Left alone, the toy robots will skitter mindlessly across a tabletop and amuse small children and cats. But when engineers at Princeton paired the small toys with a flexible tether, the bots developed remarkable abilities. They explored enclosed spaces, solved mazes with ease, and even rounded up loose objects into patterns.

In a new study, researchers discovered that tweaking the texture of any surface and adding a thin layer of graphene oxide prevents 100% of frost from forming on surfaces for one week or potentially even longer. This is 1,000 times longer than current, state-of-the-art anti-frosting surfaces.

To improve treatment for ischemic strokes caused by blockages in the brain, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researcher Yihao Zheng is shining a light on blood clots.

Zheng, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and a team of researchers with expertise across science and engineering are developing a fiber-optic probe that will use light and advanced calculations to determine in real time whether a blood clot in the brain is soft, stiff, sturdy, or weak. 

MIT researchers created a synthetic magnetic field using a superconducting quantum processor, which could enable them to precisely study complex phenomena in materials, like phase changes. This could shed light on properties of unique materials that may be used to create faster or more powerful electronics.

Marine animals like jellyfish, corals and sea anemones often live with algae inside their cells in a symbiotic relationship. The animals give the algae nutrients and a place to live; in return, algae give the animals some of the food they make from sunlight via photosynthesis. While this food production seems great for the jellyfish, the algae can also change its host animal’s immunity, similar to the changes made by human pathogens, like parasites that cause malaria. This side effect of the partnership weakens the jellyfish’s immune system, making them worse at fighting off infections, according to a new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington.

An international team of geoscientists led by a volcanologist at Rutgers University-New Brunswick has discovered that, contrary to present scientific understanding, ancient volcanoes continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth long past their period of eruptions.

In a new PNAS Perspective, a team of authors argues that stochastic thermodynamics provides the mathematical tools needed to investigate the energy usage of all computational systems.

Medical imaging is no longer in Kansas, Toto, as a team led by Penn State researchers brings traditional black and white diagnostic images of X-rays and traditional CT scans into technicolor. The researchers developed novel contrast agents that target two proteins implicated in osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease commonly characterized as wear-and-tear arthritis. By marking the proteins with the contrast agents comprising newly designed metal nanoprobes, the researchers can use advanced imaging called “K-edge” imaging or photon-counting computed tomography (CT) to simultaneously track separate biological processes in color that, together, reveal more about the disease’s progression than a traditional scan.