Though the practice of 3D printing is still firmly entrenched in its journey from fledgling idea to emerging technology, news out of Harvard’s Wyss Institute this week proves innovation waits for no one. According to a published press release, a team of researchers at the esteemed Ivy League school have taken the concept of 3D printing and upped the ante by adding a fourth dimension: time. Taking on the obvious label of 4D printing, the group’s inventive take on additive manufacturing uses a gel-like composite to print flat objects which then have the ability to dramatically alter their shape when submerged in water.
Developed under the management of the study’s senior author Jennifer Lewis, the gel-like composite ink used for the prints contains miniature fibers of cellulose, an organic compound found in plants. Moreover, a plant’s ability to alter their shape and formation based on environmental stimuli was one of the biggest influences when Lewis’ team created 4D printing. Specifically, the group intended to develop a printable substance capable of mimicking the way plants respond and react to precipitation or sunlight. The resulting cellulose-heavy composite allowed them to accomplish this very goal.
“Using one composite ink printed in a single step, we can achieve shape-changing hydrogel geometries containing more complexity than any other technique, and we do so simply by modifying the print path,” says co-lead author and graduate research assistant A. Sydney Gladman. “What’s more, we can interchange different materials to tune for properties such as conductivity or biocompatibility.”
Before printing, Lewis and her team have the ability to adjust the extent to which each object will swell when immersed in water by choosing how to align the fibers of cellulose. While aligning the cells, the printer then encodes the hydrogel ink for specific anistropic stiffness and swelling. It’s the cellulose’s anistropic quality that allows the team to accurately predict how the object may shift its shape when exposed to water. Because of this, the team developed a precise mathematical model which allows them to program and tune the prints to whatever they desire.
“What’s remarkable about this 4D printing advance made by Jennifer and her team is that it enables the design of almost any arbitrary, transformable shape from a wide range of available materials with different properties and potential applications, truly establishing a new platform for printing self-assembling, dynamic microscale structures that could be applied to a broad range of industrial and medical applications,” says Wyss Institute director Donald Ingber.
Moving forward, the team intends to see how well its 4D printing model does printing live, active tissue. Whereas a 3D-printed organ may allow for the production of a working replacement organ, advancements in 4D printing could allow for the creation of actively adaptive cells — i.e. as the body changes, so too would the implanted 4D-printed tissue. These are obviously incredibly lofty goals for a tech in its infancy, but if anyone’s going to do it, why not a team of scientists from Harvard University?
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.