Lapsed video photography of shapeshifting material via ZDNet

Scientists at Harvard University and M.I.T. have invented self-folding sheets of fiberglass that can flex themselves origami-like into shapes of airplanes and boats.

Less than a half-millimeter thick and connected by elastic silicone rubber creases, the self-folding sheets are one step closer to “programmable matter” that could one day serve to bend and crease into any three-dimensional shape.

To make the sheets self-folding, computer scientist Daniela Rus at MIT and her colleagues embedded strips just 100 microns thick — as wide as a human hair — made of a “shape-memory” nickel-titanium alloy that changes shape when heated or cooled. They also included flexible, stretchable copper-laminated plastic mesh ribbons on the sheets that served as wires.

The sheets shift from flat to bent when electricity is applied to heat the shape memory alloy strips, causing the entire sheet to fold with them.

“The underlying theme here is to have a structure that can choose different shapes on demand for whatever you might use them for,” said researcher Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard University.

To program each crease to fold in the right direction and order, the researchers are developing stickers that contain all the circuits needed to connect and trigger the correct actuators for making specific complex three-dimensional shapes.

The researchers foresee a number of potential applications:

* Measuring cups that fold to hold anywhere from a quarter teaspoon to multiple cups.

* Shelves that fold into as many divisions as required.

* A puckering sheet that can display information for the blind or people in the dark.

* A Swiss army knife of sorts able to form a tripod, wrench, antenna, or splint.

Currently the researchers power the sheets by wiring them to external controllers. Wood suggests that future sheets could include energy storage or energy harvesting layers, such as solar panels, and could also be wirelessly powered.

Instead of employing shape memory alloy strips, the actuators could be made of a number of other materials as well, such as artificial muscles.

via ZDNet and LiveScience

Video of programmable sheet self-folding into a boat and airplane from Harvard Microrobotics Lab

Photo via flickr by Wonderlane

A new study shows that hand-washing does more than remove the guilt of past misdeeds—it also “wipes the slate clean,” removing doubts about recent choices.

According to University of Michigan psychologist Spike W. S. Lee, “It’s not just that washing your hands contributes to moral cleanliness as well as physical cleanliness, as seen in earlier research. Our studies show that washing also reduces the influence of past behaviors and decisions that have no moral implications whatsoever.”

For the study, Lee, a doctoral candidate in social psychology and his colleague Norbert Schwarz, who is affiliated with the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Ross School of Business in addition to the Department of Psychology, asked undergraduate students to browse through 30 CD covers as part of an alleged consumer survey. Participants picked 10 CDs they would like to own, ranking them by preference. Later, the experimenter offered them a choice between their 5th and 6th ranked CDs as a token of appreciation. Following that choice, participants completed an ostensibly unrelated product survey — of liquid soap. Half merely examined the bottle before answering while the others tested the soap by washing their hands. After completing a filler task, participants were asked to rank the 10 CDs again.

“People who merely examined the soap bottle dealt with their doubts about their decision by changing how they saw the CDs: As in hundreds of earlier studies, once they had made a choice, they saw the chosen CD as much more attractive than before and the rejected CD as much less attractive. But hand-washing eliminated this classic effect. Once participants had washed their hands, they no longer needed to justify their choice when they ranked the CDs the second time around,” Schwarz said.

The researchers replicated the findings in a study using a different task — taste expectations of jars of fruit jams and ostensibly unrelated surveys of antiseptic wipes. “Participants who merely examined an antiseptic wipe after choosing a jar of fruit jam expected the taste of the chosen jam to far exceed the taste of the rejected one. This difference was eliminated when participants tested the antiseptic wipe by cleaning their hands,” said Lee.

According to the authors, the results show that as much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them.

This “clean slate” effect may be relevant to many choices in life. Does washing away the urge to justify one’s choice of one car over another, or even one partner over another, result in less rosy evaluations of them in the long run? If so, does this increase buyer’s remorse because buyers are less likely to convince themselves that they made the best choice possible?

via University of Michigan News Service

Photo via flickr by tdietmut

MIT neuroscientists have shown they can can sway people’s views of moral situation by disrupting brain activity in a particular region.

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. In this new study, researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp. They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

The researchers, led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, report their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Funding for the research came from The National Center for Research Resources, the MIND Institute, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, the Simons Foundation and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper.

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that TMS interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.

via MIT News

Photo via flickr by Martin_Heigan

A newfound ability to model the complex feedback loops that control plant clocks could have important implications for computing.

One of the limitations of conventional thinking in computation is that computable functions proceed in a sequential manner, one independent step after another. In the biological world, things are more complex because steps in biological computations may not be independent—for example, the circadian rhythm in plants, the 24 hour cycle of biochemical processes that govern behavior. The cycle has various important features such as the ability to synchronize with an external periodic light source and to continue to oscillate even in the absence of variations in illumination.

Biochemists have long known that these cycles are the result of various biochemical feedback loops in which the transcription of genes is boosted and damped. Of course, plant clocks have been studied for hundreds of years and a huge amount is known about how they work, particularly about Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant that is the standard object of study for plant biologists. The trouble is that nobody has been able to accurately model the behavior of these rhythms from first principles. That’s because these processes do not involve independent sequential steps, so conventional computational methods are just not up to the job. Biochemists need some other way of thinking about their problem.

As luck would have it, just such a system has been waiting in the wings. Process algebra is a form of computation that can handle multiple simultaneous interdependent steps and this makes it perfect for modeling these tricky biochemical networks and the feedback loops that drive them. Ozgur Akman, Andrew Millar and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh used this approach to model the circadian rhythm of the green alga Ostreococcus tauri, which has the honor of possessing the simplest planet clock yet discovered.

They co-created a model of the various feedback loops in the Ostreococcus clock using a process algebra known as Bio-PEPA. This allowed them to explore how the clock responds to factors such as changes in illumination patterns and to genetic mutations, a factor that effects how the clock might change over evolutionary time scales.

While the outcome will help make predictions for plant biology, the real importance may be more subtle. An often overlooked property of process algebra is that it is not equivalent to a standard sequential Turing machine. Because process algebra encompasses concurrent processes and the communication between them, it is subtly different and potentially more powerful.

via The Physics arXiv Blog

Photo via flickr by Barack Obama

The mission of the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (the “CPD”) is to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates are held every four years between the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States.

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was established in 1987 to ensure that debates, as a permanent part of every general election, provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners. Its primary purpose is to sponsor and produce debates for the United States presidential and vice presidential candidates and to undertake research and educational activities relating to the debates. The organization, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) corporation, sponsored all the presidential debates in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008.

To meet its ongoing goal of educating voters, the CPD is engaged in various activities beyond producing and sponsoring the presidential debates. Its staff prepares educational materials and conducts research to improve the quality of debates.

Further, the CPD provides technical assistance to emerging democracies and others interested in establishing debate traditions in their countries. In recent years, the staff worked with groups from Brazil, Ecuador, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan and the Ukraine, among others. Finally, the CPD coordinates post-debate symposia and research after many of its presidential forums (1996 Post-Debate Symposium, 1992 Post-Debate Research, 1988 Post-Debate Symposium).

Co-Chariman: Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr; Michael D. McCurry; Honorary Co-Chairmen: Jimmy Carter, William Clinton.

Board of Directors:  Howard Buffett; John C. Danforth; Antonia Hernandez; Caroline Kennedy; Newton N. Minow; Dorthothy Ridings; Alan K. Simpson; H, Patirck Swygert.

Executive Director: Janet H. Brown.

Behave? Tell that to the strange, the freaks, the weirdos, the atypical. These are the people who live futures that others will later have. The people who imagine new possibilities, and empower people with the power of their imaginings. These are the people who, says science writer Howard Bloom, turn science fiction into science future, inventing novel devices like cell phones. Although large scale human behavior is fairly predictable, and there’s a reasonable chance, according to mathematician Ian Stewart, that over the next century mathematics will reach a point where it can make real predictions about the future and the way people behave, what it can’t provide, is a good prediction of what a particular person will do. The problem with free will is not that we behave in completely random ways, it’s that we behave in coherent ways, but we strongly feel we have a choice. The inherent behavior of pine cones, on the other hand, even though considered dead as they no longer have a metabolism, can still open and close in response to humidity changes in the environment, and is currently seen as an inspiration for designers, according to architect Michael Hensel, for the development of highly, sophisticated performative architectures that won’t require the standard plethora of mechanical and electrical devices. And while we find that molecular, self-assembly is revolutionizing material science, due to the pioneering research of chemist George Whitesides, aiding the development of rapid, inexpensive fabrications of ultra-small devices, C5 Corporation, a data research group, says that in the future we will find that not only does all “data behave” according to 4 types of characteristics: “fold, spread, blossom and loner,” but there will be a 7-11 for algorithms, because algorithms will become the fabric of every transaction, every device, every single appliance, even clothing. In fact, Alisa Andrasek, in her fashion project, Genware, has already developed an algorithm, or what she calls, “bodyscapes,” which allows customers, after scanning their bodies, to pick different patterns that will “grow” on their physical geometry, adjusting to their various, specific body behaviors. As we move forward into an era where our objects and technology behaves, computer scientist Vernor Vinge remarks: “Humankind has thousands of years of experiences with biological systems in life-critical situations. For instance, a horse rider going through the desert. He’s depending upon that horse. The fact that the horse is biological and sort of a flaky system, that’s too bad. Do we really want technology based upon biological systems that are notoriously fickle and irresponsible?” Oh, behave!