While that may sound like a bad dad joke, it’s reality at Tulane University, where researchers have developed a new A.I. tool that can tell you if a fruit fly is hungry, sleepy or singing (yes, fruit flies sing).

Dubbed MAFDA (for Novel Machine-learning-based Automatic Fly-behavioral Detection and Annotation) the system uses cameras and a newly developed software to track and identify complex interactive behaviors of individual flies within a larger group. This allows researchers to compare and contrast the behaviors of fruit flies with different genetic backgrounds.

For more than a century, scientists have used fruit flies’ simple genome and short lifespan to decode mysteries of inheritance and immunity in humans with studies of Drosophila melanogaster nabbing six Nobel Prizes. Fruit flies and humans share 60 percent of the same DNA.

Previous algorithms were less accurate at tracking individual flies within a group, but the MAFDA system makes studying the tiny, winged insects easier.

“Fruit flies are like pioneers in the discovery of new things, from the chromosome theory of inheritance to innate immunity,” said corresponding author Wu-Min Deng, PhD., professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and the Gerald & Flora Jo Mansfield Piltz Endowed Professor in Cancer Research at Tulane School of Medicine. “To be able to quantify the flies’ behavior is really a step forward in behavior studies.”

Wenkan Liu, a School of Medicine graduate student who developed the MAFDA system, said the significance of the platform is “undeniable.”

“It speeds up research, minimizes human error, and provides intricate insights into behavior genetics,” Liu said. “This tool is potentially pivotal as it enhances reproducibility and paves the way for new explorations in large-scale behavioral analysis.”

MAFDA was developed as part of a recent study, which discovered that the gene that causes flies to perceive pheromones is the same gene that controls pheromone production. These findings, published in Science Advances, challenge the status quo view that separate genes control pheromone production and perception and have broad applications in the fields of human behavioral evolution, metabolism and sex dimorphism.

Going forward, the researchers hope to see MAFDA used in a variety of applications. Jie Sun, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at Tulane School of Medicine, said MAFDA could eventually be used to study other insects as well as mice and fish, and the system may be useful in studying drug effects.

“The more information we give the machine, the better it gets at correctly identifying different behaviors from courtship to feeding and so on,” Sun said. “This is a very important, meaningful tool.”

MAFDA is already in use on other research projects at Tulane, and researchers are working to package the system so it can be used by more scientists both at Tulane and around the world .

“That’s the goal,” Deng said. “The original idea was to be able to identify the health status of flies. That may be too much to ask right now, but we’re hoping this will be more broadly used by the community and hopefully in the future we can go in that direction.”

The new study led by mechanical science and engineering professor Sameh Tawfick demonstrates how bendable fins and fluids can simultaneously switch between straight or bent and hot and cold by controlling the volume and temperature of tiny fluid-filled pixels. Varying the volume of fluids within the pixels can change the directions in which the flaps flip — similar to old-fashioned flip clocks — and varying the temperature allows the pixels to communicate via infrared energy.

The study findings are published in the journal Science Advances.

Tawfick’s interest in the interaction of elastic and capillary forces — or elasto-capillarity — started as a graduate student, spanned the basic science of hair wetting and led to his research in soft robotic displays at Illinois.

“An everyday example of elasto-capillarity is what happens to our hair when we get in the shower,” Tawfick said. “When our hair gets wet, it sticks together and bends or bundles as capillary forces are applied and released when it dries out.”

In the lab, the team created small boxes, or pixels, a few millimeters in size, that contain fins made of a flexible polymer that bend when the pixels are filled with fluid and drained using a system of tiny pumps. The pixels can have single or multiple fins and are arranged into arrays that form a display to convey information, Tawfick said.

“We are not limited to cubic pixel boxes, either,” Tawfick said. “The fins can be arranged in various orientations to create different images, even along curved surfaces. The control is precise enough to achieve complex motions, like simulating the opening of a flower bloom.”

The study reports that another feature of the new displays is the ability to send two simultaneous signals — one that can be seen with the human eye and another that can only be seen with an infrared camera.

“Because we can control the temperature of these individual droplets, we can display messages that can only be seen using an infrared device,” Tawfick said, “Or we can send two different messages at the same time.”

However, there are a few limitations to the new displays, Tawfick said.

While building the new devices, the team found that the tiny pumps needed to control the pixel fluids were not commercially available, and the entire device is sensitive to gravity — meaning that it only works while in a horizontal position.

“Once we turn the display by 90 degrees, the performance is greatly degraded, which is detrimental to applications like billboards and other signs intended for the public,” Tawfick said. “The good news is, we know that when liquid droplets become small enough, they become insensitive to gravity, like when you see a rain droplet sticking on your window and it doesn’t fall. We have found that if we use fluid droplets that are five times smaller, gravity will no longer be an issue.”

The team said that because the science behind gravity’s effect on droplets is well understood, it will provide the focal point for their next application of the emerging technology.

Tawfick said he is very excited to see where this technology is headed because it brings a fresh idea to a big market space of large reflective displays. “We have developed a whole new breed of displays that require minimal energy, are scaleable and even flexible enough to be placed onto curved surfaces.”

Illinois researchers Jonghyun Ha, Yun Seong Kim, Chengzhang Li, Jonghyun Hwang, Sze Chai Leung and Ryan Siu also participated in this research.

The Airforce Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported this research.

In a new study, the research team, which includes entomologists with the University of Florida, the Agricultural Research Service-USDA, Louisiana State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, showed that prompting honey bees’ cells to produce free radicals helped the bees weather a host of viruses. In fact, the treatment greatly reduced, and in some cases, nearly eliminated virus activity in full scale field studies.

“This approach is especially exciting because it doesn’t just target a specific type of virus but helps with many different viruses,” said Daniel Swale, senior author of the study. Swale is the associate director for training and special projects in the UF Emerging Pathogens Institute and associate professor in the UF/IFAS entomology and nematology department.

“Additionally, we demonstrated that our treatment works both in the lab and in colonies that each contain 80,000 bees in the field. This is huge because, in a hive setting, bees are exposed to so many different viruses and stressors, so successfully controlling viruses in that environment is very encouraging,” said Swale, who completed some of this research while at Louisiana State University.

Honey bee colonies, and the beekeepers who manage them, play an important role in food production by pollinating many crops. In recent years, honey bee populations have seen significant declines, and viruses, while not the top cause of honey bee deaths, are among the main contributors.

“Varroa mites are the number one cause of honey bee losses, but it’s important to point out that varroa mites, aside from physically weakening bees, also transmit viruses to bees. If we can mitigate viruses in honey bee colonies, that would be a big step forward,” said Michael Simone-Finstrom, a co-author of the study and a research molecular biologist with the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research Lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

In the experiment, the researchers used a compound called pinacidil to alter potassium ion channels, a protein found in the cells of bees’ and most living things. Altering these channels produced slightly more free radicals.

“While free radicals are often bad for cell health, in moderate amounts they can be therapeutic, as we see in this study. In this case, the additional free radicals signal to the immune system to ramp up, which helps the bees fight off viruses,” said Troy Anderson, a co-author of the paper and a professor of entomology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The scientists administered the drug to honey bee colonies by mixing it into sugar water and drizzling the water over the honey comb at night. The bees then consumed the sugar water and fed it to their young. During the day, bees are constantly moving in an out of the hive, so giving them the treatment at night maximizes the number of bees that will receive it.

The treatment protected bees from six potentially deadly honey bee viruses: Israeli acute paralysis virus, deformed wing viruses A and B, black queen cell virus and Lake Sinai viruses 1 and 2. The researchers also showed that pinacidil helped more bees survive in colonies heavily infested with varroa mites.

Administering pinacidil to commercial honey bee hives may only be feasible for some beekeepers, the researchers said, but the study opens the door to identifying other active ingredients that may work better and cost less.

“One of the big take-aways from this study is that potassium ion channels can be a target for improving immune system function in honey bees and possibly other insects. We would like to find a molecule, such as a peptide, or a new technology that has the same effect as pinacidil but is more accessible to beekeepers,” Swale said.

It’s no small feat to measure the rate at which objects move away from each other across vast distances. Since the discovery of cosmic expansion, its rate has been measured and re-measured with increasing precision, with some of the latest values ranging from 67.4 up to 76.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which relates the recession velocity (in kilometers per second) to the distance (in megaparsecs).

The discrepancy between different measurements of cosmic expansion is called the “Hubble tension.” Some have called it a crisis in cosmology. But for UC Santa Barbara theoretical astrophysicist Tejaswi Venumadhav Nerella and colleagues at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India, and the Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, it is an exciting time.

Since the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, detectors have been significantly improved and are poised to yield a rich haul of signals in the coming years. Nerella and his colleagues have come up with a method to use these signals to measure the universe’s expansion, and perhaps help to settle the debate once and for all. “A major scientific goal of future detectors is to deliver a comprehensive catalog of gravitational wave events, and this will be a completely novel use of the remarkable dataset,” said Nerella, co-author of a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

Measurements of the cosmic expansion rate boil down to velocity and distance. Astronomers use two kinds of methods to measure distances: the first start with objects with a known length (“standard rulers”) and look at how big they appear in the sky. These “objects” are features in cosmic background radiation, or in the distribution of galaxies in the universe.

A second class of methods starts with objects of known luminosity (“standard candles”) and measures their distances from Earth using their apparent brightness. These distances are connected to those of farther bright objects and so on, which builds up a chain of measurement schemes that is often called the “cosmic distance ladder.” Incidentally, gravitational waves themselves can also help measure cosmic expansion, since the energy released by the collision of neutron stars or black holes can be used to estimate the distance to these objects.

The method that Nerella and his co-authors propose belongs to the second class but uses gravitational lensing. This is a phenomenon that occurs when massive objects warp spacetime, and bend waves of all kinds that travel near the objects. In rare cases, lensing can produce multiple copies of the same gravitational wave signal that reach Earth at different times — the delays between the signals for a population of multiple imaged events can be used to calculate the universe’s expansion rate, according to the researchers.

“We understand very well just how sensitive gravitational wave detectors are, and there are no astrophysical sources of confusion, so we can properly account for what gets into our catalog of events,” Nerella said. “The new method has sources of error that are complementary to those of existing methods, which makes it a good discriminator.”

The sources of these signals would be binary black holes: systems of two black holes that orbit each other and ultimately merge, releasing massive amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves. We haven’t yet detected strongly lensed examples of these signals, but the upcoming generation of ground-based detectors is expected to have the necessary level of sensitivity.

“We expect the first observation of lensed gravitational waves in the next few years,” said study co-author Parameswaran Ajith. Additionally, these future detectors should be able to see farther into space and detect weaker signals.

The authors expect these advanced detectors to start their search for merging black holes in the next decade. They anticipate recording signals from a few million black hole pairs, a small fraction (about 10,000) of which will appear multiple times in the same detector due to gravitational lensing. The distribution of the delays between these repeat appearances encodes the Hubble expansion rate.

According to lead author Souvik Jana, unlike other methods of measurement, this method does not rely on knowing the exact locations of, or the distances to, these binary black holes. The only requirement is to accurately identify a sufficiently large number of these lensed signals. The researchers add that observations of lensed gravitational waves can even provide clues on other cosmological questions, such as the nature of the invisible dark matter that makes up much of the energy content of the universe.

A first-of-its-kind robotic glove is lending a “hand” and providing hope to piano players who have suffered a disabling stroke. Developed by researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, the soft robotic hand exoskeleton uses artificial intelligence to improve hand dexterity.

Combining flexible tactile sensors, soft actuators and AI, this robotic glove is the first to “feel” the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the same song and to combine these features into a single hand exoskeleton.

“Playing the piano requires complex and highly skilled movements, and relearning tasks involves the restoration and retraining of specific movements or skills,” said Erik Engeberg, Ph.D., senior author, a professor in FAU’s Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering within the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and a member of the FAU Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences and the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute. “Our robotic glove is composed of soft, flexible materials and sensors that provide gentle support and assistance to individuals to relearn and regain their motor abilities.”

Researchers integrated special sensor arrays into each fingertip of the robotic glove. Unlike prior exoskeletons, this new technology provides precise force and guidance in recovering the fine finger movements required for piano playing. By monitoring and responding to users’ movements, the robotic glove offers real-time feedback and adjustments, making it easier for them to grasp the correct movement techniques.

To demonstrate the robotic glove’s capabilities, researchers programmed it to feel the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the well-known tune, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” played on the piano. To introduce variations in the performance, they created a pool of 12 different types of errors that could occur at the beginning or end of a note, or due to timing errors that were either premature or delayed, and that persisted for 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3 seconds. Ten different song variations consisted of three groups of three variations each, plus the correct song played with no errors.

To classify the song variations, Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithms were trained with data from the tactile sensors in the fingertips. Feeling the differences between correct and incorrect versions of the song was done with the robotic glove independently and while worn by a person. The accuracy of these algorithms was compared to classify the correct and incorrect song variations with and without the human subject.

Results of the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI, demonstrated that the ANN algorithm had the highest classification accuracy of 97.13 percent with the human subject and 94.60 percent without the human subject. The algorithm successfully determined the percentage error of a certain song as well as identified key presses that were out of time. These findings highlight the potential of the smart robotic glove to aid individuals who are disabled to relearn dexterous tasks like playing musical instruments.

Researchers designed the robotic glove using 3D printed polyvinyl acid stents and hydrogel casting to integrate five actuators into a single wearable device that conforms to the user’s hand. The fabrication process is new, and the form factor could be customized to the unique anatomy of individual patients with the use of 3D scanning technology or CT scans.

“Our design is significantly simpler than most designs as all the actuators and sensors are combined into a single molding process,” said Engeberg. “Importantly, although this study’s application was for playing a song, the approach could be applied to myriad tasks of daily life and the device could facilitate intricate rehabilitation programs customized for each patient.”

Clinicians could use the data to develop personalized action plans to pinpoint patient weaknesses, which may present themselves as sections of the song that are consistently played erroneously and can be used to determine which motor functions require improvement. As patients progress, more challenging songs could be prescribed by the rehabilitation team in a game-like progression to provide a customizable path to improvement.

“The technology developed by professor Engeberg and the research team is truly a gamechanger for individuals with neuromuscular disorders and reduced limb functionality,” said Stella Batalama, Ph.D., dean of the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science. “Although other soft robotic actuators have been used to play the piano; our robotic glove is the only one that has demonstrated the capability to ‘feel’ the difference between correct and incorrect versions of the same song.”

Study co-authors are Maohua Lin, first author and a Ph.D. student; Rudy Paul, a graduate student; and Moaed Abd, Ph.D., a recent graduate; all from the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science; James Jones, Boise State University; Darryl Dieujuste, a graduate research assistant, FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science; and Harvey Chim, M.D., a professor in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the University of Florida.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Aging of the NIH and the National Science Foundation. This research was supported in part by a seed grant from the FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science and the FAU Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE).

Reported in the journal Chem, the study shows that the ladder-type molecule serves as a robust and reversible molecular switch over a wide range of conductivity levels and different molecular states.

“Our work provides a significant step forward towards the development of functional molecular electronic devices,” says Charles Schroeder, who is the James Economy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

To enhance the chemical and mechanical stability of the molecule, the team used new strategies in chemical synthesis to lock the molecular backbone to prevent the molecule from rotating, like converting a rope ladder into something more stable like metal or wood.

“Imagine a light switch that we turn on and off every day, but instead of flipping an actual switch, we add chemical or electrochemical stimuli to turn the electrical signal from the material on and off,” says lead author and former graduate student Jialing (Caroline) Li. Compared to bulk inorganic materials, organic single molecules can be made into basic electrical components, like wires and transistors, and will help enable the ultimate goal of shrinking electrical circuits.

Single-molecule electronic devices are constructed as junctions with a single molecule bridge that is generally anchored to two terminal groups connected to metal electrodes. These devices can be made programmable by using a stimuli-responsive element in the bridge that can be switched on and off by using an array of stimuli such as pH, optical fields, electric fields, magnetic fields, mechanical forces and electrochemical control.

“The molecular scale switch has been a very popular subject in studies of single molecule electronics,” Li explains. “But realizing a multi-state switch on a molecular scale is challenging because we require a material that is conductive and has several different molecular charge states, and we require the material to be very stable so it can be switched on and off for many cycles.”

Though Li explored many other organic materials, the drawback of those materials was that they were not stable in ambient conditions and could break down easily when exposed to oxygen. After searching for the ideal material for a long time, Li struck gold when she stumbled upon a material from a research group at Texas A&M University (collaborators on this project) and immediately identified it as ideal for her purposes.

Modifying the structure by locking the backbone of the molecule prevents hydrolysis, chemical breakdown due to reaction with water, and other degradation reactions from occurring, and makes characterization of the material easier since it cannot rotate and change forms. This rigid, coplanar form enhances the electronic properties of the molecule, making the flow of electrons through the material easier. The ladder-type structure allows for stable molecular charge states when external stimuli are applied that give rise to significantly different levels of conductivity- making multi-state switching possible.

This material meets almost all of the requirements needed to serve in single-molecule electronic devices: it is stable in ambient conditions, can be cycled on/off many times, is conductive (although not as conductive as metal) and has different molecular states accessible to be utilized.

“Researchers have been struggling to minimize the size of the transistor to fit as many as possible on chips for semiconductors, usually using inorganic materials like silicon,” Li says. “An alternative way of doing that is using organic materials like a single-molecule material to conduct the electrons and replace the inorganic counterparts.” The ladder-type structure used in this research shows promise to be used as functional materials for single-molecule transistors.

For now, only one unit of the molecule is used for single-molecule electronics, but it is possible to extend the length to include many repeating units to make a longer molecular wire. The team believes that the material will still be highly conductive, even over a longer distance.

Dr Matthew Luskin, from UQ’s School of the Environment, and his team collated and analysed species population data from across the region, some of it collected with a network of cameras.

“Macaques and wild pigs are taking over Southeast Asia’s disturbed forests,” Dr Luskin said.

“Humans are largely to blame for this by altering forests with logging and establishing palm oil farms which provide food and ideal breeding conditions for these animals.

“We saw that wild boar and macaque numbers were 400 per cent higher in forests near the plantations than in untouched environments.

“These animals take full advantage of the farmland, raiding crops and thriving on calorie-rich foods.”

Setting and monitoring the camera traps provided Dr Luskin with an up-close experience of the exploding numbers.

“I encountered huge troops of macaques in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia — they were everywhere in the forest edges, following us and interfering with our equipment,” Dr Luskin said.

“At first it was frustrating but then was eerie as we became completely surrounded.”

Dr Luskin said there were significant human health risks in the rising pig and macaque populations.

“The wildlife origins of the COVID-19 pandemic show that mammals in human-modified ecosystems often host high pathogen loads and pose serious zoonotic disease risks,” he said.

“Both pigs and macaques are recognised as carriers of diseases that can be transmitted to people and they’re the most common species in a region considered to be the global zoonotic disease hotspot.”

Collaborator, Professor Carlos Peres from the University of East Anglia (UK), said abnormally high populations of wildlife species that are disease reservoirs often occur in human-modified tropical forests.

“This study again shows that densely settled rural areas in Southeast Asia may be a source of future human epidemics,” he said.

University of East Anglia and Southern University of Science and Technology (China) PhD candidate, Jonathan Moore, said the immediate effects of the population explosions could be seen on native flora in the affected regions.

“Both pigs and macaques trigger negative cascading impacts in these pristine ecosystems,” Mr Moore said.

“They kill the seeds and seedlings of native plants and eat bird and reptile eggs.

“The Malaysian pigs alone were found to reduce rainforest tree regeneration by 62 per cent.”

The researchers say action is needed to minimise population expansions of wild pigs and macaques.

“Efforts to manage the populations of these species have failed in the past because of their rapid reproductive capacity and public outcry,” Dr Luskin said.

“Nobody favours needless killing of wildlife but the negative social and ecological impacts from hyperabundant pest species does demand ethical and urgent management solutions.”

This is now mostly achieved via wired or invasive contact systems. However, these are either inconvenient or, for patients with burns or for infants with insufficient skin area, are unsuitable.

Scientists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute and the NSW Smart Sensing Network have now developed a photonic radar system that allows for highly precise, non-invasive monitoring.

The research is published today in Nature Photonics.

Using their newly developed and patented radar system, the researchers monitored cane toads and were able accurately to detect pauses in breathing patterns remotely. The system was also used on devices that simulate human breathing.

The scientists say this demonstrates a proof of principle for using photonic radar that could enable the vital-sign monitoring of multiple patients from a single, centralised station.

The University of Sydney Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) and lead for this research Professor Ben Eggleton said: “Our guiding principle here is to overcome comfort and privacy issues, while delivering highly accurate vital sign monitoring.”

An advantage to this approach is the ability to detect vital signs from a distance, eliminating the need for physical contact with patients. This not only enhances patient comfort but reduces the risk of cross-contamination, making it valuable in settings where infection control is crucial.

“Photonic radar uses a light-based, photonics system — rather than traditional electronics — to generate, collect and process the radar signals. This approach allows for very wideband generation of radio frequency (RF) signals, offering highly precise and simultaneous, multiple tracking of subjects,” said lead author Ziqian Zhang, a PhD student in the School of Physics.

“Our system combined this approach with LiDAR — light detection and ranging. This hybrid approach delivered a vital sign detection system with a resolution down to six millimetres with micrometre-level accuracy. This is suitable for clinical environments.”

Alternate approaches to non-contact monitoring have typically relied on optical sensors, using infrared and visible wavelength cameras.

“Camera-based systems have two problems. One is high sensitivity to variations in lighting conditions and skin colour. The other is with patient privacy, with high-resolution images of patients being recorded and stored in cloud computing infrastructure,” said Professor Eggleton who is also the co-Director of the NSW Smart Sensing Network.

Radio frequency (RF) detection technology can remotely monitor vital signs without the need for visual recording, providing built-in privacy protection. Signal analysis, including identification of health signatures, can be performed with no requirement for cloud storage of information.

Co-author Dr Yang Liu, a former PhD student in Professor Eggleton’s team, now based at EPFL in Switzerland, said: “A real innovation in our approach is complementarity: our demonstrated system has the capability to simultaneously enable radar and LiDAR detection. This has inbuilt redundancy; if either system encounters a fault, the other continues to function.”

Conventional RF radar systems, which rely entirely on electronics, have narrow RF bandwidth and therefore have lower-range resolution. This means they cannot separate closely located targets or distinguish them in a cluttered environment.

Relying solely on LiDAR, which uses much shorter light wavelengths, provides improved range and resolution, but has limited penetration abilities through objects such as clothes.

“Our proposed system maximises the utility of both approaches through integrating the photonic and radio frequency technologies,” Mr Zhang said.

Working with collaborators and partners in the NSW Smart Sensing Network, the researchers hope this research provides a platform to develop a cost-effective, high-resolution and rapid-response vital sign monitoring system with application in hospitals and corrective services.

“A next step is to miniaturise the system and integrate it into photonic chips that could be used in handheld devices,” Mr Zhang said.