Inspiration can hit anytime, anywhere—and come from just about anything. “I was walking my dog and watching a squirrel jump from tree branch to tree branch,” says David Saldaña, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Lehigh University. “I started thinking about how quickly the animal has to adapt to the different properties of each branch and to the forces generated by their movement. And that’s when the idea hit me—how could we get robots, especially aerial robots, to adapt like that?” Saldaña, who leads the SwarmsLab, recently received nearly $600,000 in funding through the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program to answer that question. His research will explore how to expand the capabilities of aerial robots so they can manipulate and transport flexible objects such as cables, rods, hoses, and plastic sheets. Potential applications could range from construction and disaster response to industrial automation.   

Scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory and New Jersey Institute of Technology produced the finest images of the Sun’s corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new ‘coronal adaptive optics’ system that removes blur from images caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. Their ground-breaking results were recently published in Nature Astronomy and pave the way for deeper insight into coronal heating, solar eruptions, and space weather, and open an opportunity for new discoveries in the Sun’s atmosphere.

Scientists create a floss pick that samples cortisol within saliva as a marker of stress and quantifies it with a built-in electrode. The system uses a polymer casting technology that can be adapted to capture a wide a range of markers, such as estrogen for tracking fertility, or glucose for tracking diabetes. Ease of use allows monitoring to be incorporated into many areas of treatment