TOP SCEINCE
Public have no difficulty getting to grips with an extra thumb, study finds
Cambridge researchers have shown that members of the public have little trouble in learning very quickly how to use a third thumb — a controllable, prosthetic extra thumb — to pick up and manipulate objects.
An emerging area of future technology is motor augmentation — using motorised wearable devices such as exoskeletons or extra robotic body parts to advance our motor capabilities beyond current biological limitations.
While such devices could improve the quality of life for healthy individuals who want to enhance their productivity, the same technologies can also provide people with disabilities new ways to interact with their environment.
Professor Tamar Makin from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge said: “Technology is changing our very definition of what it means to be human, with machines increasingly becoming a part of our everyday lives, and even our minds and bodies.
“These technologies open up exciting new opportunities that can benefit society, but it’s vital that we consider how they can help all people equally, especially marginalised communities who are often excluded from innovation research and development. To ensure everyone will have the opportunity to participate and benefit from these exciting advances, we need to explicitly integrate and measure inclusivity during the earliest possible stages of the research and development process.”
Dani Clode, a collaborator within Professor Makin’s lab, has developed the Third Thumb, an extra robotic thumb aimed at increasing the wearer’s range of movement, enhancing their grasping capability and expanding the carrying capacity of the hand. This allows the user to perform tasks that might be otherwise challenging or impossible to complete with one hand or to perform complex multi-handed tasks without having to coordinate with other people.
The Third Thumb is worn on the opposite side of the palm to the biological thumb and controlled by a pressure sensor placed under each big toe or foot. Pressure from the right toe pulls the Thumb across the hand, while the pressure exerted with the left toe pulls the Thumb up toward the fingers. The extent of the Thumb’s movement is proportional to the pressure applied, and releasing pressure moves it back to its original position.
In 2022, the team had the opportunity to test the Third Thumb at the annual Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, where members of the public of all ages were able to use the device during different tasks. The results are published today in Science Robotics.
Over the course of five days, the team tested 596 participants, ranging in age from three to 96 years old and from a wide range of demographic backgrounds. Of these, only four were unable to use the Third Thumb, either because it did not fit their hand securely, or because they were unable to control it with their feet (the pressure sensors developed specifically for the exhibition were not suitable for very lightweight children).
Participants were given up to a minute to familiarise themselves with the device, during which time the team explained how to perform one of two tasks.
The first task involved picking up pegs from a pegboard one at a time with just the Third Thumb and placing them in a basket. Participants were asked to move as many pegs as possible in 60 seconds. 333 participants completed this task.
The second task involved using the Third Thumb together with the wearer’s biological hand to manipulate and move five or six different foam objects. The objects were of various shapes that required different manipulations to be used, increasing the dexterity of the task. Again, participants were asked to move as many objects as they could into the basket within a maximum of 60 seconds. 246 participants completed this task.
Almost everyone was able to use the device straightaway. 98% of participants were able to successfully manipulate objects using the Third Thumb during the first minute of use, with only 13 participants unable to perform the task.
Ability levels between participants were varied, but there were no differences in performance between genders, nor did handedness change performance — despite the Thumb always being worn on the right hand. There was no definitive evidence that people who might be considered ‘good with their hands’ — for example, they were learning to play a musical instrument, or their jobs involved manual dexterity — were any better at the tasks.
Older and younger adults had a similar level of ability when using the new technology, though further investigation just within the older adults age bracket revealed a decline in performance with increasing age. The researchers say this effect could be due to the general degradation in sensorimotor and cognitive abilities that are associated with ageing and may also reflect a generational relationship to technology.
Performance was generally poorer among younger children. Six out of the 13 participants that could not complete the task were below the age of 10 years old, and of those that did complete the task, the youngest children tended to perform worse compared to older children. But even older children (aged 12-16 years) struggled more than young adults.
Dani said: “Augmentation is about designing a new relationship with technology — creating something that extends beyond being merely a tool to becoming an extension of the body itself. Given the diversity of bodies, it’s crucial that the design stage of wearable technology is as inclusive as possible. It’s equally important that these devices are accessible and functional for a wide range of users. Additionally, they should be easy for people to learn and use quickly.”
Co-author Lucy Dowdall, also from the MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit, added: “If motor augmentation — and even broader human-machine interactions — are to be successful, they’ll need to integrate seamlessly with the user’s motor and cognitive abilities. We’ll need to factor in different ages, genders, weight, lifestyles, disabilities — as well as people’s cultural, financial backgrounds, and even likes or dislikes of technology. Physical testing of large and diverse groups of individuals is essential to achieve this goal.”
There are countless examples of where a lack of inclusive design considerations has led to technological failure:
- Automated speech recognition systems that convert spoken language to text have been shown to perform better listening to white voices over Black voices.
- Some augmented reality technologies have been found to be less effective for users with darker skin tones.
- Women face a higher health risk from car accidents, due to car seats and seatbelts being primarily designed to accommodate ‘average’ male-sized dummies during crash testing.
- Hazardous power and industrial tools designed for a right-hand dominant use or grip have resulted in more accidents when operated by left-handers forced to use their non-dominant hand.
This research was funded by the European Research Council, Wellcome, the Medical Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
TOP SCEINCE
Early dark energy could resolve cosmology’s two biggest puzzles
A new study by MIT physicists proposes that a mysterious force known as early dark energy could solve two of the biggest puzzles in cosmology and fill in some major gaps in our understanding of how the early universe evolved.
Now, the MIT team has found that both puzzles could be resolved if the early universe had one extra, fleeting ingredient: early dark energy. Dark energy is an unknown form of energy that physicists suspect is driving the expansion of the universe today. Early dark energy is a similar, hypothetical phenomenon that may have made only a brief appearance, influencing the expansion of the universe in its first moments before disappearing entirely.
Some physicists have suspected that early dark energy could be the key to solving the Hubble tension, as the mysterious force could accelerate the early expansion of the universe by an amount that would resolve the measurement mismatch.
The MIT researchers have now found that early dark energy could also explain the baffling number of bright galaxies that astronomers have observed in the early universe. In their new study, reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team modeled the formation of galaxies in the universe’s first few hundred million years. When they incorporated a dark energy component only in that earliest sliver of time, they found the number of galaxies that arose from the primordial environment bloomed to fit astronomers’ observations.
“You have these two looming open-ended puzzles,” says study co-author Rohan Naidu, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We find that in fact, early dark energy is a very elegant and sparse solution to two of the most pressing problems in cosmology.”
The study’s co-authors include lead author and Kavli postdoc Xuejian (Jacob) Shen, and MIT professor of physics Mark Vogelsberger, along with Michael Boylan-Kolchin at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sandro Tacchella at the University of Cambridge.
Big city lights
Based on standard cosmological and galaxy formation models, the universe should have taken its time spinning up the first galaxies. It would have taken billions of years for primordial gas to coalesce into galaxies as large and bright as the Milky Way.
But in 2023, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made a startling observation. With an ability to peer farther back in time than any observatory to date, the telescope uncovered a surprising number of bright galaxies as large as the modern Milky Way within the first 500 million years, when the universe was just 3 percent of its current age.
“The bright galaxies that JWST saw would be like seeing a clustering of lights around big cities, whereas theory predicts something like the light around more rural settings like Yellowstone National Park,” Shen says. “And we don’t expect that clustering of light so early on.”
For physicists, the observations imply that there is either something fundamentally wrong with the physics underlying the models or a missing ingredient in the early universe that scientists have not accounted for. The MIT team explored the possibility of the latter, and whether the missing ingredient might be early dark energy.
Physicists have proposed that early dark energy is a sort of antigravitational force that is turned on only at very early times. This force would counteract gravity’s inward pull and accelerate the early expansion of the universe, in a way that would resolve the mismatch in measurements. Early dark energy, therefore, is considered the most likely solution to the Hubble tension.
Galaxy skeleton
The MIT team explored whether early dark energy could also be the key to explaining the unexpected population of large, bright galaxies detected by JWST. In their new study, the physicists considered how early dark energy might affect the early structure of the universe that gave rise to the first galaxies. They focused on the formation of dark matter halos — regions of space where gravity happens to be stronger, and where matter begins to accumulate.
“We believe that dark matter halos are the invisible skeleton of the universe,” Shen explains. “Dark matter structures form first, and then galaxies form within these structures. So, we expect the number of bright galaxies should be proportional to the number of big dark matter halos.”
The team developed an empirical framework for early galaxy formation, which predicts the number, luminosity, and size of galaxies that should form in the early universe, given some measures of “cosmological parameters.” Cosmological parameters are the basic ingredients, or mathematical terms, that describe the evolution of the universe.
Physicists have determined that there are at least six main cosmological parameters, one of which is the Hubble constant — a term that describes the universe’s rate of expansion. Other parameters describe density fluctuations in the primordial soup, immediately after the Big Bang, from which dark matter halos eventually form.
The MIT team reasoned that if early dark energy affects the universe’s early expansion rate, in a way that resolves the Hubble tension, then it could affect the balance of the other cosmological parameters, in a way that might increase the number of bright galaxies that appear at early times. To test their theory, they incorporated a model of early dark energy (the same one that happens to resolve the Hubble tension) into an empirical galaxy formation framework to see how the earliest dark matter structures evolve and give rise to the first galaxies.
“What we show is, the skeletal structure of the early universe is altered in a subtle way where the amplitude of fluctuations goes up, and you get bigger halos, and brighter galaxies that are in place at earlier times, more so than in our more vanilla models,” Naidu says. “It means things were more abundant, and more clustered in the early universe.”
“A priori, I would not have expected the abundance of JWST’s early bright galaxies to have anything to do with early dark energy, but their observation that EDE pushes cosmological parameters in a direction that boosts the early-galaxy abundance is interesting,” says Marc Kamionkowski, professor of theoretical physics at Johns Hopkins University, who was not involved with the study. “I think more work will need to be done to establish a link between early galaxies and EDE, but regardless of how things turn out, it’s a clever — and hopefully ultimately fruitful — thing to try.”
“We demonstrated the potential of early dark energy as a unified solution to the two major issues faced by cosmology. This might be an evidence for its existence if the observational findings of JWST get further consolidated,” Vogelsberger concludes. “In the future, we can incorporate this into large cosmological simulations to see what detailed predictions we get.”
This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation.
TOP SCEINCE
Plant-derived secondary organic aerosols can act as mediators of plant-plant interactions
A new study published in Science reveals that plant-derived secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) can act as mediators of plant-plant interactions. This research was conducted through the cooperation of chemical ecologists, plant ecophysiologists and atmospheric physicists at the University of Eastern Finland.
The study showed that Scots pine seedlings, when damaged by large pine weevils, release VOCs that activate defences in nearby plants of the same species. Interestingly, the biological activity persisted after VOCs were oxidized to form SOAs. The results indicated that the elemental composition and quantity of SOAs likely determines their biological functions.
“A key novelty of the study is the finding that plants adopt subtly different defence strategies when receiving signals as VOCs or as SOAs, yet they exhibit similar degrees of resistance to herbivore feeding,” said Professor James Blande, head of the Environmental Ecology Research Group. This observation opens up the possibility that plants have sophisticated sensing systems that enable them to tailor their defences to information derived from different types of chemical cue.
“Considering the formation rate of SOAs from their precursor VOCs, their longer lifetime compared to VOCs, and the atmospheric air mass transport, we expect that the ecologically effective distance for interactions mediated by SOAs is longer than that for plant interactions mediated by VOCs,” said Professor Annele Virtanen, head of the Aerosol Physics Research Group. This could be interpreted as plants being able to detect cues representing close versus distant threats from herbivores.
The study is expected to open up a whole new complex research area to environmental ecologists and their collaborators, which could lead to new insights on the chemical cues structuring interactions between plants.
TOP SCEINCE
Folded or cut, this lithium-sulfur battery keeps going
Most rechargeable batteries that power portable devices, such as toys, handheld vacuums and e-bikes, use lithium-ion technology. But these batteries can have short lifetimes and may catch fire when damaged. To address stability and safety issues, researchers reporting in ACS Energy Letters have designed a lithium-sulfur (Li-S) battery that features an improved iron sulfide cathode. One prototype remains highly stable over 300 charge-discharge cycles, and another provides power even after being folded or cut.
The team coated iron sulfide cathodes in different polymers and found in initial electrochemical performance tests that polyacrylic acid (PAA) performed best, retaining the electrode’s discharge capacity after 300 charge-discharge cycles. Next, the researchers incorporated a PAA-coated iron sulfide cathode into a prototype battery design, which also included a carbonate-based electrolyte, a lithium metal foil as an ion source, and a graphite-based anode. They produced and then tested both pouch cell and coin cell battery prototypes.
After more than 100 charge-discharge cycles, Wang and colleagues observed no substantial capacity decay in the pouch cell. Additional experiments showed that the pouch cell still worked after being folded and cut in half. The coin cell retained 72% of its capacity after 300 charge-discharge cycles. They next applied the polymer coating to cathodes made from other metals, creating lithium-molybdenum and lithium-vanadium batteries. These cells also had stable capacity over 300 charge-discharge cycles. Overall, the results indicate that coated cathodes could produce not only safer Li-S batteries with long lifespans, but also efficient batteries with other metal sulfides, according to Wang’s team.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China; the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan, China; and the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics.
-
Solar Energy3 years ago
DLR testing the use of molten salt in a solar power plant in Portugal
-
world news11 months ago
Gulf, France aid Gaza, Russia evacuates citizens
-
Camera11 months ago
DJI Air 3 vs. Mini 4 Pro: which compact drone is best?
-
Camera3 years ago
Charles ‘Chuck’ Geschke, co-founder of Adobe and inventor of the PDF, dies at 81
-
Solar Energy11 months ago
Glencore eyes options on battery recycling project
-
world news11 months ago
Strong majority of Americans support Israel-Hamas hostage deal
-
Camera11 months ago
Sony a9 III: what you need to know
-
TOP SCEINCE6 months ago
Can animals count?