The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is proud to announce its participation in RobustifAI, a groundbreaking Horizon Europe research consortium dedicated to strengthening the reliability and robustness of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technologies. The project officially commenced on June 1, 2025, with a total budget of €9.3 million and a projected duration of 36 months.

Discover Horizon Europe’s LAFERIA project, dedicated to reintroducing landscape features in intensively farmed areas across the EU to support biodiversity and sustainable agriculture.

Currently, numerous biomimetic robots inspired by natural biological systems have been developed. However, creating soft robots with versatile locomotion modes remains a significant challenge. Snakes, as invertebrate reptiles, exhibit diverse and powerful locomotion abilities, including prey constriction, sidewinding, accordion locomotion, and winding climbing, making them a focus of robotics research. In this study, we present a snake-inspired soft robot with an initial coiling structure, fabricated using MXene-cellulose nanofiber ink printed on pre-expanded polyethylene film through direct ink writing technology. The controllable fabrication of initial coiling structure soft robot (ICSBot) has been achieved through theoretical calculations and finite element analysis to predict and analyze the initial structure of ICSBot, and programmable ICSBot has been designed and fabricated. This robot functions as a coiling gripper capable of grasping objects with complex shapes under near infrared light stimulation. Additionally, it demonstrates multi-modal crawling locomotion in various environments, including confined spaces, unstructured terrains, and both inside and outside tubes. These results offer a novel strategy for designing and fabricating coiling-structured soft robots and highlight their potential applications in smart and multifunctional robotics.

Researchers in the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) at the National University of Singapore and the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) have developed a hydrogel-based platform that extends the survival of patient-derived tumour tissues in the lab. The platform better replicates the tumour’s natural environment, allowing for more accurate evaluation of cancer drugs - particularly for peritoneal metastases, an advanced stage for abdominal and pelvic cancers. The study, published in Advanced Materials, could pave the way for more personalised and effective treatment strategies.

African scaly-tailed squirrels use their scaled tails to safely move across the smooth bark of trees in their native rainforest habitats. Researchers from Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have for the first time investigated the physics of these thorn-covered scales located on the underside of the squirrel tails through mathematical and physical models. Their findings could eventually enable agile and energy-efficient bionic robots and drones.

In this week’s issue of the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Prof. Joohoon Kang at Yonsei University and his team provide a comprehensive review that sheds light on how atomically thin 2D materials—especially those processed through solution-based methods—could offer scalable and cost-effective approaches for producing memristors, a type of memory device promising for in-memory and neuromorphic computing hardware.

The leading researcher, Prof. Joohoon Kang, commented: “Our work will serve as a milestone in solution-processed 2D memristor research—being the first review to extensively cover 2D memristors specifically fabricated using solution-based processing, from fundamental principles and materials production to device fabrication, switching mechanisms, and potential applications.”