Published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, the study highlights the connections between surface and groundwater and calls for diversified strategies for managing them both.

“I like to emphasize a lot of solutions and how they can be optimized,” said lead author Bridget Scanlon, a senior research scientist at the UT Bureau of Economic Geology, a research unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

The study draws on data from satellites, climate models, monitoring networks and almost 200 scientific papers to analyze the Earth’s water supply, how it’s changing in different regions and what’s driving these changes. The study’s co-authors include almost two dozen water experts from around the world.

According to the research, humans primarily rely on surface water. Globally, it accounts for 75% of irrigation and 83% of municipal and industrial supply annually. However, what we see at the surface is tightly connected to groundwater flow. In the United States, about 50% of annual streamflow starts as groundwater. And globally, surface water that seeps into the ground accounts for about 30% of annual groundwater supplies.

Human intervention can strongly influence the exchange in water between surface and groundwater sources. About 85% of groundwater pumped by humans in the U.S. is considered “captured”from surface water, which leads to declines in streamflow. At the same time, irrigation sourced from surface water can increase groundwater recharge as irrigated water seeps through the ground back to aquifers.

The study cites numerous examples of human activity affecting this flux between surface water and groundwater supplies. For example, surface water irrigation recharged aquifers in the early to mid-1900s in the Northwestern U.S.’ Columbia Plateau and Snake River Plain, while global models show that groundwater pumping has greatly reduced the volume of water going to streams, with 15-21% of global watersheds at risk because of the reduced flows.

Despite their inherent connection, surface water and groundwater are frequently regulated and managed as separate resources. According to the researchers, future water resilience depends on recognizing that surface water and groundwater behave as a single resource — and acting on that knowledge.

The study describes different ways for managing water through both natural and engineered solutions that can help increase water supplies, reduce demand, store water and transport it. According to Scanlon, one of the best ways to adapt to increasing climate extremes is storing water during wet times and drawing on it in times of drought.

“We have droughts and we have floods,” she said. “We are trying to manage those extremes and a way to do that is to store water.”

Annually, the world stores about 7,000-8,300 cubic kilometers, or about two Lake Michigan’s worth of water, in surface reservoirs. The researchers said it was important to continue developing groundwater supplies, too, because they are more resilient than surface reservoirs during long-term droughts. Managed aquifer recharge can help cities build up their groundwater supplies by collecting surface water and diverting it underground into aquifers. Globally, about 10,000 cubic kilometers of water is stored this way each year.

“This type of integrated research, linking surface and groundwater, is exactly what is needed to develop lasting solutions to issues such as fresh water use,” said Scott Tinker, the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology. “Too often studies are done in isolation, and well-intended applications have unintended outcomes.”

Matthew Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved in the study, said that the paper offers a useful compendium of research results and potential solutions for managing water supplies while also keeping water quality — a characteristic that’s more difficult to monitor remotely than quantity — in mind.

“Water quality is one of the next targets in terms of being able to manage water resources,” he said. “I like that this was incorporated as well.”

To avoid a bottleneck of bots, a team of MIT engineers is designing a kit of universal robotic parts that an astronaut could easily mix and match to rapidly configure different robot “species” to fit various missions on the moon. Once a mission is completed, a robot can be disassembled and its parts used to configure a new robot to meet a different task.

The team calls the system WORMS, for the Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System. The system’s parts include worm-inspired robotic limbs that an astronaut can easily snap onto a base, and that work together as a walking robot. Depending on the mission, parts can be configured to build, for instance, large “pack” bots capable of carrying heavy solar panels up a hill. The same parts could be reconfigured into six-legged spider bots that can be lowered into a lava tube to drill for frozen water.

“You could imagine a shed on the moon with shelves of worms,” says team leader George Lordos, a PhD candidate and graduate instructor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), in reference to the independent, articulated robots that carry their own motors, sensors, computer, and battery. “Astronauts could go into the shed, pick the worms they need, along with the right shoes, body, sensors and tools, and they could snap everything together, then disassemble it to make a new one. The design is flexible, sustainable, and cost-effective.”

Lordos’ team has built and demonstrated a six-legged WORMS robot. Last week, they presented their results at IEEE’s Aerospace Conference, where they also received the conference’s Best Paper Award.

MIT team members include Michael J. Brown, Kir Latyshev, Aileen Liao, Sharmi Shah, Cesar Meza, Brooke Bensche, Cynthia Cao, Yang Chen, Alex S. Miller, Aditya Mehrotra, Jacob Rodriguez, Anna Mokkapati, Tomas Cantu, Katherina Sapozhnikov, Jessica Rutledge, David Trumper, Sangbae Kim, Olivier de Weck, Jeffrey Hoffman, along with Aleks Siemenn, Cormac O’Neill, Diego Rivero, Fiona Lin, Hanfei Cui, Isabella Golemme, John Zhang, Jolie Bercow, Prajwal Mahesh, Stephanie Howe, and Zeyad Al Awwad, as well as Chiara Rissola of Carnegie Mellon University and Wendell Chun of the University of Denver.

Animal instincts

WORMS was conceived in 2022 as an answer to NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge — an annual competition for university students to design, develop, and demonstrate a game-changing idea. In 2022, NASA challenged students to develop robotic systems that can move across extreme terrain, without the use of wheels.

A team from MIT’s Space Resources Workshop took up the challenge, aiming specifically for a lunar robot design that could navigate the extreme terrain of the moon’s South Pole — a landscape that is marked by thick, fluffy dust; steep, rocky slopes; and deep lava tubes. The environment also hosts “permanently shadowed” regions that could contain frozen water, which, if accessible, would be essential for sustaining astronauts.

As they mulled over ways to navigate the moon’s polar terrain, the students took inspiration from animals. In their initial brainstorming, they noted certain animals could conceptually be suited to certain missions: A spider could drop down and explore a lava tube, a line of elephants could carry heavy equipment while supporting each other down a steep slope, and a goat, tethered to an ox, could help lead the larger animal up the side of a hill as it transports an array of solar panels.

“As we were thinking of these animal inspirations, we realized that one of the simplest animals, the worm, makes similar movements as an arm, or a leg, or a backbone, or a tail,” says deputy team leader and AeroAstro graduate student Michael Brown. “And then the lightbulb went off: We could build all these animal-inspired robots using worm-like appendages.'”

Snap on, snap off

Lordos, who is of Greek descent, helped coin WORMS, and chose the letter “O” to stand for “oligomeric,” which in Greek signifies “a few parts.”

“Our idea was that, with just a few parts, combined in different ways, you could mix and match and get all these different robots,” says AeroAstro undergraduate Brooke Bensche.

The system’s main parts include the appendage, or worm, which can be attached to a body, or chassis, via a “universal interface block” that snaps the two parts together through a twist-and-lock mechanism. The parts can be disconnected with a small tool that releases the block’s spring-loaded pins.

Appendages and bodies can also snap into accessories such as a “shoe,” which the team engineered in the shape of a wok, and a LiDAR system that can map the surroundings to help a robot navigate.

“In future iterations we hope to add more snap-on sensors and tools, such as winches, balance sensors, and drills,” says AeroAstro undergraduate Jacob Rodriguez.

The team developed software that can be tailored to coordinate multiple appendages. As a proof of concept, the team built a six-legged robot about the size of a go-cart. In the lab, they showed that once assembled, the robot’s independent limbs worked to walk over level ground. The team also showed that they could quickly assemble and disassemble the robot in the field, on a desert site in California.

In its first generation, each WORMS appendage measures about 1 meter long and weighs about 20 pounds. In the moon’s gravity, which is about one-sixth that of Earth’s, each limb would weigh about 3 pounds, which an astronaut could easily handle to build or disassemble a robot in the field. The team has planned out the specs for a larger generation with longer and slightly heavier appendages. These bigger parts could be snapped together to build “pack” bots, capable of transporting heavy payloads.

“There are many buzz words that are used to describe effective systems for future space exploration: modular, reconfigurable, adaptable, flexible, cross-cutting, et cetera,” says Kevin Kempton, an engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, who served as a judge for the 2022 BIG Idea Challenge. “The MIT WORMS concept incorporates all these qualities and more.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, MIT, the Massachusetts Space Grant, the National Science Foundation, and the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation.

Video: https://youtu.be/U72lmSXEVkM

Massive stars race through their lifecycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers. Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, resulting in their characteristic halos of gas and dust. The star WR 124 is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has shed 10 Suns’ worth of material — so far. As the ejected gas moves away from the star and cools, cosmic dust forms and glows in the infrared light detectable by Webb.

The origin of cosmic dust that can survive a supernova blast and contribute to the universe’s overall “dust budget” is of great interest to astronomers for multiple reasons. Dust is integral to the workings of the universe: It shelters forming stars, gathers together to help form planets, and serves as a platform for molecules to form and clump together — including the building blocks of life on Earth. Despite the many essential roles that dust plays, there is still more dust in the universe than astronomers’ current dust-formation theories can explain. The universe is operating with a dust budget surplus.

Webb opens up new possibilities for studying details in cosmic dust, which is best observed in infrared wavelengths of light. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) balances the brightness of WR 124’s stellar core and the knotty details in the fainter surrounding gas. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the clumpy structure of the gas and dust nebula of the ejected material now surrounding the star. Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget. Now those questions can be investigated with real data.

Stars like WR 124 also serve as an analog to help astronomers understand a crucial period in the early history of the universe. Similar dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged in their cores — elements that are now common in the current era, including on Earth.

Webb’s detailed image of WR 124 preserves forever a brief, turbulent time of transformation, and promises future discoveries that will reveal the long-shrouded mysteries of cosmic dust.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge carried out a study in a tech consultancy firm using two different robot wellbeing coaches, where 26 employees participated in weekly robot-led wellbeing sessions for four weeks. Although the robots had identical voices, facial expressions, and scripts for the sessions, the robots’ physical appearance affected how participants interacted with it.

Participants who did their wellbeing exercises with a toy-like robot said that they felt more of a connection with their ‘coach’ than participants who worked with a humanoid-like robot. The researchers say that perception of robots is affected by popular culture, where the only limit on what robots can do is the imagination. When faced with a robot in the real world however, it often does not live up to expectations.

Since the toy-like robot looks simpler, participants may have had lower expectations and ended up finding the robot easier to talk connect with. Participants who worked with the humanoid robot found that their expectations didn’t match reality, since the robot was not capable of having interactive conversations.

Despite the differences between expectations and reality, the researchers say that their study shows that robots can be a useful tool to promote mental wellbeing in the workplace. The results will be reported today (15 March) at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Stockholm.

The World Health Organization recommends that employers take action to promote and protect mental wellbeing at work, but the implementation of wellbeing practices is often limited by a lack of resources and personnel. Robots have shown some early promise for helping address this gap, but most studies on robots and wellbeing have been conducted in a laboratory setting.

“We wanted to take the robots out of the lab and study how they might be useful in the real world,” said Dr Micol Spitale, the paper’s first author.

The researchers collaborated with local technology company Cambridge Consultants to design and implement a workplace wellbeing programme using robots. Over the course of four weeks, employees were guided through four different wellbeing exercises by one of two robots: either the QTRobot (QT) or the Misty II robot (Misty).

The QT is a childlike humanoid robot and roughly 90cm tall, while Misty is a 36cm tall toy-like robot. Both robots have screen faces that can be programmed with different facial expressions.

“We interviewed different wellbeing coaches and then we programmed our robots to have a coach-like personality, with high openness and conscientiousness,” said co-author Minja Axelsson. “The robots were programmed to have the same personality, the same facial expressions and the same voice, so the only difference between them was the physical robot form.”

Participants in the experiment were guided through different positive psychology exercises by a robot in an office meeting room. Each session started with the robot asking participants to recall a positive experience or describe something in their lives they were grateful for, and the robot would ask follow-up questions. After the sessions, participants were asked to assess the robot with a questionnaire and an interview. Participants did one session per week for four weeks, and worked with the same robot for each session.

Participants who worked with the toy-like Misty robot reported that they had a better working connection with the robot than participants who worked with the child-like QT robot. Participants also had a more positive perception of Misty overall.

“It could be that since the Misty robot is more toy-like, it matched their expectations,” said Spitale. “But since QT is more humanoid, they expected it to behave like a human, which may be why participants who worked with QT were slightly underwhelmed.”

“The most common response we had from participants was that their expectations of the robot didn’t match with reality,” said Professor Hatice Gunes from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who led the research. “We programmed the robots with a script, but participants were hoping there would be more interactivity. It’s incredibly difficult to create a robot that’s capable of natural conversation. New developments in large language models could really be beneficial in this respect.”

“Our perceptions of how robots should look or behave might be holding back the uptake of robotics in areas where they can be useful,” said Axelsson.

Although the robots used in the experiment are not as advanced as C-3PO or other fictional robots, participants still said they found the wellbeing exercises helpful, and that they were open to the idea of talking to a robot in future.

“The robot can serve as a physical reminder to commit to the practice of wellbeing exercises,” said Gunes. “And just saying things out loud, even to a robot, can be helpful when you’re trying to improve mental wellbeing.”

The team is now working to enhance the robot coaches’ responsiveness during the coaching practices and interactions.

The research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Hatice Gunes is a Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Three research teams led by Professor Hyung Joon Cha of the Chemical Engineering Department at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Professor Yun Kee Jo of the School of Convergence at Kyungpook National University (KNU), and Professor Sang Ho Jun of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Korea University Anam Hospital together developed an osteogenic barrier coating material for dental implants that prevents the invasion of soft tissue cells, attracts osteo-progenitor cells including bone stem cells, and sustainably releases the loaded bone morphogenetic protein-2 (BMP-2), significantly facilitating bone regeneration.

GBR is widely used in dental implant placement. It maintains the space for bones to grow and prevents cells other than osteogenic cells, such as fibroblasts, from populating the bone defect sites, allowing the bone to grow without interference by non-osteogenic cells. However, the GBR approach is still less likely to be successful and requires longer treatment time for those patients with insufficient bone quantity and quality. Depending on the configurations of defect sites, preventing the invasion of the non-osteogenic cells by using barrier membranes alone is not enough to significantly facilitate the bone regeneration.

The joint research team first loaded BMP-2 on top of the bioengineered material where RGD peptide, cell recognitive motif that is capable of attracting cells, is fused with mussel adhesive protein (MAP) that maintains strong adhesiveness in a wet environment. The team then coated the titanium mesh (Ti-mesh) membrane with it. According to the research findings, the coated barrier membrane exhibited cell occlusivity where fibroblasts could not permeate the membrane. The team also found that it induced a high level of bone differentiation in a short period of time inside the membrane by means of high growth of mesenchymal stem cells and release of BMP-2.

Application of the developed MAP-based barrier coating for guided bone regeneration to a titanium membrane in a rat calvarial defect model showed that the coating roughly doubled the speed of bone tissue regeneration.

Professor Hyung Joon Cha who led the research said, “This research was conducted based on long-term research cooperation of the joint research team in the area of bone regeneration for implant placement. Its findings revealed the possibility of improving the success rate of implant treatment regardless of the bone condition.” He added that the research findings could also be applied to regenerate a variety of hard tissues.

The research findings were published in the online edition of the Bioengineering & Translational Medicine, a distinguished journal in the field of bioengineering and regenerative medicine. The study was conducted as a part of the Dentistry Technology R&D Project under the Korea Health Technology R&D Project funded by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, the High Value-added Food Technology Development Program funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs, and the BK21 Four Program by the National Research Foundation of Korea.