Best of Last Week – Magnetic tunnel surrounding our solar system, swarming legged robots, a new way to treat diabetes

October 25, 2021 • by Bob Yirka

Left: A curving tunnel, with lines formed by the tunnel lights and road lane markers, forms a similar geometry to the proposed model of the North Polar Spur and Fan Region (photo by Pixabay/ illustration by Jennifer West). Right: The sky as it would appear in radio polarized waves. Credit: Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory/Villa Elisa telescope/ESA/Planck Collaboration/Stellarium/Jennifer West

It was a good week for space science as an international team of astronomers used NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to watch as a white dwarf switched on and off. Also, another team made up of astronomers from several Canadian institutions announced that they had found evidence that a 'magnetic tunnel' surrounds our solar system. And a team at NASA released a video of its Perseverance Mars rover that included audio, allowing viewers to hear sounds captured from Mars.

In technology news, a combined team from Brown University and the University of Maryland announced that they had developed a new material that could pave the way for better and perhaps safer batteries based on polymer tubes derived from wood. Also, a team at MIT found that the human brain seems to be wired to calculate the 'pointiest' path, not the shortest one, when navigating. And a team at Technische Universität Dresden, developed a technique for automatically generating hardware components for robotic systems. The technique is based on field programmable gate arrays. And a pair of engineers, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, with Notre Dame University and Daniel Goldman, with the Georgia Institute of Technology, built a swarm of four-legged robots that were able to conduct collective behaviors.

In other news, a team led by a group at Barcelona Institute for Global Health found evidence that COVID-19 is a seasonal infection linked to humidity levels and lower temperatures. Also, a team at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory backed up findings by a team last year working on HCb experiments at CERN, that boosts evidence for a new fundamental physics.

And finally, if you have type II diabetes, you may want to check out the work being done by an international team working at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology—they have taken a novel approach to treating type II diabetes based on autograft of muscle cells engineered to take in sugar at increased rates—thus far, it has shown prolonged normal blood sugar levels in patients after a single one-time procedure.