Photonics for a Better World

Brownie Space Science Adventurer Cybersecurity. Space exploration. Robotics. Mechanical engineering. Environmental advocacy. These are just a few of the STEM-related areas covered by 30 new Girl Scout badges  that reflect freshly-implemented programs for girls 5-18. Girls in kindergarten through fifth grade, for example, through a collaboration with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate led by the SETI Institute, now have a window into the wonderful worlds of outer space and astronomy. Fourth and fifth grade girls can earn mechanical engineering badges through hands-on work as they design paddle boats, cranes, and balloon-powered cars, learning about jet propulsion, buoyancy, and potential and kinetic energy in the process. New programming for girls in grades 6-12 includes learning to design, program, and showcase robots, while the Raytheon-funded “Think Like a Programmer” track offers foundational lessons in computational thinking, and “Think Like an Engineer” focuses on ...

Robotic pollinator Photo and video: Miyako et al. Can you imagine a world in which our crops and flowers are pollinated by autonomous drones the size of bees? Researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology believe this reality could be closer than we may think due to staggering declines in bee populations around the world. Eijiro Miyako and his colleagues have used the principle of cross-pollination to engineer a bioinspired robotic pollinator, which can mimic the functionality of real bees, reports an article published in Science Direct . Measuring 4 centimeters wide and weighing a mere 15 grams, each drone is equipped with a strip of horsehair coated in an iconic liquid gel, allowing it to pick up pollen from one flower and deposit it in another. "GPS, high-resolution cameras and artificial intelligence will be required for the drones to independently track their way between flowers and land on them correctly, " sa...

Researchers around the world are in the midst of developing artificial skins essential to modern robotics, prosthetic limbs, and other applications. Designed to emulate the most practical properties of human skin, some artificial skin technologies have managed to surpass the sensory capabilities of living tissues. One such technology is a temperature-sensitive electronic film, which has paralleled the record performance of the world's most sensitive heat-detecting organism, the Crotalinae , commonly know as the pit viper. While in the process of fabricating materials for synthetic wood, a team of researchers discovered a film made of pectin, a sugar molecule responsible for the temperature sensitivity in plants, could exhibit an electrical response to changes in temperature when enriched with positively-charged calcium ions. This finding led to the study " Biomimetic temperature-sensing layer for artificial skins " by senior author Chiara Daraio , et al., which w...