Animal locomotion: Wing-like femoral lobes help orchid mantid nymphs glide

The femoral lobes of the orchid mantis give this fierce predator a flower-like appearance, but they also assist in gliding, showing that form can match function in more ways than one.

Bioinspired robots can foster nature conservation

We live in a time of unprecedented scientific and human progress while being increasingly aware of its negative impacts on our planet's health. Aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems have significantly declined putting us on course to a sixth mass extinction event. Nonetheless, the advances made in science, engineering, and technology have given us the opportunity to reverse some of our ecosystem damage and preserve them through conservation efforts around the world. However, current conservation efforts are primarily human led with assistance from conventional robotic systems which limit their scope and effectiveness, along with negatively impacting the surroundings. In this perspective, we present the field of bioinspired robotics to develop versatile agents for future conservation efforts that can operate in the natural environment while minimizing the disturbance/impact to its inhabitants and the environment's natural state. We provide an operational and environmental framework that should be considered while developing bioinspired robots for conservation. These considerations go beyond addressing the challenges of human-led conservation efforts and leverage the advancements in the field of materials, intelligence, and energy harvesting, to make bioinspired robots move and sense like animals. In doing so, it makes bioinspired robots an attractive, non-invasive, sustainable, and effective conservation tool for exploration, data collection, intervention, and maintenance tasks. Finally, we discuss the development of bioinspired robots in the context of collaboration, practicality, and applicability that would ensure their further development and widespread use to protect and preserve our natural world.

A Year at the Forefront of Gliding Locomotion

This review highlights the largely understudied behavior of gliding locomotion, which is exhibited by a diverse range of animals spanning vertebrates and invertebrates, in air and in water. The insights in the literature gained from January 2022 to December 2022 continue to challenge the previously held notion of gliding as a relatively simple form of locomotion. Using advances in field/lab data collection and computation, the highlighted studies cover gliding in animals including seabirds, flying lizards, flying snakes, geckos, dragonflies, damselflies, and dolphins. Altogether, these studies present gliding as a sophisticated behavior resulting from the interdependent aspects of morphology, sensing, environment, and likely selective pressures. This review uses these insights as inspiration to encourage researchers to revisit gliding locomotion, both in the animal's natural habitat and in the laboratory, and to investigate questions spanning gliding biomechanics, ecology, sensing, and the evolution of animal flight.

How biomechanics, path planning and sensing enable gliding flight in a natural environment

Gliding animals traverse cluttered aerial environments when performing ecologically relevant behaviours. However, it is unknown how gliders execute collision-free flight over varying distances to reach their intended target. We quantified complete glide trajectories amid obstacles in a naturally behaving population of gliding lizards inhabiting a rainforest reserve. In this cluttered habitat, the lizards used glide paths with fewer obstacles than alternatives of similar distance. Their takeoff direction oriented them away from obstacles in their path and they subsequently made mid-air turns with accelerations of up to 0.5 g to reorient towards the target tree. These manoeuvres agreed well with a vision-based steering model which maximized their bearing angle with the obstacle while minimizing it with the target tree. Nonetheless, negotiating obstacles reduced mid-glide shallowing rates, implying greater loss of altitude. Finally, the lizards initiated a pitch-up landing manoeuvre consistent with a visual trigger model, suggesting that the landing decision was based on the optical size and speed of the target. They subsequently followed a controlled-collision approach towards the target, ending with variable impact speeds. Overall, the visually guided path planning strategy that enabled collision-free gliding required continuous changes in the gliding kinematics such that the lizards never attained theoretically ideal steady-state glide dynamics.

Fabrication of a novel biomaterial with enhanced mechanical and conducting properties

Conducting polymers have combined advantages of metal conductivity with ease in processing and biocompatibility, making them extremely versatile for biosensor and tissue engineering applications.

Early filtration and mortality in meningococcal septic shock?

Following the introduction of a policy of early therapeutic filtration for presumed meningococcal septicaemic shock, the overall mortality has decreased.