The affected proteins are known as actins, which are highly abundant and have multiple roles that include helping every cell unite its contents, maintain its shape, divide and migrate. Actins assemble into thread-like filaments to do certain work inside cells.

Researchers found that two toxins produced by the Vibrio genus of bacteria cause actins to start joining together into these filaments — which could be thought of as cellular highways on which cargo is delivered — at the wrong location inside cells, and headed in the wrong direction.

“Growing in the wrong direction is a totally new function that was not previously known and was not thought to be possible for actin filaments inside the cell,” said senior author Dmitri Kudryashov, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. “A large fraction of actin in the cell is consumed in formation of the ‘highways’ where they are not needed, so the cell resources are wasted and cannot be used to satisfy the cell’s basic needs.”

The research is published today (Nov. 18, 2022) in the journal Science Advances.

These disruptive toxins are called VopF and VopL, and are produced by two strains of Vibrio bacteria living in seawater: V. cholerae and V. parahaemolyticus, both of which can contaminate oysters and other shellfish that, when eaten raw, make people sick.

In this study, the research team zeroed in on describing the unexpected cellular activities rather than any further implications, such as how the hijacking relates to bacterial infection.

“We are looking at the interference at the molecular level — we have not focused here on how this cell function might affect humans,” said first and co-corresponding author Elena Kudryashova, a research scientist in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

“From a practical standpoint, this tells us more about these pathogens, and knowing your enemy helps you fight your enemy,” she said. “But finding something that we didn’t know was possible — for actin to behave in such a way inside the cell — raises new questions about whether this function might actually be needed, or could come about in some other way.”

Until now, actins have been known to assemble each filament in one way, originating from what is known as its pointed end and directed toward what is called the barbed end of the structure. Because they are limited in number, the actins disassemble as needed from the pointed end and are recycled to maintain directional activity toward the barbed end — and then these actin filaments perform functions, such as cell migration, contraction or division, as dictated by what the cell commands.

When the VopF and VopL toxins enter a cell, however, they attract actin molecules to start a new filament and cause the filaments to start assembling in this spot, which leads them to elongate in the direction of the pointed end — a reversal of their usual elongation direction.

“The toxins start making these actin filament highways in the wrong place, building something that is useless for the cell, and the cell doesn’t know how to deal with it,” Kudryashov said.

This actin interference was observed using imaging of live cells containing individual toxin molecules. Though they don’t yet know all the consequences of this hijacking activity, the researchers said the results could include seepage of nutrients through damaged intestinal walls — which would provide food for the infectious bacteria waiting outside.

“Killing cells is not always necessary — disrupting cells’ barrier function can also be beneficial to pathogens,” Kudryashova said.

And that’s why the scientists want to learn more — whether other molecules can force actins to assemble “roads to nowhere,” and whether that strange filament formation might even be a beneficial mechanism under a different set of circumstances.

“It’s quite possible that our own cells are doing this on some occasion, but we don’t know because actin has so many functions and not all of them are yet well understood,” Kudryashov said.

The Ohio State team collaborated with co-authors Ankita, Heidi Ulrichs and Shashank Shekhar of Emory University.

This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

“The brain is very busy when we sleep, repeating what we have learned during the day,” said Maxim Bazhenov, PhD, professor of medicine and a sleep researcher at University of California San Diego School of Medicine. “Sleep helps reorganize memories and presents them in the most efficient way.”

In previous published work, Bazhenov and colleagues have reported how sleep builds rational memory, the ability to remember arbitrary or indirect associations between objects, people or events, and protects against forgetting old memories.

Artificial neural networks leverage the architecture of the human brain to improve numerous technologies and systems, from basic science and medicine to finance and social media. In some ways, they have achieved superhuman performance, such as computational speed, but they fail in one key aspect: When artificial neural networks learn sequentially, new information overwrites previous information, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting.

“In contrast, the human brain learns continuously and incorporates new data into existing knowledge,” said Bazhenov, “and it typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation.”

Writing in the November 18, 2022 issue of PLOS Computational Biology, senior author Bazhenov and colleagues discuss how biological models may help mitigate the threat of catastrophic forgetting in artificial neural networks, boosting their utility across a spectrum of research interests.

The scientists used spiking neural networks that artificially mimic natural neural systems: Instead of information being communicated continuously, it is transmitted as discrete events (spikes) at certain time points.

They found that when the spiking networks were trained on a new task, but with occasional off-line periods that mimicked sleep, catastrophic forgetting was mitigated. Like the human brain, said the study authors, “sleep” for the networks allowed them to replay old memories without explicitly using old training data.

Memories are represented in the human brain by patterns of synaptic weight — the strength or amplitude of a connection between two neurons.

“When we learn new information,” said Bazhenov, “neurons fire in specific order and this increases synapses between them. During sleep, the spiking patterns learned during our awake state are repeated spontaneously. It’s called reactivation or replay.

“Synaptic plasticity, the capacity to be altered or molded, is still in place during sleep and it can further enhance synaptic weight patterns that represent the memory, helping to prevent forgetting or to enable transfer of knowledge from old to new tasks.”

When Bazhenov and colleagues applied this approach to artificial neural networks, they found that it helped the networks avoid catastrophic forgetting.

“It meant that these networks could learn continuously, like humans or animals. Understanding how human brain processes information during sleep can help to augment memory in human subjects. Augmenting sleep rhythms can lead to better memory.

“In other projects, we use computer models to develop optimal strategies to apply stimulation during sleep, such as auditory tones, that enhance sleep rhythms and improve learning. This may be particularly important when memory is non-optimal, such as when memory declines in aging or in some conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.”

Co-authors include: Ryan Golden and Jean Erik Delanois, both at UC San Diego; and Pavel Sanda, Institute of Computer Science of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

About 443 million years ago, life on Earth was undergoing the Late Ordovician mass extinction, or LOME, which eliminated about 85% of marine species. Scientists have long studied this mass extinction and continue to investigate its possible causes, such as reduced habitat loss in a rapidly cooling world or persistent low-oxygen conditions in the oceans.

By measuring isotopes of the element thallium — which shows special sensitivity to changes in oxygen in the ancient marine environment — the research team found that previously documented patterns of this mass extinction coincided with an initial rapid decrease in marine oxygen levels followed by a rapid increase in oxygen. Their work is published online in the journal Science Advances.

“Paleontologists have noted that there were several groups of organisms, such as graptolites and brachiopods, that started to decline very early in this mass extinction interval, but we didn’t really have any good evidence of an environmental or climate signature to tie that early decline of these groups to a particular mechanism,” said co-author Seth Young, an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science. “This paper can directly link that early phase of extinction to changes in oxygen. We see a marked change in thallium isotopes at the same time these organisms start their steady decline into the main phase of the mass extinction event.”

That decrease in oxygen was immediately followed by an increase. This rapid shift in oxygen coincided with the traditional first die-off of mass extinction and major ice sheet growth over the ancient South Pole.

“Turbulence in oxygen levels in oceanic waters is really what seems to have been pretty problematic for organisms that were living in the Late Ordovician at that time, which might have been adapted to cope with low oxygen conditions initially or vice versa,” Young said. “The fact that oxygen levels in the oceans next to the continents switching back and forth over short geologic time scales (a few hundred thousand years) really did seem to play havoc with these marine ecosystems.”

The Late Ordovician extinction was one of five major mass extinctions in Earth’s history and the only one scientists are confident took place in what are called “icehouse” conditions, in which widespread ice sheets are present on Earth’s surface. Earth is currently experiencing icehouse conditions and loss of biodiversity, which makes this ancient mass extinction an important analog for present-day conditions, along with trying to understand Earth’s future as our climate continues to warm and ice sheets recede.

Previous research into environmental conditions surrounding the LOME used evidence found in limestones from more oxygenated settings, but this study used shales that were deposited in deeper, oxygen-poor water, which record different geochemical signatures, allowing the researchers to make conclusions about global marine conditions, rather than for local conditions.

“The discovery of the initial expansion of low-oxygen conditions on a global level and the coincidence with the early phases of decline in marine animals helps paint a clearer picture of what was happening with this extinction event,” said lead author Nevin Kozik, a visiting assistant professor at Occidental College and former FSU doctoral student.

Co-authors on this paper were doctoral student Sean Newby and associate professor Jeremy Owens of FSU; former FSU postdoctoral scholar and current assistant professor at the College of Charleston Theodore Them; Mu Liu and Daizhao Chen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Emma Hammarlund of Lund University; and David Bond of the University of Hull.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society, the Sloan Research Foundation and the Geological Society of America.

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Materials provided by Florida State University. Original written by Bill Wellock. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“Our findings reinforce the need for a precision medicine approach to preventing MS in these vulnerable populations,” said lead researcher Kathleen Rodgers, PhD, associate director of translational neuroscience at the Center for Innovation in Brain Science.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an unpredictable autoimmune neurological disorder that affects the central nervous system and leads to severe physical and cognitive disability. It is estimated that nearly 1 million adults in the U.S. and more than 2.8 million worldwide are living with MS.

For people with Type 2 diabetes, there is mounting evidence linking metabolic disorders and MS through a common driver of increased autoimmunity. This brings into question the impact of anti-hyperglycemic therapeutics used to treat Type 2 diabetes, including insulin, on the incidence of MS.

“Previous research has shown a neuroprotective effect of anti-hyperglycemic medications in Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias,” Dr. Rodgers said. “For MS, we wanted to further examine age and sex differences, particularly among men and women under 45 with Type 2 diabetes.”

They found that men older than 45 years old had a slightly significant increase of MS risk and women older than 45 years exhibited a significant increase in MS incidence after anti-hyperglycemic exposure. In addition to age differences, the risk analysis by drug class showed that exposure to insulin in patients older than 45 years old was associated with a greater increased risk compared with other therapies.

In patients younger than 45, anti-hyperglycemic exposure was protective against the development of MS.

The study utilized a U.S.-based insurance claims database of 151 million participants to identify more than 5 million patients with a diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes and either early-onset or late-onset MS. Researchers segmented the data by age — patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes prior to or after age 45 — and sex to decode the factors driving MS risk in both populations, especially in women over 45 years of age.

The paper, “Age and sex differences on anti-hyperglycemic medication exposure and risk of newly diagnosed multiple sclerosis in propensity score-matched type 2 diabetics,” was published recently in the journal Heliyon.

Co-authors from the Center for Innovation in Brian Science include Roberta Diaz Brinton, PhD, director and Regents Professor; Francesca Vitali, PhD, research assistant professor of neurology; Georgina Torrandell-Haro, doctoral candidate and graduate research assistant; and Gregory Branigan, PhD, third-year medical student in the UArizona College of Medicine — Tucson’s MD-PhD program.

This research was supported in part by the National Institute on Aging (P01AG026572, T32AG061897, R37AG053589) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R25NS107185), both divisions of the National Institutes of Health.

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The Penn State-led team published their results today (Nov. 18) in Science Advances.

To run the experiment, researchers altered the wing length of anesthetized fruit flies, imitating an injury flying insects can sustain. They then suspended the flies in a virtual reality ring. Mimicking what flies would see when in flight, researchers played virtual imagery on tiny screens in the ring, causing the flies to move as if flying.

“We found flies compensate for their injuries by flapping the damaged wing harder and reducing the speed of the healthy one,” said corresponding author Jean-Michel Mongeau, Penn State assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “They accomplish this by modulating signals in their nervous system, allowing them to fine-tune their flight even after an injury.”

By flapping their damaged wing harder, fruit flies exchange some performance — which lowers only slightly — to maintain stability by actively increasing damping.

“If you drive on a paved road, friction is maintained between the tires and the surface, and the car is stable,” Mongeau said, comparing damping to friction. “But on an icy road, there is decreased friction between the road and tires, causing instability. In this case, a fruit fly, as the driver, actively increases damping with its nervous system in an attempt to increase stability.”

Co-author Bo Cheng, Penn State Kenneth K. and Olivia J. Kuo Early Career Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, noted that stability is more important than power for flight performance.

“Under wing damage, both performance and stability would typically suffer; however, flies use an ‘internal knob’ that increases damping to maintain the desired stability, even if that leads to further decreases in performance,” Cheng said. “In fact, it has been shown that it is indeed the stability, instead of the required power, that limits maneuverability in flies.”

The researchers’ work suggests that fruit flies, with just 200,000 neurons compared to 100 billion in humans, employ a sophisticated, flexible motor control system, allowing them to adapt and survive after an injury.

“The complexity we’ve uncovered here in flies is unmatched by any existing engineering systems; the sophistication of the fly is more complex than existing flying robots,” Mongeau said. “We are still far away on the engineering side of trying to replicate what we see in nature, and this is just another example of just how far we have to go.”

With increasingly complex environments, engineers are challenged to design robots that can adapt quickly to faults or mishaps.

“Flying insects can inspire the design of flapping robots and drones that can respond intelligently to physical damage and maintain operations,” said co-author Wael Salem, Penn State doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering. “For example, designing a drone that can compensate for a broken motor in flight, or a legged robot that that can rely on its other legs when one gives out.”

To study the mechanism by which flies compensate for wing damage in flight, collaborators at the University of Colorado Boulder created a robot prototype of a mechanical wing, close in size and function to that of a fruit fly. Researchers snipped the mechanical wing, replicating the Penn State experiments, and tested the interactions between the wings and the air.

“With a mathematical model only, we need to make simplifying assumptions about the structure of the wing, the motion of the wing and the wing-air interactions to make our computations tractable,” said co-author Kaushik Jayaram, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. “But with a physical model, our robot prototype interacts with the natural world much like a fly would, subject to the laws of physics. Thus, this setup captures the intricacies of the complex wing-air interactions that we do not yet fully understand.”

In addition to Mongeau, Cheng, Salem and Jayaram, the co-authors include Benjamin Cellini, Penn State Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Heiko Kabutz and Hari Krishna Hari Prasad, University of Colorado Boulder.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship supported this work.

One issue holding back these next-generation electronics is the heat they generate when in use. Conventional electronics typically reach about 80 degrees Celsius, but the materials in 2D devices are packed so densely in such a small area that the devices can become twice as hot. This temperature increase can damage the device.

This problem is compounded by the fact that scientists don’t have a good understanding of how 2D materials expand when temperatures rise. Because the materials are so thin and optically transparent, their thermal expansion coefficient (TEC) — the tendency for the material to expand when temperatures increase — is nearly impossible to measure using standard approaches.

“When people measure the thermal expansion coefficient for some bulk material, they use a scientific ruler or a microscope because with a bulk material, you have the sensitivity to measure them. The challenge with a 2D material is that we cannot really see them, so we need to turn to another type of ruler to measure the TEC,” says Yang Zhong, a graduate student in mechanical engineering.

Zhong is co-lead author of a research paper that demonstrates just such a “ruler.” Rather than directly measuring how the material expands, they use laser light to track vibrations of the atoms that comprise the material. Taking measurements of one 2D material on three different surfaces, or substrates, allows them to accurately extract its thermal expansion coefficient.

The new study shows that this method is highly accurate, achieving results that match theoretical calculations. The approach confirms that the TECs of 2D materials fall into a much narrower range than previously thought. This information could help engineers design next-generation electronics.

“By confirming this narrower physical range, we give engineers a lot of material flexibility for choosing the bottom substrate when they are designing a device. They don’t need to devise a new bottom substrate just to mitigate thermal stress. We believe this has very important implications for the electronic device and packaging community,” says co-lead author and former mechanical engineering graduate student Lenan Zhang SM ’18, PhD ’22, who is now a research scientist.

Co-authors include senior author Evelyn N. Wang, the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as others from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. The research is published in Science Advances.

Measuring vibrations

Because 2D materials are so small — perhaps just a few microns in size — standard tools aren’t sensitive enough to directly measure their expansion. Plus, the materials are so thin they must be bonded to a substrate such as silicon or copper. If the 2D material and its substrate have different TECs, they will expand differently when temperatures increase, which causes thermal stress.

For instance, if a 2D material is bonded to a substrate with a higher TEC, when the device is heated the substrate will expand more than the 2D material, which stretches it. This makes it difficult to measure the actual TEC of a 2D material since the substrate affects its expansion.

The researchers overcame these problems by focusing on the atoms that make up the 2D material. When a material is heated, its atoms vibrate at a lower frequency and move farther apart, which causes the material to expand. They measure these vibrations using a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy, which involves hitting the material with a laser. The vibrating atoms scatter the laser’s light, and this interaction can be used to detect their vibrational frequency.

But as the substrate expands or compresses, it impacts how the 2D material’s atoms vibrate. The researchers needed to decouple this substrate effect to zero in on the material’s intrinsic properties. They did this by measuring the vibrational frequency of the same 2D material on three different substrates: copper, which has a high TEC; fused silica, which has a low TEC; and a silicon substrate dotted with tiny holes. Because the 2D material hovers above the holes on the latter substrate, they can perform measurements on these tiny areas of freestanding material.

The researchers then placed each substrate on a thermal stage to precisely control the temperature, heated each sample, and performed micro-Raman spectroscopy.

“By performing Raman measurements on the three samples, we can extract something called the temperature coefficient that is substrate dependent. Using these three different substrates, and knowing the TECs of the fused silica and the copper, we can extract the intrinsic TEC of the 2D material,” Zhong explains.

A curious result

They performed this analysis on several 2D materials and found that they all matched theoretical calculations. But the researchers saw something they didn’t expect: 2D materials fell into a hierarchy based on the elements that comprise them. For instance, a 2D material that contains molybdenum always has a greater TEC than one which contains tungsten.

The researchers dug deeper and learned that this hierarchy is caused by a fundamental atomic property known as electronegativity. Electronegativity describes the tendency for atoms to pull or extract electrons when they bond. It is listed on the periodic table for each element.

They found that the larger the difference between electronegativities of elements that form a 2D material, the lower the material’s thermal expansion coefficient will be. An engineer could use this method to quickly estimate the TEC for any 2D material, rather than relying on complex calculations that typically must be crunched by a supercomputer, says Zhong.

“An engineer can just search the periodic table, get the electronegativities of the corresponding materials, plug them into our correlation equation and within a minute they can have a reasonably good estimation of the TEC. This is very promising for rapid materials selection for engineering applications,” Zhang says.

Moving forward, the researchers want to apply their methodology to many more 2D materials, perhaps building a database of TECs. They also want to use micro-Raman spectroscopy to measure TECs of heterogenous materials, which combine multiple 2D materials. And they hope to learn the underlying reasons thermal expansion of 2D materials is different from that of bulk materials.

This work is funded, in part, by the Centers for Mechanical Engineering Research and Education at MIT and Southern University of Science and Technology, the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Army Research Office.

Muhammad Rahman, an assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is employing Rice’s unique flash Joule heating process to convert asphaltenes instantly into turbostratic (loosely aligned) graphene and mix it into composites for thermal, anti-corrosion and 3D-printing applications.

The process makes good use of material otherwise burned for reuse as fuel or discarded into tailing ponds and landfills. Using at least some of the world’s reserve of more than 1 trillion barrels of asphaltene as a feedstock for graphene would be good for the environment as well.

“Asphaltene is a big headache for the oil industry, and I think there will be a lot of interest in this,” said Rahman, who characterized the process as both a scalable and sustainable way to reduce carbon emissions from burning asphaltene.

Rahman is a lead corresponding author of the paper in Science Advances co-led by Rice chemist James Tour, whose lab developed flash Joule heating, materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and Md Golam Kibria, an assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Asphaltenes are 70% to 80% carbon already. The Rice lab combines it with about 20% of carbon black to add conductivity and flashes it with a jolt of electricity, turning it into graphene in less than a second. Other elements in the feedstock, including hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, are vented away as gases.

“We try to keep the carbon black content as low as possible because we want to maximize the utilization of asphaltene,” Rahman said.

“The government has been putting pressure on the petroleum industries to take care of this,” said Rice graduate student and co-lead author M.A.S.R. Saadi. “There are billions of barrels of asphaltene available, so we began working on this project primarily to see if we could make carbon fiber. That led us to think maybe we should try making graphene with flash Joule heating.”

Assured that Tour’s process worked as well on asphaltene as it did on various other feedstocks, including plastic, electronic waste, tires, coal fly ash and even car parts, the researchers set about making things with their graphene.

Saadi, who works with Rahman and Ajayan, mixed the graphene into composites, and then into polymer inks bound for 3D printers. “We’ve optimized the ink rheology to show that it is printable,” he said, noting the inks have no more than 10% of graphene mixed in. Mechanical testing of printed objects is forthcoming, he said.

Rice graduate student Paul Advincula, a member of the Tour lab, is co-lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Rice graduate students Md Shajedul Hoque Thakur, Ali Khater, Jacob Beckham and Minghe Lou, undergraduate Aasha Zinke and postdoctoral researcher Soumyabrata Roy; research fellow Shabab Saad, alumnus Ali Shayesteh Zeraati, graduate student Shariful Kibria Nabil and postdoctoral associate Md Abdullah Al Bari of the University of Calgary; graduate student Sravani Bheemasetti and Venkataramana Gadhamshetty, an associate professor, at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and its 2D Materials of Biofilm Engineering Science and Technology Center; and research assistant Yiwen Zheng and Aniruddh Vashisth, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, of the University of Washington.

The research was funded by the Alberta Innovates for Carbon Fiber Grand Challenge programs, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-19-1-0296), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (W912HZ-21-2-0050) and the National Science Foundation (1849206, 1920954).

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Materials provided by Rice University. Original written by Mike Williams. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Now, Scripps Research scientists have identified a class of drugs that might break this link. In animal models of PTSD, the drug decreased alcohol preference and intake as well as other behaviors associated with PTSD, including aggression, excessive fear and hyperarousal. The findings were published in Neuropsychopharmacology on November 18, 2022.

“The overlap of PTSD and AUD is a major problem,” says co-senior author Marisa Roberto, PhD, the Schimmel Family Chair of Molecular Medicine and a professor of Neuroscience at Scripps Research. “We’ve shown that there is potential to alleviate both disorders by targeting brain pathways that they share.”

According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD, about 12 million adults in the U.S. have PTSD during a given year. Men and women who have PTSD at any point in their lives are more than twice as likely as other people to have alcohol abuse or dependence. Moreover, people who suffer from both PTSD and AUD are at a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and extreme aggression compared to those with either disorder alone.

Researchers have known that FKBP5, a protein found in the brain, plays a role in both disorders. The FKBP5 gene is responsible for lifting the brakes on the brain’s stress response pathways, and its genetic variants are associated with increased risk of AUD and PTSD. In animals, higher levels of FKBP5 have been linked to both stress exposure and alcohol exposure.

In the new study, co-first authors Bryan Cruz, PhD, and Valentina Vozella, PhD, and additional colleagues studied rats with symptoms similar to comorbid human PTSD and AUD. Like people with the disorders, the animals drink more alcohol than average, are irritable and fearful, and exhibit anxiety and sleep disturbances, the team showed. The researchers treated the animals with either of two drugs known to target FKBP5: benztropine (Cogentin®), which is FDA-approved to treat Parkinson’s disease and targets a number of molecules in the brain, or SAFit2, an experimental compound designed specifically for blocking FKBP5.

They found that benztropine reduced alcohol preference in stressed male and female animals, as well as aggressive behavior in the females. SAFit2 reduced alcohol drinking in stressed males, and decreased levels of extreme fear in both male and females. Neither drug impacted sleep.

“The results may have varied between male and female animals because of reproductive hormones,” says Cruz. “There is new literature suggesting that the activity of these kinds of compounds varies in females throughout the estrous cycle.”

The team says that the fact that benztropine is already FDA-approved suggests the potential for repurposing it in people with PTSD.

“We think FKBP5 inhibitors might be useful in preventing AUD after the onset of PTSD,” adds co-senior author Eric Zorrilla, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine. “More work is needed to determine whether these compounds also can prevent the recurrent relapse that hampers recovery.”

Support for this study was provided by The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA027700, AA028879, AA013498, P60 AA006420, AA017447, AA021491, AA029841, AA015566, K99 AA026638 and T32 AA007456), the Schimmel Family Endowed Chair, and the Department of Defense (DoD).

“To date, swimming soft robots have not been able to swim faster than one body length per second, but marine animals — such as manta rays — are able to swim much faster, and much more efficiently,” says Jie Yin, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State. “We wanted to draw on the biomechanics of these animals to see if we could develop faster, more energy-efficient soft robots. The prototypes we’ve developed work exceptionally well.”

The researchers developed two types of butterfly bots. One was built specifically for speed, and was able to reach average speeds of 3.74 body lengths per second. A second was designed to be highly maneuverable, capable of making sharp turns to the right or left. This maneuverable prototype was able to reach speeds of 1.7 body lengths per second.

“Researchers who study aerodynamics and biomechanics use something called a Strouhal number to assess the energy efficiency of flying and swimming animals,” says Yinding Chi, first author of the paper and a recent Ph.D. graduate of NC State. “Peak propulsive efficiency occurs when an animal swims or flies with a Strouhal number of between 0.2 and 0.4. Both of our butterfly bots had Strouhal numbers in this range.”

The butterfly bots derive their swimming power from their wings, which are “bistable,” meaning the wings have two stable states. The wing is similar to a snap hair clip. A hair clip is stable until you apply a certain amount of energy (by bending it). When the amount of energy reaches critical point, the hair clip snaps into a different shape — which is also stable.

In the butterfly bots, the hair clip-inspired bistable wings are attached to a soft, silicone body. Users control the switch between the two stable states in the wings by pumping air into chambers inside the soft body. As those chambers inflate and deflate, the body bends up and down — forcing the wings to snap back and forth with it.

“Most previous attempts to develop flapping robots have focused on using motors to provide power directly to the wings,” Yin says. “Our approach uses bistable wings that are passively driven by moving the central body. This is an important distinction, because it allows for a simplified design, which lowers the weight.”

The faster butterfly bot has only one “drive unit” — the soft body — which controls both of its wings. This makes it very fast, but difficult to turn left or right. The maneuverable butterfly bot essentially has two drive units, which are connected side by side. This design allows users to manipulate the wings on both sides, or to “flap” only one wing, which is what enables it to make sharp turns.

“This work is an exciting proof of concept, but it has limitations,” Yin says. “Most obviously, the current prototypes are tethered by slender tubing, which is what we use to pump air into the central bodies. We’re currently working to develop an untethered, autonomous version.”

The paper, “Snapping for high-speed and high-efficient, butterfly stroke-like soft swimmer,” will be published Nov. 18 in the open-access journal Science Advances. The paper was co-authored by Yaoye Hong, a Ph.D. student at NC State; and by Yao Zhao and Yanbin Li, who are postdoctoral researchers at NC State. The work was done with support from the National Science Foundation under grants CMMI-2005374 and CMMI-2126072.

Video of the butterfly bots can be found at https://youtu.be/Pi-2pPDWC1w.

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Materials provided by North Carolina State University. Original written by Matt Shipman. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.