2020

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2019

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Why Birds Are the World’s Best Engineers

The time period “chook’s nest” has come to explain a messy hairdo, tangled fishing line and different unspeakably knotty conundrums. But that does birds an injustice. Their tiny brains, dense with neurons, produce marvels which have lengthy captured scientific curiosity as naturally chosen engineering options — but nests are nonetheless not properly understood. One effort to disentangle the structural dynamics of the nest is underway within the sunny yellow lab — the Mechanical Biomimetics and Open Design Lab — of Hunter King, an experimental soft-matter physicist on the University of Akron in Ohio. “We hypothesize that a chook nest may successfully be a disordered stick bomb, with simply sufficient saved power to maintain it inflexible,” Dr. King stated. He is the principal investigator of an ongoing research, with a preliminary evaluate paper, “Mechanics of randomly packed filaments — The ‘chook nest’ as meta-material,” not too long ago revealed within the Journal of Applied Physics. (He added that, clearly, the bird-nest stick bomb by no means explodes.) ---- These are simply preliminary findings, which Dr. King will proceed to discover within the lab, and with additional simulations by Mattia Gazzola, a mechanical engineer, and his Ph.D. pupil Yashraj Bhosale, on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

• https://lightlynews.com/2020/03/17/science/why-birds-are-the-worlds-best-engineers/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/science/why-birds-are-the-worlds-best-engineers.html
• https://www.statsmadeeasy.net/2020/04/beware-of-birds-making-stick-bombs-in-your-backyard/

Researchers Build Microscopic Biohybrid Robots Propelled by Muscles and Nerves

Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a biohybrid robot powered by neuromuscular tissue that responds to light. Biohybrid robots are the result of integrating synthetic material and living tissue such as muscle, nerves or bone to produce a device that is capable of independent motion. The addition of neuronal action to control muscle tissue represents a significant step forward in the quest for autonomous biobots. In 2014 researchers developed the first self-propelled biobots powered by cardiac muscle tissue taken from rats. These early designs, modeled after sperm cells, had a single tail and could swim but could not sense their environment or make decisions. In this new study, computational models were used to optimize the skeleton design. The previous single-tailed structure was replaced with a new two-tailed model, and the length of the tails was also adjusted. These design improvements resulted in an order of magnitude increase in swimming speed from the previous single-tailed version.

• https://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/19554/Researchers-Build-Microscopic-Biohybrid-Robots-Propelled-by-Muscles-and-Nerves.aspx
• https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190916160826.htm
• https://www.nanowerk.com/news2/robotics/newsid=53650.php
• https://movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/video/10.1073/pnas.1907051116/video-3

HPC Career Notes: May 2019 Edition

The NSF has named Mattia Gazzola a recipient of one of its annual NSF CAREER Awards.

• https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/05/01/hpc-career-notes-may-2019-edition/

Researchers Use Blue Waters to Study Interactions Between Musculoskeletal Systems and Environments

Illinois researcher, Blue Waters professor, and NCSA faculty affiliate Mattia Gazzola and his team are conducting research in an effort to understand how the brain, body, and fluid flow work together to produce a behavior.

• https://www.rdmag.com/news/2018/09/researchers-use-blue-waters-study-interactions-between-musculoskeletal-systems-and-environments
• https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/researchers-use-blue-waters-to-study-interactions-between-musculoskeletal-systems-and-environments/