Inspired by a simple children's toy, a jumping popper toy, researchers have unlocked a key to designing more agile and predictable soft robots. Soft robots, made from flexible materials, hold immense promise for delicate tasks, but their complex movements have been difficult to predict and control, especially dynamic actions like jumping. Now, a team from Keio University and The University of Osaka has published a study in Advanced Robotics Research detailing the physics behind the jump of thin hemispherical shells, a fundamental building block for jumping soft robots.

Tokyo, Japan – A team led by a researcher from Tokyo Metropolitan University has devised a new way of coating magnesium alloys to improve their corrosion resistance. Instead of costly, unwieldy, and slower coating techniques under vacuum, they used liquid-based chemical conversion coating with the addition of cavitation bubbles. The resulting thick coating helped improve corrosion resistance to chlorides and mechanical properties. The team’s new technology is aimed at reinforcing lightweight materials in electric cars.

Recently, the team led by Academician Wei-Hong Zhu at East China University of Science and Technology proposed a novel photo-rearrangement reaction of diarylethenes induced by intramolecular proton transfer (IPT), while exploring the reactivity of active carbon sites in diarylethene systems. In this study, published in CCS Chemistry, aldehyde and carboxyl groups were innovatively introduced at the active carbon positions, revealing distinct photoresponsive behaviors. The dialdehyde-substituted system exhibited typical reversible photochromism, whereas the dicarboxylate-substituted counterpart underwent an unexpected photorearrangement to yield polycyclic aromatic structures. Mechanistic studies, including transient absorption spectroscopy and density functional theory (DFT) calculations, demonstrated that the rearrangement proceeds through electrocyclization followed by an IPT-driven decarboxylation process. This work opens a new pathway for light-induced synthesis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and highlights potential applications in molecular modification, photoreaction mechanisms, and synthetic photochemistry.

Food scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found the optimal conditions for fermenting five types of legume pulses, which not only extended the shelf lives of the raw foods but increased their antioxidant and antidiabetic properties. The research holds potential for improving the functional properties of health-promoting foods and the sustainability of plant-based diets to address global problems with food insecurity.

Co-packaged optics (CPO) technology requires reliable laser sources, either integrated or external, for operation. Since integrated laser sources are associated with reliability challenges, researchers are increasingly exploring CPO systems with external sources. Recently, polymer waveguides fabricated on glass-epoxy substrates have emerged as a reliable solution for transmitting laser signals from external sources to photonic circuits. Researchers from Japan have now demonstrated the suitability of these waveguides for use in CPO systems.