The robot’s versatility is due to a novel design based on kirigami, a cousin of origami, in which slices in the material enable it to fold, expand and locomote.

The team’s paper, “Electronically Configurable Microscopic Metasheet Robots,” published Sept. 11 in Nature Materials. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researchers Qingkun Liu and Wei Wang. The project was led by Itai Cohen, professor of physics. His lab has previously produced microrobotic systems that can actuate their limbs, pump water via artificial cilia and walk autonomously.

In a sense, the origins of the kirigami robot were inspired by “living organisms that can change their shape.” Liu said. “But when people make a robot, once it’s fabricated, it might be able to move some limbs but its overall shape is usually static. So we’ve made a metasheet robot. The ‘meta’ stands for metamaterial, meaning that they’re composed of a lot of building blocks that work together to give the material its mechanical behaviors.”

The robot is a hexagonal tiling composed of approximately 100 silicon dioxide panels that are connected through more than 200 actuating hinges, each about 10 nanometers thin. When electrochemically activated via external wires, the hinges form mountain and valley folds and act to splay open and rotate the panels, allowing the robot to change its coverage area and locally expand and contract by up to 40%. Depending which hinges are activated, the robot can adopt various shapes and potentially wrap itself around other objects, and then unfold itself back into a flat sheet.

Cohen’s team is already thinking of the next phase of metasheet technology. They anticipate combining their flexible mechanical structures with electronic controllers to create ultra-responsive “elastronic” materials with properties that would never be possible in nature. Applications could range from reconfigurable micromachines to miniaturized biomedical devices and materials that can respond to impact at nearly the speed of light, rather than the speed of sound.

“Because the electronics on each individual building block can harvest energy from light, you can design a material to respond in programmed ways to various stimuli. When prodded, such materials, instead of deforming, could ‘run’ away, or push back with greater force than they experienced,” Cohen said. “We think that these active metamaterials — these elastronic materials — could form the basis for a new type of intelligent matter governed by physical principles that transcend what is possible in the natural world.”

In what the researchers say in Scientific Reports is the first time for a non-human animal to be demonstrated to possess some mental states (e.g., mental body image, standards, intentions, goals) which are elements of private self-awareness, bluestreak cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) checked their body size in a mirror before choosing whether to attack fish that were slightly larger or smaller than themselves.

The team of OMU Graduate School of Science student Taiga Kobayashi, Specially Appointed Professor Masanori Kohda, Professor Satoshi Awata, and Specially Appointed Researcher Shumpei Sogawa, and Professor Redouan Bshary of Switzerland’s University of Neuchâtel, were among the group that last year reported the cleaner wrasse could identify photographs of itself as itself, based on its face through mirror self-recognition.

This time, the cleaner wrasse’s behavior of going to look in the mirror installed in a tank when necessary indicated the possibility that the fish were using the mirror to check their own body size against that of other fish and predict the outcome of fights.

“The results that fish can use the mirror as a tool can help clarify the similarities between human and non-human animal self-awareness and provide important clues to elucidate how self-awareness has evolved,” doctoral candidate Kobayashi declared.

This study was financially supported by JST SPRING (JPMJSP2139 to T.K.), JSPS KAKENHI (23KJ1829 to T.K., 19F19713 and 20K20630 to M.K., 22H02703 to S.A., and 20K20154 to S.S.), Swiss Science Foundation (310030_192673 to R.B.), and an OCU Strategic Research Grant 2018-2019 (to M.K. and S.A.).

But in that time, the steel structures have also become a symbol of playground peril for many anxious parents and public officials who think they should be removed from parks and schoolyards to avoid the occasional bruises and broken bones.

A team of Dartmouth anthropologists takes a different view, marking 100 years since the jungle gym and monkey bars were patented by arguing that the iconic playground equipment and other forms of risky play exercise a biological need passed on from apes and early humans that may be critical to childhood development.

They write in the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health that a trend toward “surplus safety” on playgrounds may come at the expense of children being allowed to independently test and expand their physical and cognitive abilities in a context in which injury is possible but avoidable.

“One of the ironies of modern parenting is that our children have never been physically safer and yet we have never been more worried about them. We need to consider the potential longer-term benefits of allowing them to engage in play where there is some level of risk so they can overcome challenges on their own and learn from it when it doesn’t work out,” says Zane Thayer, a co-author of the paper and associate professor of anthropology at Dartmouth.

“Generally, researchers have found that risky play helps children build resilience and confidence, skills that resonate throughout life,” she says. “We focus on jungle gyms and monkey bars as an easy way for children to engage in risky and thrill-seeking play.”

The researchers describe how the physiology — and fossilized injuries — of early humans show juveniles likely engaged in extensive swinging, climbing, jumping, and other risky play. The 3.3-million-year-old remains of a female Australopithecus afarensis child known as Selam exhibit shoulders, fingers, and feet adapted to climbing in trees and hanging from limbs, like modern apes. The 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of Lucy, an adult female of the same species, shows healed fractures thought to result from falls as high as 40 feet.

“Fossil evidence suggests that the children of early humans spent as much time in trees as adults did,” says Luke Fannin, first author of the paper and a PhD candidate in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society program in the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies.

“If you’re spending all that time in trees as a juvenile, you need confidence, because falling from a tree can be devastating and possibly fatal for a large ape or hominin,” he says. “We see in modern nonhuman primates that juveniles test the limits of what they can and can’t do, what the risks are, and how to respond. That leads to the climbing skills we see in adults.”

The Dartmouth researchers cite a 2014 study reporting that infant and juvenile chimpanzees spend 15% and 27% more time, respectively, climbing and swinging than adults, which enhances their dexterity, skill, and awareness of their own mass. Though lacking the dexterity of other primates, modern humans are still competent climbers, Fannin says. People in hunter-gatherer cultures have been known to climb as high as 150 feet into trees to collect food.

“The past and the present point to children gaining physical and experiential skills by exploring their boundaries through play,” Fannin says. “Our physiology as children is still conducive to climbing, running, and jumping, as well as more easily recovering from injuries and short-distance falls.”

“It’s rare to see anthropology intersect so much with our daily lives,” Fannin says. “People don’t think about our ancestors very much, but play is a way that the past is reflected in the present.”

Nathaniel Dominy, the Charles Hansen Professor of Anthropology and study co-author, says that Sebastian “Ted” Hinton, the Chicago lawyer who patented the jungle gym and monkey bars in 1923 and 1924, also saw that reflection.

In one of his patents, Hinton wrote that children have a “monkey instinct” to climb as a form of play and exercise. Hinton lived during a fervor for the outdoors in the early 20th century that led to the establishment of the National Park Service, the plotting of the Appalachian Trail, and the creation of Scouting.

But Hinton saw climbing as a vestige of our simian lineage before that link was formally established, Dominy says. The remains of the Taung Child, a 2.8-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus that provided the first physical link between modern humans and ape-like ancestors, weren’t reported until 1925.

“Hinton was at the forefront of this cultural moment that embraced nature as essential to fitness, but it focused on bipedalism. Hinton described climbing as a product and necessity for childhood growth and development before we had the evidence for it,” Dominy says.

“One hundred years later, jungle gyms and monkey bars are still very much part of the conversation around childhood play. But the voice of anthropologists is nowhere in this debate, and that’s what we wanted to change,” Dominy says. “Our work shows how evolutionary theory has the potential to inform research and practice in the public health domain.”

Studies of hospital admissions show that jungle gyms and monkey bars result in more childhood fractures and hospital visits than any other playground equipment, the researchers report. But the risk of children being injured on a playground is relatively low.

The Dartmouth team cites a 2003 study that calculated the risk of playground injury at no more than 0.59 in 100,000, which is far less than injuries sustained through organized sports or even gym class. Another study found that 95% of children with playground injuries were treated and released between 2001-2013.

“Free play lets kids modulate activities to match their physical abilities and personal confidence,” Fannin says. “The rules and guidelines of free play develop on much longer timescales than supervised and organized sports where adults set the rules and expectations. Kids getting injured in organized sports has a lot to do with the social context in which they occur.”

But jungle gyms and monkey bars remain targets of efforts to make playgrounds safer, the researchers report. New York City removed them from most of their 862 public playgrounds in the 1980s and 1990s. While seven states have adopted the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s safety guidelines for monkey bars into law, enforcement is difficult, the Dartmouth team found. Municipalities find it easier to just remove the structures.

“We share the concerns of parents, school administrators, and policymakers in wanting to make sure our kids are safe. However, we also must consider the long-term benefits of engaging in this type of play,” Thayer says. “Risky play in which children challenge themselves is a normal part of our development, as it was for our ancestors.”