for a robust, stain-resistant textile for a host of consumer and industrial applications.

“We took one page out of Nature’s book, and are finding that it has the potential to help us develop solutions to a variety of age-old challenges: ice we don’t want on refrigeration coils, bacteria that we don’t want on medical devices, and now stains we don’t want on clothes,” said Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., who leads the development of the technology. Aizenberg is a Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science at SEAS

Most currently available state-of-the-art, stain-resistant fabrics draw their inspiration and design from the lotus leaf. Tiny nanotextures on the surface of lotus leaves resist water, causing droplets of water to bead up on a cushion of air at the edge of the surface. Lotus-inspired textiles therefore use air-filled nanostructures to repel water. These are capable of repelling most aqueous liquids and dirt particles, but they suffer from a series of shortcomings, explained Cicely Shillingford, a Wyss Research Assistant and lead author of the Nanotechnology publication. They require a stable solid-air layer for the beading process to occur and thus fail easily under pressure – as in a heavy rainstorm – and do not withstand physical damage, such as twisting and abrasion, very well. They also stain more easily from organic or complex liquids, such as oil.

On the other hand, SLIPS is inspired by the carnivorous pitcher plant, which locks in a water layer to create a slick coating that causes insects that land on it to literally hydroplane and fall into the plant. The SLIPS coating anchors a slippery lubricated film infused to a nanoporous solid surface, creating a material that performs exceedingly well under pressure or physical damage, and can resist all kinds of liquids, including oil.
To create a fabric with SLIPS-type functionality, the team bought off-the-shelf cotton and polyester fabrics from stores near their lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and developed two ways to chemically treat them. One involved coating them with tiny particles of silica (SiM), and the other required a treatment with sol-gel based alumina (SgB). …

What happened after the team put the SLIPS-fabrics through a ringer of tests performed according to industrial standards – from twisting to rubbing and staining attempts?

“The SLIPS-fabric showed an unprecedented ability to repel a wide range of fluids and resist staining, and it handles physical stresses and strains just fine,” said Aizenberg.

While not every SLIPS-fabric was as breathable (yet) as the researchers hoped, it outperformed currently available stain-resistant fabrics on just about every other measure. As such, the most likely immediate applications could be fabrics needed in potentially extreme environments where breathability is not paramount but exposure to challenging contaminating liquids and biological hazards is involved, such as tactical suits for the military, lab coats, medical clothing, specialty garments for construction and manufacturing, and perhaps even tents and sports stadiums.

The scientists have also provided an image of a lab coat that was partially (sleeves) converted to SLIPS and than stained with a variety of foodstuffs,

Former Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Tak-Sing Wong, Ph.D., who is now an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University, wears a labcoat in which the sleeves were converted to SLIPS, after sprayed with wine, tomato juice, eggs, and more. Courtesy Wyss Institute

Former Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Tak-Sing Wong, Ph.D., who is now an assistant professor at The Pennsylvania State University, wears a labcoat in which the sleeves were converted to SLIPS, after sprayed with wine, tomato juice, eggs, and more. Courtesy Wyss Institute

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Fabrics coated with lubricated nanostructures display robust omniphobicity by Cicely Shillingford, Noah MacCallum, Tak-Sing Wong, Philseok Kim and Joanna Aizenberg. Nanotechnology 25 01 4019 doi:10.1088/0957-4484/25/1/014019

This paper is behind a paywall. As for an explanation of the word omniphobicity this abstract is helpful,

The development of a stain-resistant and pressure-stable textile is desirable for consumer and industrial applications alike, yet it remains a challenge that current technologies have been unable to fully address. Traditional superhydrophobic surfaces, inspired by the lotus plant, are characterized by two main components: hydrophobic chemical functionalization and surface roughness. While this approach produces water-resistant surfaces, these materials have critical weaknesses that hinder their practical utility, in particular as robust stain-free fabrics. For example, traditional superhydrophobic surfaces fail (i.e., become stained) when exposed to low-surface-tension liquids, under pressure when impacted by a high-velocity stream of water (e.g., rain), and when exposed to physical forces such as abrasion and twisting. We have recently introduced slippery lubricant-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS), a self-healing, pressure-tolerant and omniphobic surface, to address these issues. [emphasis mine] Herein we present the rational design and optimization of nanostructured lubricant-infused fabrics and demonstrate markedly improved performance over traditional superhydrophobic textile treatments: SLIPS-functionalized cotton and polyester fabrics exhibit decreased contact angle hysteresis and sliding angles, omni-repellent properties against various fluids including polar and nonpolar liquids, pressure tolerance and mechanical robustness, all of which are not readily achievable with the state-of-the-art superhydrophobic coatings.

If I understand it rightly the researchers are using the word omniphobic (omni meaning ‘all’ or ‘everything’) to imply that this surface repels liquids in many more situations, e.g. high-velocity stream of water (rain) than the superhydrophobic materials.

Chameleon materials

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Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences researchers discovered some unexpected properties when testing a new coating according to an Oct. 22, 2013 news item on Azonano,

Active camouflage has taken a step forward at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), with a new coating that intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras.

In a laboratory test, a team of applied physicists placed the device on a hot plate and watched it through an infrared camera as the temperature rose. Initially, it behaved as expected, giving off more infrared light as the sample was heated: at 60 degrees Celsius it appeared blue-green to the camera; by 70 degrees it was red and yellow. At 74 degrees it turned a deep red—and then something strange happened. The thermal radiation plummeted. At 80 degrees it looked blue, as if it could be 60 degrees, and at 85 it looked even colder. Moreover, the effect was reversible and repeatable, many times over.

The Oct. 21, 2013 Harvard University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, discusses the potential for this discovery and describes the process of discovery in more detail (Note: A link has been removed),

Principal investigator Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at Harvard SEAS, predicts that with only small adjustments the coating could be used as a new type of thermal camouflage or as a kind of encrypted beacon to allow soldiers to covertly communicate their locations in the field.

The secret to the technology lies within a very thin film of vanadium oxide, an unusual material that undergoes dramatic electronic changes when it reaches a particular temperature. At room temperature, for example, pure vanadium oxide is electrically insulating, but at slightly higher temperatures it transitions to a metallic, electrically conductive state. During that transition, the optical properties change, too, which means special temperature-dependent effects—like infrared camouflage—can also be achieved.

The insulator-metal transition has been recognized in vanadium oxide since 1959. However, it is a difficult material to work with: in bulk crystals, the stress of the transition often causes cracks to develop and can shatter the sample. Recent advances in materials synthesis and characterization—especially those by coauthor Shriram Ramanathan, Associate Professor of Materials Science at Harvard SEAS—have allowed the creation of extremely pure samples of thin-film vanadium oxide, enabling a burst of new science and engineering to take off in just the last few years.

“Thanks to these very stable samples that we’re getting from Prof. Ramanathan’s lab, we now know that if we introduce small changes to the material, we can dramatically change the optical phenomena we observe,” explains lead author Mikhail Kats, a graduate student in Capasso’s group at Harvard SEAS. “By introducing impurities or defects in a controlled way via processes known as doping, modifying, or straining the material, it is possible to create a wide range of interesting, important, and predictable behaviors.”

By doping vanadium oxide with tungsten, for example, the transition temperature can be brought down to room temperature, and the range of temperatures over which the strange thermal radiation effect occurs can be widened. Tailoring the material properties like this, with specific outcomes in mind, may enable engineering to advance in new directions.

The researchers say a vehicle coated in vanadium oxide tiles could potentially mimic its environment like a chameleon, appearing invisible to an infrared camera with only very slight adjustments to the tiles’ actual temperature—a far more efficient system than the approaches in use today.

Tuned differently, the material could become a component of a secret beacon, displaying a particular thermal signature on cue to an infrared surveillance camera. Capasso’s team suggests that the material could be engineered to operate at specific wavelengths, enabling simultaneous use by many individually identifiable soldiers.

And, because thermal radiation carries heat, the researchers believe a similar effect could be employed to deliberately speed up or slow down the cooling of structures ranging from houses to satellites.

The Harvard team’s most significant contribution is the discovery that nanoscale structures that appear naturally in the transition region of vanadium oxide can be used to provide a special level of tunability, which can be used to suppress thermal radiation as the temperature rises. The researchers refer to such a spontaneously structured material as a “natural, disordered metamaterial.”

“To artificially create such a useful three-dimensional structure within a material is extremely difficult,” says Capasso. “Here, nature is giving us what we want for free. By taking these natural metamaterials and manipulating them to have all the properties we want, we are opening up a new area of research, a completely new direction of work. We can engineer new devices from the bottom up.”

Here’s an image, from the scientists, illustrating the material’s thermal camouflage (or chameleon) properties,

A new coating intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras. (Image courtesy of Mikhail Kats.)

A new coating intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras. (Image courtesy of Mikhail Kats.)

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper,

Vanadium Dioxide as a Natural Disordered Metamaterial: Perfect Thermal Emission and Large Broadband Negative Differential Thermal Emittance by Mikhail A. Kats, Romain Blanchard, Shuyan Zhang, Patrice Genevet, Changhyun Ko, Shriram Ramanathan, and Federico Capasso. Phys. Rev. X » Volume 3 » Issue 4  or Phys. Rev. X 3, 041004 (2013) DOI:10.1103/PhysRevX.3.041004

This paper is published in an open access journal according to the Harvard news release,

About Physical Review X

Launched in August 2011, PRX (http://prx.aps.org) is an open-access, peer-reviewed publication of the American Physical Society (www.aps.org), a non-profit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Chart junk: rethinking science data visualization

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Which of these visualizations will you remember later? (Images courtesy of Michelle Borkin, Harvard SEAS.)

Which of these visualizations will you remember later? (Images courtesy of Michelle Borkin, Harvard SEAS.)

This chart of data visualization images accompanies an Oct. 16, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily concerning some research into what makes some charts more memorable than others,

It’s easy to spot a “bad” data visualization — one packed with too much text, excessive ornamentation, gaudy colors, and clip art. Design guru Edward Tufte derided such decorations as redundant at best, useless at worst, labeling them “chart junk.” Yet a debate still rages among visualization experts: Can these reviled extra elements serve a purpose?

Taking a scientific approach to design, researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are offering a new take on that debate. The same design elements that attract so much criticism, they report, can also make a visualization more memorable.

Detailed results were presented this week at the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) conference in Atlanta, hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The Oct. 16, 2013 School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) Harvard University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, details some of the ways in which the researchers attempted to study data visualizations and memorability (Note: Links from the news release to be found on the SEAS website have been removed),

For lead author Michelle Borkin, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), memorability has a particular importance:

“I spend a lot of my time reading these scientific papers, so I have to wonder, when I walk away from my desk, what am I going to remember? Which of the figures and visualizations in these publications are going to stick with me?”

But it’s more than grad-school anxiety. Working at the interface of computer science and psychology, Borkin specializes in the visual representation of data, looking for the best ways to communicate and interpret complex information. The applications of her work have ranged from astronomy to medical diagnostics and may already help save lives.

Her adviser, Hanspeter Pfister, An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS, was intrigued by the chart junk debate, which has flared up on design blogs and at visualization conferences year after year.

Together, they turned to Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and a cognitive psychologist by training. Oliva’s lab has been studying visual memory for about six years now. Her team has found that in photographs, faces and human-centric scenes are typically easy to remember; landscapes are not.

“All of us are sensitive to the same kinds of images, and we forget the same kind as well,” Oliva says. “We like to believe our memories are unique, that they’re like the soul of a person, but in certain situations it’s as if we have the same algorithm in our heads that is going to be sensitive to a particular type of image. So when you find a result like this in photographs, you want to know: is it generalizable to many types of materials—words, sound, images, graphs?”

“Speaking with [Pfister] and his group, it became very exciting, the idea that we could study what makes a visualization memorable or not,” Oliva recalls. “If it turned out to be the same for everyone, we thought this would be a win-win result.”

For Oliva’s group, it would provide more evidence of cognitive similarities in the brain’s visual processing, from person to person. For Pfister’s group, it could suggest that certain design principles make visualizations inherently more memorable than others.

With Harvard students Azalea A. Vo ’13 and Shashank Sunkavalli SM ’13, as well as MIT graduate students Zoya Bylinskii and Phillip Isola, the team designed a large-scale study—in the form of an online game—to rigorously measure the memorability of a wide variety of visualizations. They collected more than 5,000 charts and graphics from scientific papers, design blogs, newspapers, and government reports and manually categorized them by a wide range of attributes. Serving them up in brief glimpses—just one second each—to participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk, the researchers tested the influence of features like color, density, and content themes on users’ ability to recognize which ones they had seen before.

The results meshed well with Oliva’s previous results, but added several new insights.

“A visualization will be instantly and overwhelmingly more memorable if it incorporates an image of a human-recognizable object—if it includes a photograph, people, cartoons, logos—any component that is not just an abstract data visualization,” says Pfister. “We learned that any time you have a graphic with one of those components, that’s the most dominant thing that affects the memorability.”

Visualizations that were visually dense proved memorable, as did those that used many colors. Other results were more surprising.

“You’d think the types of charts you’d remember best are the ones you learned in school—the bar charts, pie charts, scatter plots, and so on,” Borkin says. “But it was the opposite.”

Unusual types of charts, like tree diagrams, network diagrams, and grid matrices, were actually more memorable.

“If you think about those types of diagrams—for example, tree diagrams that show relationships between species, or diagrams that explain a molecular chemical process—every one of them is going to be a little different, but the branching structures feel very natural to us,” explains Borkin. “That combination of the familiar and the unique seems to influence the memorability.”

The best type of chart to use will always depend on the data, but for designers who are required to work within a certain style—for example, to achieve a recognizable consistency within a magazine—the results may be reassuring.

“A graph can be simple or complex, and they both can be memorable,” explains Oliva. “You can make something familiar either by keeping it simple or by having a little story around it. It’s not really that you should choose to use one color or many, or to include additional ornaments or not. If you need to keep it simple because it’s the style your boss likes or the style of your publication, you can still find a way to make it memorable.”

At this stage, however, the team hesitates to issue any sweeping design guidelines for an obvious reason: memorability isn’t the only thing that matters. Visualizations must also be accurate, easy to comprehend, aesthetically pleasing, and appropriate to the context.

“A memorable visualization is not necessarily a good visualization,” Borkin cautions. “As a community we need to keep asking these types of questions: What makes a visualization engaging? What makes it comprehensible?”

As for the chart junk, she says diplomatically, “I think it’s going to be an ongoing debate.”

I believe Michelle Borkin is the lead author of an unpublished (as yet) paper submitted to the 2013 IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) conference, which means I can’t offer a link to or a citation for the paper.

Harvard University researcher Chirarattananom’s Flight of the RoboBee

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The flight of  Chirarattananom’s RoboBee took place last summer but the research has only now been published. There’s a May 2, 2013 news release on EurekAlert heralding this robotic first from 2012,

In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m.—subject line, “Flight of the RoboBee.”

“I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,” recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.

The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Here’s what it looks like,

The tiny robot flaps its wings 120 times per second using piezoelectric actuators -- strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within the carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real-time. Credit: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University.

The tiny robot flaps its wings 120 times per second using piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within the carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real-time.
Credit: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University.

The Harvard [University] Gazette May 2, 2013 article by Caroline Perry, which originated the news release, provides more detail about what makes this particular robotic work unique,

“We had to develop solutions from scratch, for everything,” explains Wood [Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, Wyss core faculty member, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project]. “We would get one component working, but when we moved onto the next, five new problems would arise. It was a moving target.”

Flight muscles, for instance, don’t come prepackaged for robots the size of a fingertip.

“Large robots can run on electromagnetic motors, but at this small scale you have to come up with an alternative, and there wasn’t one,” says co-lead author Kevin Y. Ma, a graduate student at SEAS.

The tiny robot flaps its wings with piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within the carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real time.

At tiny scales, small changes in airflow can have an outsized effect on flight dynamics, and the control system has to react that much faster to remain stable.

While it’s called the RoboBee project, the researchers’ inspiration for this prototype is a fly. Unlike most flies, this one is tethered, at least for now (from Perry’s article),

The prototypes are still tethered by a very thin power cable because there are no off-the-shelf solutions for energy storage that are small enough to be mounted on the robot’s body. High-energy-density fuel cells must be developed before the RoboBees will be able to fly with much independence.

Future research plans include (from Perry’s article),

… integrating the parallel work of many different research teams that are working on the brain, the colony coordination behavior, the power source, and so on, until the robotic insects are fully autonomous and wireless.

Here’s a citation for and a link to the research paper,

Controlled Flight of a Biologically Inspired, Insect-Scale Robot by Kevin Y. Ma,  Pakpong Chirarattananon,  Sawyer B. Fuller, and Robert J. Wood. Science 3 May 2013: Vol. 340 no. 6132 pp. 603-607 DOI: 10.1126/science.1231806

The paper is behind a paywall.

On reading about the RoboBee project I was reminded of Michael Crichton’s 2002 cautionary tale, Prey, which focuses on a possible future where small, swarming bots that fly threaten to take over the world. More happily, I was also inspired musically and found this rendition of the Flight of the Bumblebee,

Have a nice Friday, May 3, 2013!

Harvard researchers look deeply into oily puddles as they rethink thin films and optical loss

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For centuries it was thought that thin-film interference effects, such as those that cause oily pavements to reflect a rainbow of swirling colors, could not occur in opaque materials. Harvard physicists have now discovered that even very “lossy” thin films, if atomically thin, can be tailored to reflect a particular range of dramatic and vivid colors.

from the Oct. 14, 2012 news release on EurekAlert (also available on the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences [SEAS] news page),

The discovery is the latest to emerge from the laboratory of Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS, whose research group most recently produced ultrathin flat lenses and needle light beams that skim the surface of metals. The common thread in Capasso’s recent work is the manipulation of light at the interface of materials that are engineered at the nano- scale, a field referred to as nanophotonics. Graduate student and lead author Mikhail A. Kats carried that theme into the realm of color.

“In my group, we frequently reexamine old phenomena, where you think everything’s already known,” Capasso says. “If you have perceptive eyes, as many of my students do, you can discover exciting things that have been overlooked. In this particular case there was almost a bias among engineers that if you’re using interference, the waves have to bounce many times, so the material had better be transparent. What Mikhail’s done—and it’s admittedly simple to calculate—is to show that if you use a light-absorbing film like germanium, much thinner than the wavelength of light, then you can still see large interference effects.”

The result is a structure made of only two elements, gold and germanium (or many other possible pairings), that shines in whatever color one chooses.

These are gold films colored with nanometer-thick layers of germanium. Credit: Photo courtesy of Mikhail Kats, Romain Blanchard, and Patrice Genevet

The Oct. 14, 2012 news item on ScienceDaily notes,

“We are all familiar with the phenomenon that you see when there’s a thin film of gasoline on the road on a wet day, and you see all these different colors,” explains Capasso.

Those colors appear because the crests and troughs in the light waves interfere with each other as they pass through the oil into the water below and reflect back up into the air. Some colors (wavelengths) get a boost in brightness (amplitude), while other colors are lost.

That’s essentially the same effect that Capasso and Kats are exploiting, with coauthors Romain Blanchard and Patrice Genevet. The absorbing germanium coating traps certain colors of light while flipping the phase of others so that the crests and troughs of the waves line up closely and reflect one pure, vivid color.

“Instead of trying to minimize optical losses, we use them as an integral part of the design of thin-film coatings,” notes Kats. “In our design, reflection and absorption cooperate to give the maximum effect.”

Most astonishingly, though, a difference of only a few atoms’ thickness across the coating is sufficient to produce the dramatic color shifts. The germanium film is applied through standard manufacturing techniques — lithography and physical vapor deposition, which the researchers compare to stenciling and spray-painting — so with only a minimal amount of material (a thickness between 5 and 20 nanometers), elaborate colored designs can easily be patterned onto any surface, large or small.

“Just by changing the thickness of that film by about 15 atoms, you can change the color,” says Capasso. “It’s remarkable.”

I will never look at another oily puddle the same way again.