Liquid metals are unusual substances. They flow like water yet conduct electricity almost as well as solid copper. This combination makes them appealing for flexible electronics, soft robotics, and wearable devices.
Their weakness lies in the oxide film that instantly forms when the metal meets air or water. The thin oxide stabilizes droplets but prevents them from fusing, interrupting electrical flow. Previous attempts to control this oxide used agitation, chemical etching, or complex coatings. Each method added cost or created new problems such as brittleness or instability. A stable, self-repairing conductor that worked without those steps remained out of reach.
[…] new research offers a biological route forward. [A] team created a living liquid metal composite by embedding bacterial endospores within a gallium and indium alloy. The spores come from Bacillus subtilis, a microbe known for surviving heat, dryness, and chemical stress. In the dormant spore state, the cells are metabolically inactive and remarkably durable. When exposed to nutrients, they germinate and return to life. Within the metal, these spores act as both structural and electrical agents. They modify the oxide layer and, once active, move electrons directly into the metallic network.
Conceptual illustrations of the living liquid metal composite embedded with electrogenic bacterial endospores. a) Circuit conductivity: i) Liquid metal droplets with native oxide layers, exhibiting low conductivity. ii) Endospore-mediated oxide rupture between droplets, enabling conductive bridging, and high conductivity. b) Biological functionality: i) Dormant endospores embedded in liquid metal, supporting long-term preservation, and stable conductivity. ii) Germination of endospores, reactivating metabolic activity and extracellular electron transfer (EET). c) Self-healing behavior enabled by the intrinsic fluidity and oxide dynamics of liquid metal. d) Enhanced patternability on paper substrates due to improved wettability and interfacial compatibility provided by endospores. [downloaded from https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.202521818]
Berger’s October 30, 2025 article provides more detail about the advantages of this particular approach,
The mechanism depends on how the spores interact with the metal surface. Each spore carries a rough outer shell covered with chemical groups that bond strongly to metal oxides. These include amino, carboxyl, phosphate, and hydroxyl groups. When mixed with the gallium–indium alloy, the spores attach to the oxide skin and disturb its uniformity. This weakens the barrier and allows neighboring droplets to merge, restoring electrical continuity without external pressure or heating. Spectroscopic analysis confirms reduced oxygen signals and greater exposure of gallium, evidence of thinner oxide layers and stronger metal connectivity.
This microscopic change produces significant electrical improvements. The composite conducts at about 1.1×10⁴ siemens per centimeter even without sintering. After a week of air exposure, it retains over 90 percent of that conductivity, while pure liquid metal loses much more. When the spores are activated with a nutrient solution containing amino acids and sugars, the conductivity increases to about 5.1×10⁶ siemens per centimeter. The gain comes from both mechanical disruption of the oxide and electron transfer by the living cells. Imaging shows that the spores germinate and spread within the metallic matrix, confirming that biological activity enhances performance.
Electrochemical tests reinforce this finding. Cyclic voltammetry shows that oxidized metal without spores produces unstable current profiles that weaken over time. With spores, the current remains steady, showing stable charge transfer. Impedance measurements reveal higher resistance while the spores are dormant, followed by a marked drop after germination, consistent with active electron movement through the living network.
Mechanical performance also improves. Liquid metals already heal by flowing into cracks, but the composite heals faster. After being cut, it recovers more than 90 percent of its conductivity within about 30 seconds, while the unmodified alloy needs about 90 seconds. During 500 bending cycles at 10 percent strain, the composite retains over 90 percent of its conductivity, while the pure alloy loses nearly half. Microscopy shows continuous bridges forming across cracks and suggests that the spores reinforce the oxide layer and spread stress more evenly.
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Binghamton University issued a November 5, 2025 news release by Chris Kocher that highlights the researcher and his hopes for the material, Note: Links have been removed,
Electronics have been transforming from rigid, lifeless systems into adaptive, living platforms capable of seamlessly interacting with biological environments. Researchers at Binghamton University are pioneering “living metal” composites embedded with bacterial endospores, paving the way for dynamic communication and integration between electronic and biological systems.
In a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials (opens in a new window), Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, Maryam Rezaie, PhD ’25, and Yang “Lexi” Gao, PhD ’26, share their potentially groundbreaking study on liquid living metal composites that could redefine the future of bioelectronics.
Choi — a faculty member in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering — is developing innovative technologies to bridge the gap between electronic and biological systems.
Most of Choi’s previous bioelectronic projects employed conductive polymer materials, as liquid metals pose challenges for integration. Their hydrophobic properties hinder adhesion to electronic substrates, and exposure to air or water leads to the formation of an oxide layer that restricts electron flow and disrupts communication between electronic and biological systems.
However, he said, polymers have their own difficulties: “I was not satisfied with the interface — it was not seamless — and although the polymers are conductive, it’s not as much as metal. Also, most bioelectronics will be deployed in very harsh environments, so they are subject to mechanical damage. They must have a self-healing property.”
He believes that electrogenic bacteria — cells which generate small amounts of power — are the key. By combining liquid metal with dormant endospores for the bacteriaBacillus subtilis, which Choi has used to develop biobatteries, the composite material overcomes many of the limitations from liquid metal alone.
“When we combine the spores with the liquid metal droplets, there is a huge attractive force, because the spores have chemical functional groups on their surface that interact with the liquid metal oxide layers. This strong force ruptures the oxide layers so the metal can be conductive.”
The spores can stay inactive under harsh conditions and germinate when the environment is more favorable. The composite also is easily absorbed into device substrates such as paper while keeping the best properties of metal. It even exhibits enhanced electrical conductivity when the spores germinate.
Most importantly, though, the composite shows the self-healing abilities that researchers want to see. When a break in the material happens, the composite autonomously fills the gap— an important breakthrough when a circuit is damaged and can’t easily be replaced.
Before any commercial applications, more experimentation is needed to better control the activation of the endospores and to evaluate the liquid living metal composites for long-term stability in a variety of environments.
In the future, such materials could enable wearable or implantable devices to interface safely and directly with human tissue.
“Biological systems use molecules and ions for metabolism or signaling, while electronics exclusively depend on the electrons, so that will create communication errors,” he said. “Electrogenic bacteria use molecules and ions but also generate electrons. The question is how we can seamlessly integrate this electrogenic bacteria into a living electrode to bridge these two systems.”
I have been stumbling across bug (or insect) research at a greater rate than usual and while the ‘bug-informed’ community is, no doubt, acutely aware of the loss of insect life, the severity of the situation was a revelation to me.
Bugpocalypse (h/t IFLScience for the head)
Caption: Drosophila use multiple mechanisms to adapt to hot, dry desert temperatures. Credit: Sarah Becan for the Gallio Lab/Northwestern University
Insect populations, foundational to food chains and pollination, have dramatically declined over the past 20 years due to rapid climate change
Scientists identify two ways fly species from different climates (high-altitude forest and hot desert) have adapted to temperature
Paper provides evidence that changes in brain wiring and heat sensitivity contributed to shifting preference to hot or cold conditions, respectively
Results may help predict the impact of ongoing climate change on insect distribution and behavior
EVANSTON, Ill. — Tiny, cold-blooded animals like flies depend on their environment to regulate body temperature, making them ideal “canaries in the mine” for gauging the impact of climate change on the behavior and distribution of animal species. Yet, scientists know relatively little about how insect sense and respond to temperature.
Using two species of flies from different climates — one from the cool, high-altitude forests of Northern California, the other hailing from the hot, dry deserts of the Southwest (both cousins of the common laboratory fly, drosophila melanogaster) — Northwestern scientists discovered remarkable differences in the way each processes external temperature.
Forest flies showed increased avoidance of heat, potentially explained by higher sensitivity in their antennae’s molecular heat receptors, while desert flies were instead actively attracted to heat, a response that could be tracked to differences in brain wiring in a region of the fly brain that helps compute the valence (inherent attractiveness or aversiveness) of sensory cues.
The scientists believe these two mechanisms may have accompanied the evolution of each species as it adapted to its distinctive thermal environment, starting from a common ancestor dating back 40 million years (not long after dinosaurs went extinct).
These findings, published today (March 5 [2025]) in the journal Nature, help understand how animals evolve the preferences for specific temperature environments and may help predict the impact of a rapidly changing climate on animal behavior and distribution.
‘Not enough people care about insects’
“Insects are especially threatened by climate change,” said Northwestern neurobiologist Marco Gallio. “Behavior is the first interface between an animal and its environment. Even before the struggle to survive or perish, animals can respond to climate change by migration and by changing their distribution. We are already seeing insect populations declining in many regions, and even insect vectors of disease like the Zika virus and malaria spreading into new areas.”
Gallio, a self-appointed “insect advocate,” is a professor in the neurobiology department and the Soretta and Henry Shapiro Research Professor in Molecular Biology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. His lab examines fruit flies and their sensing systems. Gallio acknowledged there is limited data because “not enough people care about the insects,” but that available figures record a dramatic decline in insects in the past 20 to 50 years. Though bug haters may rejoice, Gallio said the population decline in the animal group with the most species on Earth is nothing to celebrate.
In addition to their position at the foundation of most terrestrial food chains, insects pollinate 70% of our crops. Gallio said losing insect communities could cause catastrophic damage to ecosystems across the globe and have a direct impact on human wellbeing.
Understanding heat circuits in the brain
Previous work from the Gallio Lab focused on how small insects like laboratory flies respond to sensory cues like harmless and painful temperature changes.
“The common fruit fly is an especially powerful animal to study how the external world is represented and processed within the brain,” Gallio said. “Many years of work on fly genetics and neuroscience have given us a map of the fly brain more detailed than that of any other animal.”
In the present study, Gallio and colleagues wondered how the brain circuits and resulting behaviors compared in fly species that were very similar aside from their choices of thermal habitat.
Using genetic tools, including CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats], to knock out certain genes and gene swaps between species, the team studied both the molecular and brain mechanisms that may explain species-specific differences in temperature preference.
Ph.D. student and lead author Matthew Capek explained that they first found differences in the molecules that detect heat, causing them to activate at different temperatures. And while Capek said the difference in activation could explain the forest flies’ preference for cooler environments, a shift in receptor activation was not enough to explain the behavior of the desert fly.
“The desert fly seemed actively attracted to warmer temperatures — around 90 degrees Fahrenheit compared to the forest fly’s sweet spot just below 70 degrees,” said Capek, who works in the Gallio lab. “In fact, the activation threshold of the antenna heat sensors corresponded to their favorite temperature range, which they will seek, rather than to a temperature they should avoid.”
“In other words, the fly doesn’t behave any longer as though the antennae are telling it to run away from dangerous heat; they seem to be telling it higher temperatures are good, and to approach them.”
High cost, high reward
Gallio was initially puzzled — deserts are hot, so it did not make sense that flies sought out heat — but a lab trip to the Anza Borrego desert of Southern California provided key inspiration.
“Deserts in this region are very hot during the day, but temperatures can drop extremely rapidly when the sun goes down, and night can be downright freezing,” said Alessia Para, also a key author of the study and a research associate professor of neurobiology. “Flies in this climate may need to constantly attend to the rapidly changing temperature and always seek the ideal range, finding shady spots during the day and hiding in cacti for warmth at night.”
Flies from more forgiving environments may instead ignore temperature except when it changes rapidly. Constantly detecting the right temperature is costly from an energy perspective, but for desert flies, it’s life or death.
“This comparative work is useful in a couple of different ways,” Gallio said. “When an animal is born, the brain is already programmed to know if many of the things it will encounter are bad or good for it, and we do not understand how that programming works.
These fly species represent a natural experiment because a stimulus that is good for one species is bad for the other, and we can study the differences that make it so. We also want to learn more about how animals have been able to adapt to different temperatures during evolution, so that we may be able to better understand and even predict how they react to ongoing climate change. Of course we care about the insects, and we hope that what we learn may help us appreciate and protect them better.”
There’s more but first, a citation and a link to the Gallio Lab’s paper,
Evolution of temperature preference in flies of the genus Drosophila by Matthew Capek, Oscar M. Arenas, Michael H. Alpert, Emanuela E. Zaharieva, Iván D. Méndez-González, José Miguel Simões, Hamin Gil, Aldair Acosta, Yuqing Su, Alessia Para & Marco Gallio. Nature (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08682-z Published: 05 March 2025
This paper is behind a paywall.
Bugs Matter
Thanks to buglife.org.uk for the subhead and the report. Here’s more from their April 30, 2025 press release, Note: Links have been removed,
The troubling extent of insect declines across the UK has been highlighted once again by the results of the 2024 Bugs Matter citizen science survey published today. The latest data shows that the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle number plates, across the UK, has fallen by a staggering 63% since 2021.
The Bugs Matter survey, led by Kent Wildlife Trust in partnership with invertebrate charity Buglife, relies on a nationwide network of volunteer citizen scientists who record insect splats on their vehicle number plates after journeys, using the Bugs Matter app built by Natural Apptitude. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys across the UK since 2021 shows an alarming decrease in bug splats but data from 2024 shows this decrease has slowed.
Insects are critical to ecosystem functioning and services. They pollinate crops, provide natural pest control, decompose waste and recycle nutrients, and underpin food chains that support birds, mammals and other wildlife. Without insects, the planet’s ecological systems would collapse.
Dr. Lawrence Ball of Kent Wildlife Trust stated:“This huge decrease in insect splats over such a short time is really alarming. Its most likely that we are seeing the compounding effects of both a background rate of decline as well as a short term cycle of decline, perhaps linked to the extreme climate in the UK in recent years. Bug splats declined 8% from 2023 to 2024, following sharper drops of 44% in 2023 and 28% in 2022. This shows the rate of decline has slowed and it may even flatten or reverse next year. Continued support from citizen scientists is key to revealing the overall trend in insect numbers.”
The new data shows a decrease in insect splat rates across all the UK nations, with the sharpest fall between 2021 and 2024 recorded in Scotland at 65%. In England, the number of insect splats fell by 62%, in Wales by 64%, and in Northern Ireland by 55%, over the same time period.
Andrew Whitehouse, from Buglife added:“The latest Bugs Matter data suggests that the abundance of flying insects in our countryside has fallen again. The consequences are potentially far-reaching, not only impacting the health of the natural world, but affecting so many of the essential services that nature provides for us. Human activities continue to have a huge impact on nature, habitat loss and damage, pesticide use, pollution, and climate change all contribute to the decline in insects. Society must heed the warning signs of ecological collapse, and take urgent action to restore nature.”
Participation in Bugs Matter is growing and the number of journeys recorded in 2024 far exceeded previous years. This is in part thanks to a new partnership with Openreach, owner of the nation’s second largest commercial van fleet.
Peter Stewart, Openreach’s UK Operations Director for Service Delivery said:“We’re excited to participate in the ‘Bugs Matter’ survey for the second year. Our engineers travel millions of miles annually across the UK to build and maintain our network, making it easy for them to measure insect splats on vehicle number plates. We recognise the crucial role pollinators play for all of us to thrive, and as part of our strategy to protect nature, we’re proud to support this campaign again. Last year, we contributed around 10% of the registered journeys, and with our 25,000-strong fleet, we aim to do even better this year.”
Andrew Whitehouse concluded: “Thank you to everyone who participated in the Bugs Matter survey in 2024. Your contribution has provided invaluable insights into the health of our insect populations and wider environment. We are relaunching the survey on May 1 this year [2025], and with our expansion into the Republic of Ireland, we hope to engage even more people in this crucial citizen science effort.”
The 2025 Bugs Matter survey will run from Saturday 1 May to Tuesday 30 September. It is quick, free and easy to get involved – simply download the free mobile phone app and start recording insect splats on vehicle journeys.
Expansion into Republic of Ireland
In response to growing interest and the need for more comprehensive data, the Bugs Matter survey is expanding into the Republic of Ireland for the 2025 season, thanks to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant ‘Go Further, Faster’ Award received by Bugs Matter at the end of 2024. This grant provides vital resources to non-profit organisations looking to deploy cloud technology as a central tool to achieve their mission goals, and is providing Bugs Matter with a combination of funding, cloud computing credits, and engagement with AWS technical specialists. This marks an important step in building a more complete picture of insect populations across the British Isles, and future expansion of the Bugs Matter survey.
Dr. Lawrence Ball of Kent Wildlife Trust stated, “We’re extremely grateful for the financial and technical support from Amazon Web Services, which means we can launch in Ireland this year and in more countries in 2026. If you drive or know someone who drives in Ireland, please download the app, sign up, and take part! The UK results highlight the importance of understanding insect numbers elsewhere.”
The charities caution that continued long-term monitoring is essential to track the precise magnitude of these alarming trends, but stress that the current pace of decline is clearly ecologically unviable. By taking part in the Bugs Matter survey each year, citizen scientists can provide crucial data to better understand insect population patterns and support evidence-based conservation actions.
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Zac Sherratt’s April 30, 2025 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) online news website offers little more information,
A survey tracking the “staggering” decline in insect numbers across the UK and Ireland has begun.
The Bugs Matter survey, led by Kent Wildlife Trust and invertebrate charity Buglife, runs from 1 May to 30 September each year and sees “citizen scientists” record the number of bug splats on their vehicle number plates after a journey.
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Dr Ball [Dr. Lawrence Ball of Kent Wildlife Trust] said: “Without insects, the planet’s ecological systems would collapse so this huge decrease in insect splats over such a short time is really alarming.”
Bug splats declined 8% in 2024, following sharper drops of 44% in 2023 and 28% in 2022.
Dr Ball said the slowing rate of decline shows the curve may flatten or even reverse next year.
More than 25,000 journeys have been analysed as part of the survey since 2021.
There’s an interesting back story for IFLScience (which started life as as Facebook page titled, “I Fucking Love Science”). If you want to find out more about IFLScience’s origins and founder, there’s Elise Andrew’s Wikipedia entry.
Returning to the bugs, Dr. Russell Moul’s April 30 (?), 2025 article for IFLScience further highlights the plight of insects around the world, Note: Links have been removed,
Insect populations have been declining across the world at an alarming rate, but no one has been sure why. According to a new study, intense agricultural practices are at the top of the list of causes, but there are multiple interrelated factors that are all contributing to quickly killing off these vital creatures.
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“Insects are fundamental to life on earth. They are really important pollinators, decomposers, and prey for birds, bats, reptiles, and other species”, Eliza Grames, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, told IFLScience.
“Insects pollinate around 80 percent of wild flowering plants, and 75 percent of agricultural crop species rely on insects for pollination. Without insects as decomposers, the earth would essentially be covered in manure. Cow manure takes 60 percent longer to deteriorate when insects are excluded from an area.”
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But despite their importance, insect numbers are declining. In 2017, a devastating study demonstrated that there has been more than a 75 percent decline in insect populations over the last three decades. As a result, scientists have been seeking to identify the likely causes for this decline.
In order to understand which causes the scientific community has found so far, Grames and colleagues from Binghamton University examined some 175 scientific reviews, which contained over 500 hypothesized drivers behind the decline. This information allowed the team to create an interconnected network of 3,000 possible links, known as a meta-synthetic approach, which spanned everything from beekeeping and deforestation to urban sprawl and parasites.
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Within this network of information, the team found that intensified agriculture was the most cited driver behind the mass die-off. This was linked to issues such as land-use change and insecticides. However, focusing solely on the most cited drivers is not the way to interpret this information. As the team note in their work, the results show how interconnected the drivers are, highlighting complex issues.
For example, the climate may be an important driver behind the decline, but there are aspects within that, such as extreme precipitation, fire, and temperature rises, which can then contribute to other drivers. It’s an extremely connected and synergistic network.
“The drivers of insect decline are really complex and there are many overlooked stressors that we should be thinking about and researching,” Grames told IFLScience.
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If you have a little more time, you can find some interesting tidbits in Moul’s April 30 (?), 2025 article.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the recent meta-analysis/meta-synthesis mentioned in the article,
A February 6, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily announces an application that uses machine learning for insect identification,
A farmer notices an unfamiliar insect on a leaf.
Is this a pollinator? Or a pest? Good news at harvest time? Or bad? Need to be controlled? Or not?
That farmer can snap a picture, use a smartphone or computer to feed the photo into a web-based application called InsectNet and, with the help of machine learning technology, get back real-time information.
“The app identifies the insect and returns a prediction of its taxonomic classification and role in the ecosystem as a pest, predator, pollinator, parasitoid, decomposer, herbivore, indicator and invasive species,” said a scientific paper describing InsectNet recently published by the journal PNAS Nexus [PNAS stands for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US]. Iowa State University’s Baskar Ganapathysubramanian and Arti Singh are the corresponding authors.
InsectNet – which is backed by a dataset of 12 million insect images, including many collected by citizen-scientists – provides identification and predictions for more than 2,500 insect species at more than 96% accuracy. When the application isn’t sure about an insect, it says it is uncertain, giving users more confidence when it does provide answers.
And, because the application was built as a global-to-local model, it can be geographically fine-tuned using expert-verified local and regional datasets. That makes it useful to farmers everywhere.
So, beware, armyworms, cutworms, grasshoppers, stink bugs and all the other harmful insects. And, hello, butterflies, bees and all the other pollinators. Good to see you, lady beetles, mantises and all the other pest predators.
“We envision InsectNet to complement existing approaches, and be part of a growing suite of AI technologies for addressing agricultural challenges,” the authors wrote.
A village of researchers
InsectNet’s ability to be fine-tuned for specific regions or countries make it particularly useful, said Singh, an associate professor of agronomy.
In Iowa, for example, Singh said there are about 50 insect species particularly important to the state’s agricultural production. To identify and provide predictions about those insects, Singh said the project used about 500,000 insect images.
That could happen for farmers all over the globe. And wherever there isn’t sufficient data – these sophisticated models often require millions of images – for local fine-tuning, the global dataset is still available for farmers.
InsectNet isn’t just for farmers, though. Singh said it could also help agents at ports or border crossings identify invasive species. Or it could help researchers working on ecological studies.
So, the app is usable and flexible. But is it accessible?
You can’t go to an app store and download a version just yet, said Ganapathysubramanian, the Joseph and Elizabeth Anderlik Professor in Engineering and director of the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture based at Iowa State. But the app is running on a server at Iowa State. With a QR code (see sidebar) or this URL (insectapp.las.iastate.edu/), users can upload insect pictures and get an identification and prediction.
This works throughout the stages of an insect’s life: from egg to larva to pupa to adult. It works with look-alike species. And it works with diverse image qualities and orientations.
The bottom line for any user is basic information about an insect: “Is this a pest?” Singh said. “Or is it a friend?”
Developers demonstrated the app during last August’s Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. And now the research paper is introducing it to a broader, scientific audience.
But aren’t there already apps that help identify insects?
Yes, said Ganapathysubramanian, but they’re not to the scale of InsectNet and aren’t capable of global-to-local applications. And they’re also not open-source applications with technology that can be shared.
“Making InsectNet open source can encourage broader scientific efforts,” he said. “The scientific community can build on these efforts, rather than starting from scratch.”
The project also answered a lot of technical questions that could be applied to other projects, he said.
How much data is enough? Where can we get that much data? What can we do with noisy data?
How much computer power is necessary? How do we deal with so much data?
“Lastly, it takes a village of expertise to get to this point, right?” said Ganapathysubramanian.
It took agronomists and computer engineers and statisticians and data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists about two years to put InsectNet together and make it work.
“What we learned working with insects can be expanded to include weeds and plant diseases or any other related identification and classification problem in agriculture,” Singh said. “We’re very close to a one-stop shop for identifying all of these.”
The InsectNet project was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (through the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture), the National Science Foundation (through COALESCE: COntext Aware LEarning for Sustainable CybEr-Agricultural Systems), the NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities Program, the USDA’s Current Research Information System Project, and Iowa State’s Plant Sciences Institute.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
InsectNet: Real-time identification of insects using an end-to-end machine learning pipeline by Shivani Chiranjeevi, Mojdeh Saadati, Zi K Deng, Jayanth Koushik, Talukder Z Jubery, Daren S Mueller, Matthew O’Neal , Nirav Merchant , Aarti Singh , Asheesh K Singh , Soumik Sarkar , Arti Singh , Baskar Ganapathysubramanian. PNAS Nexus, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 2025, pgae575, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae575 Published: 27 December 2024
Pro-environmental behaviour increases among school students who participate in insect-related citizen science projects, according to new research from the University of Adelaide.
Students who participated in citizen science project Insect Investigators, which engages students in the discovery of new insects, not only expressed an intention to change their personal behaviour but also to encourage others to protect nature.
“As a result of their involvement in this program, students expressed intentions to further engage in insect–science–nature activities,” says the University of Adelaide’s Dr Erinn Fagan-Jeffries, who contributed to the study.
“In addition, teachers reported increased intentions to include insect-related topics in their teaching, which was positively associated with students’ own intentions for pro-environmental behaviour change.
“This suggests students’ response to the project influenced their teacher’s decision to include citizen science in their lessons.”
School-based citizen science projects facilitate authentic scientific interactions between research and educational institutions while exposing students to scientific processes.
“Teachers’ motivations for providing citizen science experiences to students was to create hands-on learning opportunities and to connect students with real science and scientists,” says Professor Patrick O’Connor AM, Director of the University’s School of Economics and Public Policy.
“Teachers reported interactions with researchers as invaluable. These interactions could take the form of in-person visits by team members, or even instructional videos and curriculum-linked teacher lesson plans.”
Incorporating insects into school-based citizen science projects can challenge widespread human misconceptions about insects and their roles in ecosystems, and foster human–insect connections.
“Given global concerns of rapid insect declines and the overarching biodiversity crisis, insect-focused, school-based citizen science projects can ultimately contribute towards equipping students with knowledge of, and actions to promote, insect conservation,” says lead author Dr Andy Howe, from the University of the Sunshine Coast.
“In Australia, approximately 33 per cent of insects are formally described, the remainder exist as ‘dark taxa’, to the detriment of environmental and biodiversity management initiatives.
“Encouraging more young people to engage in science not only engenders positive feelings in them towards the environment, it will also help to build the next generation of scientists who will fill in the vast knowledge gap that exists in the world of insects.”
Before getting to the link and citation, here’s an update on the Australian higher education ecosystem, from the March 24, 2025 version of the press release on EurekAlert ,
The University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia are joining forces to become Australia’s new major university – Adelaide University. Building on the strengths, legacies and resources of two leading universities, Adelaide University will deliver globally relevant research at scale, innovative, industry-informed teaching and an outstanding student experience. Adelaide University will open its doors in January 2026. Find out more on the Adelaide University website.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) issued an April 22, 2025 news release (also received via email) by Sachi Wickramasinghe announcing research on ‘parks for bugs’,
As the days get longer and gardeners plan their spring planting, research from the University of British Columbia offers some good news this Earth Day: small, simple changes to urban green spaces can make a big difference for pollinators. The study, published in Ecology Letters, found that reducing lawn mowing and creating pollinator meadows – think of them as ‘parks for bugs’– significantly boosts pollinator diversity, creating healthier and more resilient ecosystems.
A buzzing success
The three-year study, conducted in collaboration with the City of Vancouver’s pollinator meadows program, surveyed pollinators in 18 urban parks across Vancouver, comparing parks where meadows were planted and mowing was restricted with parks that remained as standard turfgrass lawns.
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And while the tall grass caused a small stir among some neighbours, the results were striking: parks with meadows saw an immediate increase in pollinator species, with 21 to 47 more wild bee and hoverfly species compared to parks without meadows. The increase persisted over the three-year study period, suggesting that the meadow parks also support pollinators in the long run.
More than 100 species of wild bees and hoverflies were identified, with 35 of them only found in parks with meadows – including the Vancouver and Nevada bumble bee, some miner bees such as the Milwaukee miner bee, the red-faced miner bee and several species of hoverflies.
“Many people think of urban landscapes as poor environments for biodiversity, but our research shows that small actions can have a lasting impact,” said lead author Jens Ulrich, a PhD candidate in the faculty of land and food systems. “You don’t need a lot of space or resources to make a difference.”
Urban landscapes as pollinator havens
Unlike farmland, where large fields with monocrops can limit pollinator movement, urban areas are full of green spaces—gardens, parks, and even roadside boulevards—that can serve as pollinator refuges. The patchwork of small habitats allows species to move freely and settle into restored areas quickly.
The research highlights the importance of maintaining and expanding such efforts. Ongoing management, such as adding more native plants and controlling invasive species, can further strengthen pollinator communities.
The findings also offer practical guidance for city planners and community groups looking to enhance urban green spaces, and have already informed the City of Vancouver’s long-term planning—helping to establish pollinator meadows as a permanent option for parks and shaping future efforts to balance ecological function with aesthetic and cultural values.
“With so much land dedicated to lawns, there’s a major opportunity to rethink how we use these spaces,” said co-author Dr. Risa Sargent, an associate professor in the faculty of land and food systems. “Even small patches of insect-friendly meadows can provide critical resources for pollinators.”
Whether you have a backyard, balcony, or community garden plot, you can support pollinators with these simple steps:
Reduce mowing: Pollinators thrive in areas where flowers are allowed to bloom. Consider letting a section of your lawn grow longer or mowing less frequently.
Plant native flowering shrubs and trees: Perennial species like native chokecherry, Pacific ninebark, oceanspray, native hawthorn, red flowering currant, salal, red-osier dogwood, snowberry and vine maple are great choices for British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
Create a diverse habitat: Incorporate a variety of plants that bloom at different times of the year to provide food from spring to fall.
Avoid pesticides: Many urban areas, including Vancouver, have already restricted pesticide use, but avoiding chemical treatments in your own garden can further protect pollinators.
Leave natural nesting sites: Many native bees nest in the ground or in plant stems. Keeping some bare soil or leaving flower stalks through winter can provide valuable shelter.
Common food additives known as metal oxide nanoparticles may have negative effects on your gut health, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York and Cornell University.
Gretchen Mahler, professor of biomedical engineering and interim vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, worked in collaboration with Cornell researchers to study five of these nanoparticles. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Antioxidants.
“They’re all actual food additives,” said Mahler. “Titanium dioxide tends to show up as a whitening and brightening agent. Silicon dioxide tends to be added to foods to prevent it from clumping. Iron oxide tends to be added to meats, for example, to keep that red color. And zinc oxide can be used as a preservative because it’s antimicrobial.” [emphases mine]
In order to test these nanoparticles, Mahler and Elad Tako, senior author and associate professor of food science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell, used the intestinal tract of chickens. A chicken’s intestinal tract is comparable to a human’s; the microbiota that they have and the bacterial components have a lot of overlap with the microbiota that you see in the human digestive system, said Mahler.
“We’ve been testing a series of nanomaterials here at Binghamton, and we’ve been looking at things like nutrient absorption, enzyme expression and some of the more subtle, functional markers,” said Mahler.
The doses of nanoparticles that were tested reflect what is typically consumed by humans. The nanoparticles were injected into the amniotic sac of broiler chicken eggs, which are specifically bred and raised for their meat. These chickens get larger faster, so the effects of the nanoparticles are more obvious earlier in development. The amniotic sac at a certain stage of development flows through the chicken intestine.
“When they hatched, we harvested tissue from the small intestine, the microbiota and the liver,” said Mahler. “We looked at gene expression, microbiota composition and the structure of the small intestine.”
The researchers found more negative effects with silicone dioxide and titanium dioxide. They also found that the nanoparticles had affected the functioning of the chicken’s intestinal lining (called the brush border membrane), the balance of bacteria in their intestinal tract and the chickens’ ability to absorb minerals.
The other nanoparticles had more neutral, or even positive, effects. Zinc oxide appeared to support intestinal development or compensatory mechanisms due to intestinal damage. Iron oxide could potentially be used for iron fortification, but with potential alterations in intestinal functionality and health.
Mahler doesn’t want to suggest that these nanoparticles need to be removed from our diets completely. Their research is meant to provide some information, and allow people to have a better understanding of what’s really in the food they consume.
“We’re eating these things, so it’s important to consider what some of the more subtle effects could be,” said Mahler. “We develop these gut models around this problem to try to understand it, and this collaboration, where we have these complementary methods to try to look at the problem, has been successful.”
According to an April 18, 2023 news item on ScienceDaily this long-lasting (100 years potentially) biobattery runs on bacteria,
A tiny biobattery that could still work after 100 years has been developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Last fall [2022], Binghamton University Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi and his Bioelectronics and Microsystems Laboratory published their research into an ingestible biobattery activated by the Ph factor of the human intestine.
Now, he and PhD student Maryam Rezaie have taken what they learned and incorporated it into new ideas for use outside the body.
A new study in the journal Small, which covers nanotechnology, shares the results from using spore-forming bacteria similar to the previous ingestible version to create a device that potentially would still work after 100 years.
“The overall objective is to develop a microbial fuel cell that can be stored for a relatively long period without degradation of biocatalytic activity and also can be rapidly activated by absorbing moisture from the air,” said Choi, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science.
“We wanted to make these biobatteries for portable, storable and on-demand power generation capabilities,” Choi said. “The problem is, how can we provide the long-term storage of bacteria until used? And if that is possible, then how would you provide on-demand battery activation for rapid and easy power generation? And how would you improve the power?”
The dime-sized fuel cell was sealed with a piece of Kapton tape, a material that can withstand temperatures from -500 to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. When the tape was removed and moisture allowed in, the bacteria mixed with a chemical germinant that encouraged the microbes to produce spores. The energy from that reaction produced enough to power an LED, a digital thermometer or a small clock.
Heat activation of the bacterial spores cut the time to full power from 1 hour to 20 minutes, and increasing the humidity led to higher electrical output. After a week of storage at room temperature, there was only a 2% drop in power generation.
The study is funded by the [US] Office of Naval Research, and it’s easy to imagine the military applications for a power source that could be deployed on the battlefield or in remote locations. However, there would be plenty of civilian uses for such a fuel cell, too.
While these are all good results, Choi knows that a fuel cell like this needs to power up more quickly and produce more voltage to become a viable alternative to traditional batteries.
“I think this is a good start,” he said. “Hopefully, we can make a commercial product using these ideas.”
Everyone knows that humans and most other vertebrate species hear using eardrums that turn soundwave pressure into signals for our brains. But what about smaller animals like insects and arthropods? Can they detect sounds? And if so, how?
Distinguished Professor Ron Miles, a Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty member at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, has been exploring that question for more than three decades, in a quest to revolutionize microphone technology.
A newly published study of orb-weaving spiders — the species featured in the classic children’s book “Charlotte’s Web” — has yielded some extraordinary results: The spiders are using their webs as extended auditory arrays to capture sounds, possibly giving spiders advanced warning of incoming prey or predators.
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Binghamton University (formal name: State University of New York at Binghamton) has made this fascinating (to me anyway) video available,
Binghamton University and Cornell University (also in New York state) researchers worked collaboratively on this project. Consequently, there are two news releases and there is some redundancy but I always find that information repeated in different ways is helpful for learning.
It is well-known that spiders respond when something vibrates their webs, such as potential prey. In these new experiments, researchers for the first time show that spiders turned, crouched or flattened out in response to sounds in the air.
The study is the latest collaboration between Miles and Ron Hoy, a biology professor from Cornell, and it has implications for designing extremely sensitive bio-inspired microphones for use in hearing aids and cell phone
Jian Zhou, who earned his PhD in Miles’ lab and is doing postdoctoral research at the Argonne National Laboratory, and Junpeng Lai, a current PhD student in Miles’ lab, are co-first authors. Miles, Hoy and Associate Professor Carol I. Miles from the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Biological Sciences at Binghamton are also authors for this study. Grants from the National Institutes of Health to Ron Miles funded the research.
A single strand of spider silk is so thin and sensitive that it can detect the movement of vibrating air particles that make up a soundwave, which is different from how eardrums work. Ron Miles’ previous research has led to the invention of novel microphone designs that are based on hearing in insects.
“The spider is really a natural demonstration that this is a viable way to sense sound using viscous forces in the air on thin fibers,” he said. “If it works in nature, maybe we should have a closer look at it.”
Spiders can detect miniscule movements and vibrations through sensory organs on their tarsal claws at the tips of their legs, which they use to grasp their webs. Orb-weaver spiders are known to make large webs, creating a kind of acoustic antennae with a sound-sensitive surface area that is up to 10,000 times greater than the spider itself.
In the study, the researchers used Binghamton University’s anechoic chamber, a completely soundproof room under the Innovative Technologies Complex. Collecting orb-weavers from windows around campus, they had the spiders spin a web inside a rectangular frame so they could position it where they wanted.
The team began by using pure tone sound 3 meters away at different sound levels to see if the spiders responded or not. Surprisingly, they found spiders can respond to sound levels as low as 68 decibels. For louder sound, they found even more types of behaviors.
They then placed the sound source at a 45-degree angle, to see if the spiders behaved differently. They found that not only are the spiders localizing the sound source, but they can tell the sound incoming direction with 100% accuracy.
To better understand the spider-hearing mechanism, the researchers used laser vibrometry and measured over one thousand locations on a natural spider web, with the spider sitting in the center under the sound field. The result showed that the web moves with sound almost at maximum physical efficiency across an ultra-wide frequency range.
“Of course, the real question is, if the web is moving like that, does the spider hear using it?” Miles said. “That’s a hard question to answer.”
Lai added: “There could even be a hidden ear within the spider body that we don’t know about.”
So the team placed a mini-speaker 5 centimeters away from the center of the web where the spider sits, and 2 millimeters away from the web plane — close but not touching the web. This allows the sound to travel to the spider both through air and through the web. The researchers found that the soundwave from the mini-speaker died out significantly as it traveled through the air, but it propagated readily through the web with little attenuation. The sound level was still at around 68 decibels when it reached the spider. The behavior data showed that four out of 12 spiders responded to this web-borne signal.
Those reactions proved that the spiders could hear through the webs, and Lai was thrilled when that happened: “I’ve been working on this research for five years. That’s a long time, and it’s great to see all these efforts will become something that everybody can read.”
The researchers also found that, by crouching and stretching, spiders may be changing the tension of the silk strands, thereby tuning them to pick up different frequencies. By using this external structure to hear, the spider could be able to customize it to hear different sorts of sounds.
Future experiments may investigate how spiders make use of the sound they can detect using their web. Additionally, the team would like to test whether other types of web-weaving spiders also use their silk to outsource their hearing.
“It’s reasonable to guess that a similar spider on a similar web would respond in a similar way,” Ron Miles said. “But we can’t draw any conclusions about that, since we tested a certain kind of spider that happens to be pretty common.”
Lai admitted he had no idea he would be working with spiders when he came to Binghamton as a mechanical engineering PhD student.
“I’ve been afraid of spiders all my life, because of their alien looks and hairy legs!” he said with a laugh. “But the more I worked with spiders, the more amazing I found them. I’m really starting to appreciate them.”
Charlotte’s web is made for more than just trapping prey.
A study of orb weaver spiders finds their massive webs also act as auditory arrays that capture sounds, possibly giving spiders advanced warning of incoming prey or predators.
In experiments, the researchers found the spiders turned, crouched or flattened out in response to sounds, behaviors that spiders have been known to exhibit when something vibrates their webs.
The paper, “Outsourced Hearing in an Orb-weaving Spider That Uses its Web as an Auditory Sensor,” published March 29 [2022] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides the first behavioral evidence that a spider can outsource hearing to its web.
The findings have implications for designing bio-inspired extremely sensitive microphones for use in hearing aids and cell phones.
A single strand of spider silk is so thin and sensitive it can detect the movement of vibrating air particles that make up a sound wave. This is different from how ear drums work, by sensing pressure from sound waves; spider silk detects sound from nanoscale air particles that become excited from sound waves.
“The individual [silk] strands are so thin that they’re essentially wafting with the air itself, jostled around by the local air molecules,” said Ron Hoy, the Merksamer Professor of Biological Science, Emeritus, in the College of Arts and Sciences and one of the paper’s senior authors, along with Ronald Miles, professor of mechanical engineering at Binghamton University.
Spiders can detect miniscule movements and vibrations via sensory organs in their tarsi – claws at the tips of their legs they use to grasp their webs, Hoy said. Orb weaver spiders are known to make large webs, creating a kind of acoustic antennae with a sound-sensitive surface area that is up to 10,000 times greater than the spider itself.
In the study, the researchers used a special quiet room without vibrations or air flows at Binghamton University. They had an orb-weaver build a web inside a rectangular frame, so they could position it where they wanted. The team began by putting a mini-speaker within millimeters of the web without actually touching it, where sound operates as a mechanical vibration. They found the spider detected the mechanical vibration and moved in response.
They then placed a large speaker 3 meters away on the other side of the room from the frame with the web and spider, beyond the range where mechanical vibration could affect the web. A laser vibrometer was able to show the vibrations of the web from excited air particles.
The team then placed the speaker in different locations, to the right, left and center with respect to the frame. They found that the spider not only detected the sound, it turned in the direction of the speaker when it was moved. Also, it behaved differently based on the volume, by crouching or flattening out.
Future experiments may investigate whether spiders rebuild their webs, sometimes daily, in part to alter their acoustic capabilities, by varying a web’s geometry or where it is anchored. Also, by crouching and stretching, spiders may be changing the tension of the silk strands, thereby tuning them to pick up different frequencies, Hoy said.
Additionally, the team would like to test if other types of web-weaving spiders also use their silk to outsource their hearing. “The potential is there,” Hoy said.
Miles’ lab is using tiny fiber strands bio-inspired by spider silk to design highly sensitive microphones that – unlike conventional pressure-based microphones – pick up all frequencies and cancel out background noise, a boon for hearing aids.
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Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Outsourced hearing in an orb-weaving spider that uses its web as an auditory sensor by Jian Zhou, Junpeng Lai, Gil Menda, Jay A. Stafstrom, Carol I. Miles, Ronald R. Hoy, and Ronald N. Miles. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2122789119 Published March 29, 2022 | 119 (14) e2122789119
This paper appears to be open access and video/audio files are included (you can heat the sound and watch the spider respond).
As you might suspect, a neuristor is based on a memristor .(For a description of a memristor there’s this Wikipedia entry and you can search this blog with the tags ‘memristor’ and neuromorphic engineering’ for more here.)
Being new to neuristors ,I needed a little more information before reading the latest and found this Dec. 24, 2012 article by John Timmer for Ars Technica (Note: Links have been removed),
Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they’re either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we’re familiar with, the brain, doesn’t work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display.
But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip.
The key to making the devices is something called a Mott insulator. These are materials that would normally be able to conduct electricity, but are unable to because of interactions among their electrons. Critically, these interactions weaken with elevated temperatures. So, by heating a Mott insulator, it’s possible to turn it into a conductor. In the case of the material used here, NbO2, the heat is supplied by resistance itself. By applying a voltage to the NbO2 in the device, it becomes a resistor, heats up, and, when it reaches a critical temperature, turns into a conductor, allowing current to flow through. But, given the chance to cool off, the device will return to its resistive state. Formally, this behavior is described as a memristor.
To get the sort of spiking behavior seen in a neuron, the authors turned to a simplified model of neurons based on the proteins that allow them to transmit electrical signals. When a neuron fires, sodium channels open, allowing ions to rush into a nerve cell, and changing the relative charges inside and outside its membrane. In response to these changes, potassium channels then open, allowing different ions out, and restoring the charge balance. That shuts the whole thing down, and allows various pumps to start restoring the initial ion balance.
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Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper described in Timmer’s article,
A scalable neuristor built with Mott memristors by Matthew D. Pickett, Gilberto Medeiros-Ribeiro, & R. Stanley Williams. Nature Materials 12, 114–117 (2013) doi:10.1038/nmat3510 Published online 16 December 2012
A future android brain like that of Star Trek’s Commander Data might contain neuristors, multi-circuit components that emulate the firings of human neurons.
Neuristors already exist today in labs, in small quantities, and to fuel the quest to boost neuristors’ power and numbers for practical use in brain-like computing, the U.S. Department of Defense has awarded a $7.1 million grant to a research team led by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers will mainly work on new metal oxide materials that buzz electronically at the nanoscale to emulate the way human neural networks buzz with electric potential on a cellular level.
A July 28, 2017 Georgia Tech news release, which originated the news item, delves further into neuristors and the proposed work leading to an artificial retina that can learn (!). This was not where I was expecting things to go,
But let’s walk expectations back from the distant sci-fi future into the scientific present: The research team is developing its neuristor materials to build an intelligent light sensor, and not some artificial version of the human brain, which would require hundreds of trillions of circuits.
But an artificial retina that can learn autonomously appears well within reach of the research team from Georgia Tech and Binghamton University. Despite the term “retina,” the development is not intended as a medical implant, but it could be used in advanced image recognition cameras for national defense and police work.
At the same time, it would significantly advance brain-mimicking, or neuromorphic, computing. The research field that takes its cues from what science already does know about how the brain computes to develop exponentially more powerful computing.
The retina would be comprised of an array of ultra-compact circuits called neuristors (a word combining “neuron” and “transistor”) that sense light, compute an image out of it and store the image. All three of the functions would occur simultaneously and nearly instantaneously.
“The same device senses, computes and stores the image,” Doolittle said. “The device is the sensor, and it’s the processor, and it’s the memory all at the same time.” A neuristor itself is comprised in part of devices called memristors inspired by the way human neurons work.
Brain vs. PC
That cuts out loads of processing and memory lag time that are inherent in traditional computing.
Take the device you’re reading this article on: Its microprocessor has to tap a separate memory component to get data, then do some processing, tap memory again for more data, process some more, etc. “That back-and-forth from memory to microprocessor has created a bottleneck,” Doolittle said.
A neuristor array breaks the bottleneck by emulating the extreme flexibility of biological nervous systems: When a brain computes, it uses a broad set of neural pathways that flash with enormous data. Then, later, to compute the same thing again, it will use quite different neural paths.
Traditional computer pathways, by contrast, are hardwired. For example, look at a present-day processor and you’ll see lines etched into it. Those are pathways that computational signals are limited to.
The new memristor materials at the heart of the neuristor are not etched, and signals flow through the surface very freely, more like they do through the brain, exponentially increasing the number of possible pathways computation can take. That helps the new intelligent retina compute powerfully and swiftly.
Terrorists, missing children
The retina’s memory could also store thousands of photos, allowing it to immediately match up what it sees with the saved images. The retina could pinpoint known terror suspects in a crowd, find missing children, or identify enemy aircraft virtually instantaneously, without having to trawl databases to correctly identify what is in the images.
Even if you take away the optics, the new neuristor arrays still advance artificial intelligence. Instead of light, a surface of neuristors could absorb massive data streams at once, compute them, store them, and compare them to patterns of other data, immediately. It could even autonomously learn to extrapolate further information, like calculating the third dimension out of data from two dimensions.
“It will work with anything that has a repetitive pattern like radar signatures, for example,” Doolittle said. “Right now, that’s too challenging to compute, because radar information is flying out at such a high data rate that no computer can even think about keeping up.”
Smart materials
The research project’s title acronym CEREBRAL may hint at distant dreams of an artificial brain, but what it stands for spells out the present goal in neuromorphic computing: Cross-disciplinary Electronic-ionic Research Enabling Biologically Realistic Autonomous Learning.
The new materials have already been created, and they work, but the researchers don’t yet fully understand why.
Much of the project is dedicated to examining quantum states in the materials and how those states help create useful electronic-ionic properties. Researchers will view them by bombarding the metal oxides with extremely bright x-ray photons at the recently constructed National Synchrotron Light Source II.
Grant sub-awardee Binghamton University is located close by, and Binghamton physicists will run experiments and hone them via theoretical modeling.
‘Sea of lithium’
The neuristors are created mainly by the way the metal oxide materials are grown in the lab, which has advantages over building neuristors in a more wired way.
This materials-growing approach is conducive to mass production. Also, though neuristors in general free signals to take multiple pathways, Georgia Tech’s neuristors do it much more flexibly thanks to chemical properties.
“We also have a sea of lithium, and it’s like an infinite reservoir of computational ionic fluid,” Doolittle said. The lithium niobite imitates the way ionic fluid bathes biological neurons and allows them to flash with electric potential while signaling. In a neuristor array, the lithium niobite helps computational signaling move in myriad directions.
“It’s not like the typical semiconductor material, where you etch a line, and only that line has the computational material,” Doolittle said.
Commander Data’s brain?
“Unlike any other previous neuristors, our neuristors will adapt themselves in their computational-electronic pulsing on the fly, which makes them more like a neurological system,” Doolittle said. “They mimic biology in that we have ion drift across the material to create the memristors (the memory part of neuristors).”
Brains are far superior to computers at most things, but not all. Brains recognize objects and do motor tasks much better. But computers are much better at arithmetic and data processing.
Neuristor arrays can meld both types of computing, making them biological and algorithmic at once, a bit like Commander Data’s brain.
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The research is being funded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program under grant number FOA: N00014-16-R-FO05. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of those agencies.
Using this new sunscreen does mean slathering on salmon sperm, more or lees, (read the Methods section of the academic paper cited later in this post). Considering that you’ve likely eaten (insect parts in chocolate) and slathered on more discomfiting stuff already and this development gives you access to an all natural, highly effective sunscreen, if it ever makes its way out of the laboratory, it might not be so bad. From a July 26, 2017 article by Sarah Knapton for The Telegraph,
Sunscreen made from DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] which acts like a second skin to prevent sun damage is on the horizon.
Scientists in the US have developed a film from the DNA of salmon which gets better at protecting the skin from ultraviolet light the more it is exposed to the Sun.
It also helps lock in moisture beneath the surface which is usually lost during tanning.
“Ultraviolet (UV) light can actually damage DNA, and that’s not good for the skin,” said Guy German, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Binghamton University. “We thought, let’s flip it. What happens instead if we actually used DNA as a sacrificial layer? So instead of damaging DNA within the skin, we damage a layer on top of the skin.”
German and a team of researchers developed thin and optically transparent crystalline DNA films and irradiated them with UV light. They found that the more they exposed the film to UV light, the better the film got at absorbing it.
“If you translate that, it means to me that if you use this as a topical cream or sunscreen, the longer that you stay out on the beach, the better it gets at being a sunscreen,” said German.
As an added bonus, the DNA coatings are also hygroscopic, meaning that skin coated with the DNA films can store and hold water much more than uncoated skin. When applied to human skin, they are capable of slowing water evaporation and keeping the tissue hydrated for extended periods of time.
German intends to see next if these materials might be good as a wound covering for hostile environments where 1) you want to be able to see the wound healing without removing the dressing, 2) you want to protect the wound from the sun and 3) you want to keep the wound in a moist environment, known to promote faster wound healing rates.
“Not only do we think this might have applications for sunscreen and moisturizers directly, but if it’s optically transparent and prevents tissue damage from the sun and it’s good at keeping the skin hydrated, we think this might be potentially exploitable as a wound covering for extreme environments,” he said.
Boron nitride has been exciting members of the scientific community most recently as an alternative to carbon. A Dec. 22, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,
When mixed with lightweight polymers, tiny carbon tubes reinforce the material, promising lightweight and strong materials for airplanes, spaceships, cars and even sports equipment. While such carbon nanotube-polymer nanocomposites have attracted enormous interest from the materials research community, a group of scientists now has evidence that a different nanotube — made from boron nitride — could offer even more strength per unit of weight.
A Dec. 22, 2015 American Institute of Physics (AIP) news release by Catherine Meyers, which originated the news item, describes why carbon nanotubes have interested scientists and the advantages presented by boron nitride nanotubes (Note: A link has been removed),
Carbon nanotubes are legendary in their strength — at least 30 times stronger than bullet-stopping Kevlar by some estimates. When mixed with lightweight polymers such as plastics and epoxy resins, the tiny tubes reinforce the material, like the rebar in a block of concrete, promising lightweight and strong materials for airplanes, spaceships, cars and even sports equipment.
While such carbon nanotube-polymer nanocomposites have attracted enormous interest from the materials research community, a group of scientists now has evidence that a different nanotube — made from boron nitride — could offer even more strength per unit of weight. …
Boron nitride, like carbon, can form single-atom-thick sheets that are rolled into cylinders to create nanotubes. By themselves boron nitride nanotubes are almost as strong as carbon nanotubes, but their real advantage in a composite material comes from the way they stick strongly to the polymer.
“The weakest link in these nanocomposites is the interface between the polymer and the nanotubes,” said Changhong Ke, an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. If you break a composite, the nanotubes left sticking out have clean surfaces, as opposed to having chunks of polymer still stuck to them. The clean break indicates that the connection between the tubes and the polymer fails, Ke noted.
Plucking Nanotubes
Ke and his colleagues devised a novel way to test the strength of the nanotube-polymer link. They sandwiched boron nitride nanotubes between two thin layers of polymer, with some of the nanotubes left sticking out. They selected only the tubes that were sticking straight out of the polymer, and then welded the nanotube to the tip of a tiny cantilever beam. The team applied a force on the beam and tugged increasingly harder on the nanotube until it was ripped free of the polymer.
The researchers found that the force required to pluck out a nanotube at first increased with the nanotube length, but then plateaued. The behavior is a sign that the connection between the nanotube and the polymer is failing through a crack that forms and then spreads, Ke said.
The researchers tested two forms of polymer: epoxy and poly(methyl methacrylate), or PMMA, which is the same material used for Plexiglas. They found that the epoxy-boron nitride nanotube interface was stronger than the PMMA-nanotube interface. They also found that both polymer-boron nitride nanotube binding strengths were higher than those reported for carbon nanotubes — 35 percent higher for the PMMA interface and approximately 20 percent higher for the epoxy interface.
The Advantages of Boron Nitride Nanotubes
Boron nitride nanotubes likely bind more strongly to polymers because of the way the electrons are arranged in the molecules, Ke explained. In carbon nanotubes, all carbon atoms have equal charges in their nucleus, so the atoms share electrons equally. In boron nitride, the nitrogen atom has more protons than the boron atom, so it hogs more of the electrons in the bond. The unequal charge distribution leads to a stronger attraction between the boron nitride and the polymer molecules, as verified by molecular dynamics simulations performed by Ke’s colleagues in Dr. Xianqiao Wang’s group at the University of Georgia.
Boron nitride nanotubes also have additional advantages over carbon nanotubes, Ke said. They are more stable at high temperatures and they can better absorb neutron radiation, both advantageous properties in the extreme environment of outer space. In addition, boron nitride nanotubes are piezoelectric, which means they can generate an electric charge when stretched. This property means the material offers energy harvesting as well as sensing and actuation capabilities.
The news release does note that boron nitride nanotubes have a drawback ,
The main drawback to boron nitride nanotubes is the cost. Currently they sell for about $1,000 per gram, compared to the $10-20 per gram for carbon nanotubes, Ke said. He is optimistic that the price will come down, though, noting that carbon nanotubes were similarly expensive when they were first developed.
“I think boron nitride nanotubes are the future for making polymer composites for the aerospace industry,” he said.
The researchers haven’t published a study and they have used fruit flies as their testing mechanism (animal models) so, it’s a little difficult (futile) to analyze the work at this stage but it is intriguing. A June 9, 2015 news item on Azonano announces a research collaboration designed to examine the impact engineered nanoparticles have on the gut and the gut microbiome,
Researchers at Binghamton University believe understanding nano particles’ ability to influence our metabolic processing may be integral to mediating metabolic disorders and obesity, both of which are on the rise and have been linked to processed foods.
Anthony Fiumera, associate professor of biological sciences, and Gretchen Mahler, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, are collaborating on a research project funded by a Binghamton University Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence (TAE) grant to discover the role ingested nanoparticles play in the physiology and function of the gut and gut microbiome.
The gut microbiome is the population of microbes living within the human intestine, consisting of tens of trillions of microorganisms (including at least 1,000 different species of known bacteria). Nanoparticles, which are often added to processed foods to enhance texture and color, have been linked to changes in gut function. As processed foods become more common elements of our diet, there has been a significant increase in concentrations of these particles found in the human body.
Fiumera works in vivo with fruit flies while Mahler works in vitro using a 3-D cell-culture model of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract to understand how ingesting nanoparticles influences glucose processing and the gut microbiome. By using complementary research methods, the researchers have helped advance each other’s understanding of nanoparticles.
Using fruit flies, Fiumera looks at the effects of nanoparticles on development, physiology and biochemical composition, as well as the microbial community in the GI tract of the fly. The fly model offers two advantages: 1) research can be done on a wide range of traits that might be altered by changes in metabolism and 2) the metabolic processes within the fly are similar to those in humans. Fiumera also aims to investigate which genes are associated with responses to the nanoparticles, which ultimately may help us understand why individuals react differently to nanoparticles.
For this project, Mahler expanded her GI tract model to include a commensal intestinal bacterial species and used the model to determine a more detailed mechanism of the role of nanoparticle exposure on gut bacteria and intestinal function. Early results have shown that nanoparticle ingestion alters glucose absorption, and that the presence of beneficial gut bacteria eliminates these effects.
Mahler was already investigating nanoparticles when she reached out to Fiumera and proposed they combine their respective expertise. With the help of undergraduate students Gabriella Shull and John Fountain and graduate student Jonathan Richter, Fiumera and Mahler have begun to uncover some effects of ingesting nanoparticles. Since they are using realistic, low concentrations of nanoparticles, the effects are slight, but eventually may be additive.
The most interesting aspect of this research (to me) is the notion that the impact may be additive. In short, you might be able to tolerate a few more nanoparticles in your gut but as more engineered nanoparticles become part of our food and drink (including water) and your gut receives more and more that tolerance may no longer possible.
There is increasing concern about engineered nanoparticles as they cycle through environment and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded a programed by Arizona State University (ASU), LCnano Network (part of the EPA’s larger Life Cycle of Nanomaterials project). You can find out more about the ASU program in my April 8, 2014 post (scroll down about 50% of the way).
Getting back to Binghamton, I look forward to hearing more about the research as it progresses.
The first news item I’m going to highlight was posted on Nanowerk, March 8, 2012 and is focused on the use of silver nanoparticles in mouthwashes and dentures to prevent yeast infections,
Yeasts which cause hard-to-treat mouth infections are killed using silver nanoparticles in the laboratory, scientists have found. These yeast infections, caused by Candida albicans and Candida glabrata target the young, old and immuno-compromised. Professor Mariana Henriques, University of Minho [Portugal], and her colleagues hope to test silver nanoparticles in mouthwash and dentures as a potential preventative measure against these infections.
Professor Henriques and her team, who published their research in the Society for Applied Microbiology’s journal Letters in Applied Microbiology(“Silver nanoparticles: influence of stabilizing agent and diameter on antifungal activity against Candida albicans and Candida glabrata biofilms”), looked at the use of different sizes of silver nanoparticles to determine their anti-fungal properties …
The scientists used artificial biofilms in conditions which mimic those of saliva as closely as possible. They then added different sizes and concentrations of silver nanoparticles and found that different sizes of nanoparticles were equally effective at killing the yeasts. Due to the diversity of the sizes of nanoparticles demonstrating anti-fungal properties the researchers hope this will enable the nanoparticles to be used in many different applications.
Some researchers have expressed concerns around the safety of nanoparticle use but the authors stress this research is at an early stage and extensive safety trials will be carried out before any product reaches the market. [emphasis mine]
Following on the notion of safety and gargling silver nanoparticles, coincidentally, there was another news item also dated March 8, 2012 on Nanowerk, this one about the impact that nanoparticles may have on nutrient uptake,
Nanoparticles are everywhere. From cosmetics and clothes, to soda and snacks. But as versatile as they are, nanoparticles also have a downside, say researchers at Binghamton University and Cornell University in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Oral exposure to polystyrene nanoparticles affects iron absorption”). These tiny particles, even in low doses, could have a big impact on our long-term health.
According to lead author of the article, Gretchen Mahler, assistant professor of bioengineering at Binghamton University, much of the existing research on the safety of nanoparticles has been on the direct health effects. But what Mahler, Michael L. Shuler of Cornell University and a team of researchers really wanted to know was what happens when someone gets constant exposure in small doses – the kind you’d get if you were taken a drug or supplement that included nanoparticles in some form. [e.g. silver nanoparticles in your mouthwash or on your dentures]
“We thought that the best way to measure the more subtle effects of this kind of intake was to monitor the reaction of intestinal cells,” said Mahler. “And we did this in two ways: in vitro, through human intestinal-lining cells that we had cultured in the lab; and in vivo, through the intestinal linings of live chickens. Both sets of results pointed to the same thing – that exposure to nanoparticles influences the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream.”
As for why the researchers focused on iron and tested polystyrene nanoparticles (from the news item),
The uptake of iron, an essential nutrient, was of particular interest due to the way it is absorbed and processed through the intestines. The way Mahler and the team tested this was to use polystyrene nanoparticles because of its easily traceable fluorescent properties.
“What we found was that for brief exposures, iron absorption dropped by about 50 percent,” said Mahler. “But when we extended that period of time, absorption actually increased by about 200 percent. It was very clear – nanoparticles definitely affects iron uptake and transport.”
While acute oral exposure caused disruptions to intestinal iron transport, chronic exposure caused a remodeling of the intestinal villi – the tiny, finger-like projections that are vital to the intestine’s ability to absorb nutrients – making them larger and broader, thus allowing iron to enter the bloodstream much faster.
As to whether these changes are good or bad the researchers don’t speculate. They do have plans for more testing,
calcium,
copper,
zinc, and
fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K
They don’t mention any changes in the types of nanoparticles they might be testing in future.
In any event, our bodies have changed a lot over the centuries, you just have to visit a pyramid in Egypt or a museum that holds medieval armour to observe that humans were once much shorter than we are today.
