In creating a pair of new robots, Cornell University researchers cultivated an unlikely component, one found on the forest floor: fungal mycelia. By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts.

The team’s paper published in Science Robotics. The lead author is Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, and the paper’s senior author.

“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” Shepherd said. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”

Mycelia are the underground vegetative part of mushrooms. They have the ability to sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.

“Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” Mishra said. “If you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”

Two biohybrid robots were built: a soft robot shaped like a spider and a wheeled bot.

The robots completed three experiments. In the first, the robots walked and rolled, respectively, as a response to the natural continuous spikes in the mycelia’s signal. Then the researchers stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, which caused them to change their gaits, demonstrating mycelia’s ability to react to their environment. In the third scenario, the researchers were able to override the mycelia’s native signal entirely.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CROPPS Science and Technology Center; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture; and the NSF Signal in Soil program.

In a study published on July 31 in the journal Earth’s Future, scientists, including researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, revealed how heat waves, especially those occurring in Antarctica’s cold seasons, may impact the animals living there. The research illustrates how extreme weather events intensified by climate change could have profound implications for the continent’s fragile ecosystems.

In March 2022, the most intense heat wave ever recorded on Earth hit Antarctica, just as organisms in the southern region braced themselves for the long, harsh winter ahead. The extreme weather raised temperatures in parts of Antarctica to more than 70°F above average, melting glaciers and snow even in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of the planet’s coldest and driest regions.

As part of a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project in Antarctica, the research team found that the unexpected melt followed by a rapid refreeze likely disrupted the life cycles of many organisms and killed a large swath of some invertebrates in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

“It’s important that we pay attention to these signals, even if they’re coming from microscopic organisms in soils in a polar desert,” said Michael Gooseff, the paper’s senior author and professor in the Department of Civil, Environment and Architectural Engineering at CU Boulder. “They’re the early responders to changes that could cascade up to larger organisms, the landscape and even us, far away from Antarctica.”

When Gooseff arrived in Antarctica in November 2021, the continent looked much like it had for the past two decades. As a fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), Gooseff has led the LTER at the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a National Science Foundation-funded project, for the past decade. Nearly every Antarctic summer, he travels to the southern region to study its ecosystem and how organisms survive in extreme environmental conditions.

While most animals can’t tolerate the region’s dryness and cold, some microbes and invertebrates, including roundworms and water bears, thrive in this frozen desert. Water bears, or tardigrades, are tiny, eight-legged animals measuring 0.002 to 0.05 inches long. They can survive extreme conditions — as cold as -328°F and as hot as 300 °F — that would kill most other forms of life.

In 2022, all members of the polar expedition team left the continent in February, before the Antarctic summer ended. A month later, Antarctica experienced the most extreme heat wave on record, driven by an intense storm known as an atmospheric river, which transported moist air over long distances to the polar region.

The team’s sensors in the McMurdo Dry Valleys recorded air temperatures, which typically hover around -4°F in March, rising above freezing and exceeding the average by 45°F.

Satellite imagery and stream discharge measurements showed that the sudden warming wetted the valleys’ soil more than two months after the peak summer thaw, at a time when the land is typically dry.

In two days, after the heat wave passed, temperatures plummeted and the soil froze. This event happened during a critical transition period, when organisms hunker down and get ready for the dark, cold winter. Gooseff and his colleagues were curious about how animals in the valleys responded.

“These animals invest a significant amount of energy in preparing and shutting down for the winter,” said Gooseff. “When things start to warm up the following summer, they use energy to become active again. One of our major concerns with unusual weather events like this heat wave is that these animals might start using a lot more energy, thinking it’s summer, only to have to shut down again two days later. How many times can they go through that cycle before they exhaust their energy reserves?”

He and the team returned to Antarctica the following summer, in December 2022. They sampled the soil and compared organisms living in areas that became wet to those that stayed dry during the heat wave.

They observed a 50% decrease in the population of Scottnema, a common roundworm, in areas that got wet. Scottnema is adapted to extremely cold and dry climates.

“The heat wave made the environment appear warm enough for things to get wet, creating a false start to summer. Some of the biology responding to these temperatures might be seriously disrupted by this,” Gooseff said.

Rapid swings between extremes in weather can disproportionately impact sensitive species like Scottnema, but they may have far less impact on other animals, such as tardigrades. These creatures have a higher tolerance for moisture, allowing them to proliferate as the environment becomes wetter.

“Changes in which species are in the soil and how big the populations are can have a major impact on the ecosystem’s food web and nutrient cycling,” Gooseff said.

Previous research has shown Scottnema is responsible for about 10% of the carbon processed in the Dry Valleys’ soil ecosystem.

As climate change exacerbates extreme weather events in Antarctica, larger species are also being impacted. For example, in the summer of 2013, an unusual rainfall event along the Adélie Coast of East Antarctica killed all Adélie penguin chicks in the region. In July, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica climbed up to 50 °F above the usual winter average.

Gooseff and his team plan to continue documenting extreme weather events and their impacts on the Antarctic ecosystem.

What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica, Gooseff said.

“The loss of ice shelves has pretty dramatic impacts on the mass balance of our oceans, and it affects us even thousands of miles away.”

“We know of only three or four occurrences of similar gravitational lens configurations in the observable universe, which makes this find exciting, as it demonstrates the power of Webb and suggests maybe now we will find more of these,” said astronomer Guillaume Desprez of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a member of the team presenting the Webb results.

While this region has been observed previously with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the dusty red galaxy that forms the intriguing question-mark shape only came into view with Webb. This is a result of the wavelengths of light that Hubble detects getting trapped in cosmic dust, while longer wavelengths of infrared light are able to pass through and be detected by Webb’s instruments.

Astronomers used both telescopes to observe the galaxy cluster MACS-J0417.5-1154, which acts like a magnifying glass because the cluster is so massive it warps the fabric of space-time. This allows astronomers to see enhanced detail in much more distant galaxies behind the cluster. However, the same gravitational effects that magnify the galaxies also cause distortion, resulting in galaxies that appear smeared across the sky in arcs and even appear multiple times. These optical illusions in space are called gravitational lensing.

The red galaxy revealed by Webb, along with a spiral galaxy it is interacting with that was previously detected by Hubble, are being magnified and distorted in an unusual way, which requires a particular, rare alignment between the distant galaxies, the lens, and the observer — something astronomers call a hyperbolic umbilic gravitational lens. This accounts for the five images of the galaxy pair seen in Webb’s image, four of which trace the top of the question mark. The dot of the question mark is an unrelated galaxy that happens to be in the right place and space-time, from our perspective.

In addition to producing a case study of the Webb NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) instrument’s ability to detect star formation locations within a galaxy billions of light-years away, the research team also couldn’t resist highlighting the question mark shape. “This is just cool looking. Amazing images like this are why I got into astronomy when I was young,” said astronomer Marcin Sawicki of Saint Mary’s University, one of the lead researchers on the team.

“Knowing when, where, and how star formation occurs within galaxies is crucial to understanding how galaxies have evolved over the history of the universe,” said astronomer Vicente Estrada-Carpenter of Saint Mary’s University, who used both Hubble’s ultraviolet and Webb’s infrared data to show where new stars are forming in the galaxies. The results show that star formation is widespread in both. The spectral data also confirmed that the newfound dusty galaxy is located at the same distance as the face-on spiral galaxy, and they are likely beginning to interact.

“Both galaxies in the Question Mark Pair show active star formation in several compact regions, likely a result of gas from the two galaxies colliding,” said Estrada-Carpenter. “However, neither galaxy’s shape appears too disrupted, so we are probably seeing the beginning of their interaction with each other.”

“These galaxies, seen billions of years ago when star formation was at its peak, are similar to the mass that the Milky Way galaxy would have been at that time. Webb is allowing us to study what the teenage years of our own galaxy would have been like,” said Sawicki.

The Webb images and spectra in this research came from the Canadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey (CANUCS). The research paper is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While there is substantial research into developing interventions to repair injured tissue, scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis focused instead on developing, in mice, an immunotherapy to minimize the damage from traumatic spinal cord injury. Their findings show that immunotherapy can lessen such damage by protecting neurons at the injury site from being attacked by immune cells.

The study, published Sept. 4 in Nature, demonstrates success in mice given the immunotherapy and presents a novel approach with potential to help improve outcomes for people recovering from spinal cord injuries.

“Immune cells in the central nervous system have a reputation for being the bad guys that can harm the brain and spinal cord,” said senior author Jonathan Kipnis, PhD, the Alan A. and Edith L. Wolff Distinguished Professor of Pathology & Immunology and a BJC Investigator at WashU Medicine. “But our study shows that it’s possible to take advantage of immune cells’ neuroprotective function, while controlling their inherent detrimental abilities, to help in the recovery from central nervous system injury.”

Shortly after injury to the nervous system, immune cells flood the site. Among them is a mixture of activated T cells — a subset of immune cells — that either harm or protect the surrounding neurons. Wenqing Gao, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Pathology & Immunology and the study’s first author, analyzed T cells from the spinal cords of injured mice and performed a genetic analysis to decode their identities. Her goal was to separate the harmful from the protective T cells and create numerous copies of the beneficial cells with which to treat the injured mice.

But there was a catch, she found. The protective T cells that swoop into the injury site can mistakenly attack the body’s surrounding tissues when activated for too long, causing autoimmune disease. To improve the therapy’s safety, Gao modified the cells to shut off after a few days.

Mice given the modified T cells had better mobility than did the untreated mice. The researchers saw the biggest improvements when the mice were infused with T cells within a week of the injury. None of the mice receiving immunotherapy developed a destructive autoimmune reaction.

“There are no effective treatments for traumatic injuries to the central nervous system,” explained Gao. “We developed immunotherapy for such injuries by taking advantage of the protective immune cells that infiltrate the injury site and found that it dramatically improved mobility in mice.”

In collaboration with WashU Medicine’s Wilson Zachary Ray, MD, a spinal cord surgeon and the Henry G. & Edith R. Schwartz Professor of Neurosurgery, the researchers also looked every day for a week for T cells in the cerebral spinal fluid of patients with spinal cord injuries. They found a significant expansion of the T cells, confirming the feasibility of expanding protective T cells from such patients to generate the immunotherapy.

“Our future goal is to devise a clinical trial to test the therapy in people with such injuries, while expanding this work to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases,” Gao said.

Added Kipnis: “Although the initial trigger in neurodegenerative diseases is different, the subsequent death of neurons may very well be mediated by similar processes, opening an opportunity for adapting our engineered cells for use as a therapy in neurodegeneration.”

This work was supported by the BJC Investigators Program at WashU.