Scientists at Berkeley Lab, in conjunction with the Department of Energy, have devised a way to construct 3D structures completely made from liquid. They used a modified 3D printer to inject tiny streams of water, some as small as one millimeter in diameter, into silicone oil to sculpt tubes of liquid within another liquid.
This technique could be used for liquid electronics and to create flexible devices. Visiting faculty scientist Tom Russell said, “It’s a new class of material that can reconfigure itself, and it has the potential to be customized into liquid reaction vessels for many uses, from chemical synthesis to ion transport to catalysis.”
As New Atlas explains, the water doesn’t disperse into droplets when it’s injected, due to a nanoscale “surfactant” coated inside the injecting tubes, which surrounds the water, reduces surface tension, and separates the water from the silicone oil.
A “nanoparticle supersoap” comprised of gold nanoparticles and binding polymers forms around the water threads and locks the structures into place. It’s like a protective flexible glass sheath shrunk down to a molecular level. The scientists created a number of different structures, some of them several meters in length.
“This stability means we can stretch water into a tube, and it remains a tube,” added Russell. “Or we can shape water into an ellipsoid, and it remains an ellipsoid. We’ve used these nanoparticle supersoaps to print tubes of water that last for several months.”
The team modified a regular 3D printer so it could extrude liquid through a syringe. The printer could then insert the needle into the oil and inject the water streams into a programmed pattern.
“We can squeeze liquid from a needle, and place threads of water anywhere we want in three dimensions,” said Forth. “We can also ping the material with an external force, which momentarily breaks the supersoap’s stability and changes the shape of the water threads. The structures are endlessly reconfigurable.”
The technology may also lead to fabrication of complex coatings with specific magnetic properties, or even electronics that can repair themselves.
Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Russell developed the process with researcher Joe Forth, and the results of their findings were published in March in the journal Advanced Materials.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.