Animals like bats, whales and insects have long used acoustic signals for communication and navigation. Now, an international team of scientists have taken a page from nature's playbook to model micro-sized robots that use sound waves to coordinate into large swarms that exhibit intelligent-like behavior. The robot groups could one day carry out complex tasks like exploring disaster zones, cleaning up pollution, or performing medical treatments from inside the body, according to team lead Igor Aronson, Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, and Mathematics at Penn State.

New research by University at Buffalo and University of Colorado Boulder researchers has uncovered and characterized novel two-dimensional wave patterns — waves that propagate along two directions — whether they are in water or other settings like plasmas and condensed matter. 

In 2024, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance collected an unusual rock sample, Sapphire Canyon, that features white, leopardlike spots and might hold clues about sources of organic molecules within Mars. In Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers used optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy to study a visually similar rock to try to determine if O-PTIR can be applied to the Sapphire Canyon sample when it is eventually brought here. They aimed to see if O-PTIR could differentiate between the rock’s primary material and its dark inclusions and found it was extremely effective because of the enhanced spatial resolution of O-PTIR.

Medical imaging methods are often affected by background noise. To solve this, some researchers have drawn inspiration from quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behave at the atomic scale. Their studies draw an analogy between how particles vibrate and how pixel intensity spreads out in images and causes noise. Now authors apply the same mathematics to decipher the localization of pixel intensity in images. In this way, they can separate the noise-free “signal” of the anatomical structures in the image from the visual noise of stray pixels.

Advances in technology have led to the miniaturization of many mechanical, electronic, chemical and biomedical products, and with that, an evolution in the way these tiny components and parts are transported is necessary to follow. Transport systems, such as those based on conveyor belts, suffer from the challenge of friction, which drastically slows the speed and precision of small transport. Researchers from YOKOHAMA National University addressed this issue by developing an untethered levitation device capable of moving in all directions. The frictionless design allows for ultrafast, agile movement that can prove to be very valuable in machine assembly, biomedical and chemical applications via contactless transport.

Researchers published their results in Advanced Intelligent Systems in July 2025.