The journey to outer space is incredibly dangerous, but crews must also face day-to-day hazards, such as exposure to cancer-causing radiation, microgravity and extreme isolation. Understanding and mitigating these risks may allow astronauts to stay in these environments for extended periods, especially as agencies race to build permanent habitats on the Moon.

This quest was the highlight of this year’s National Academy of Engineering regional meeting, as students, scientists and industry experts gathered to discuss and shape solutions to the logistical challenges of living and working in outer space. The three-day event was held at the Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center at The Ohio State University. 

One of the conference’s keynote speakers was Scott Parazynski, a physician and former NASA astronaut who once flew with John Glenn, who spoke about anticipating and preparing for health issues in space. Such concerns range from how astronauts will treat medical emergencies and mental health conditions to ensuring long-term pharmaceutical availability. 

“Space is actually harder on the body than you might think,” said Parazynski.

Despite the extensive health checks astronauts must undergo before liftoff, instances of illness and injury in space are still common occurrences. Prolonged stays in space can cause long-term issues like cardiovascular strain, sleeplessness, hypoxia (low oxygen) and reduced musculoskeletal fitness. Earlier this year, one astronaut even experienced a health scare that led to the first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station. 

But in situations where it isn’t possible to return to Earth quickly, crews will need to be able to handle emergency situations on their own, including having to perform space surgeries or provide care for other spaceflight-induced traumas. 

This means that advanced tools and systems will be vital to overcoming the challenges astronauts will face once off-world. “In exploration, when we challenge ourselves to go to extreme environments, we inevitably have to invent technologies not only to make it safe to go do that,” said Parazynski, “but also to extract science and do meaningful work.”

Polishing up novel technologies for future space missions could also lead to big improvements in medical systems here on Earth. “Investments in space health help us in remote parts of our world, in disaster recovery, and so many other facets of health care,” said Parazynski. 

Other topics addressed during the meeting revealed insights regarding Earth observation – or how scientists are monitoring our planet from above, what drives materials and manufacturing in space, and how researchers are finding new pathways to lunar exploration.

In another panel, Karen Dannemiller, an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at Ohio State, detailed some of the engineering challenges behind preserving astronaut health, and spoke about the importance of identifying issues like microbial threats in the environment as quickly as possible. 

“None of us thinks too much about indoor environmental quality until it’s an emergency,” said Dannemiller. “But traveling to the moon or to Mars, we don’t have the luxury to wait until then.” Instead, early detection and addressing issues before they become unmanageable are staples of sustainable innovations that can collectively support human health, she said. 

She and other panelists also shared advice on how next-generation scientists and academic leaders ought to seek out new research solutions to modern-era spaceflight obstacles.

“Follow your passions wherever that may lead,” said Dannemiller. “Don’t be afraid of failure.”

Superconductivity, or the ability of certain materials to conduct electric currents without any energy loss when cooled below a critical temperature, is a property still not very well understood. While a major challenge, understanding more about its formation mechanisms could lead to better, more long-lasting materials as well as more powerful quantum devices. 

Led by Chun Ning (Jeanie) Lau, senior author of the study and a professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the research team constructed a special material called twisted bilayer graphene — a layer of carbon stacked onto another and rotated at a small angle. 

By attaching the material to a man-made synthetic diamond called strontium titanate, Lau and colleagues were able to see and control how strongly electrons — tiny subatomic particles — in the system interacted with each other. Electron interactions that control properties like magnetic states and chemical bonding come in pairs, and by adjusting the “settings” of these pairs, the team was able to switch the material’s superconductivity on and off. 

“Electrons normally repel each other, but in superconductors they form pairs; this pair formation is the key to a superconductor’s ability to conduct electricity without dissipation,” said Lau. “Our evidence suggests that electrons themselves, depending on their sensitivity to their nearby environment, are unexpectedly important for material changes.”

The researchers were surprised to find that when they increased their adjustments, superconductivity had decreased. This result is different from conventional superconductors, where, if repelling forces between electrons are suppressed, the pairing gets stronger, highlighting the unusual nature of new materials like twisted bilayer graphene to successfully direct electricity. 

“If you could transmit electricity without energy loss, that would be hugely important for technologies used in our everyday life,” said Lau. “Despite the fundamental questions that still need answers, this work basically provides a path toward a new type of physics mechanism.”

Such a discovery could help scientists develop materials that superconduct at higher temperatures – even room temperature, a “holy grail” in the field that, if achieved, could transform their current understanding of electronics, power transmission, and communications.

The study was published April 7 in the journal Nature Physics.

Overall, these results reveal a simpler way to control the conditions needed to create and control the atomic power behind superconductivity. For instance, because many high-temperature superconductors have limitations that cap their productivity, using the environment to drive their abilities could boost their power as well as allow scientists to build more efficient electronics. 

These potential applications are not far off, according to Xueshi Gao, lead author of the study and a current PhD student in physics at Ohio State: He believes his team’s findings will soon be useful to many different types of systems and experiments across the field. 

“The mechanism of superconductivity in the twisted bilayer graphene system we used is still not well understood,” said Gao. “But our result can shed light on and help people to better understand the concept when applying it to future work.”

Still, the team emphasizes that the model is only an initial step toward understanding unexplored electronic interactions, and next steps will involve testing other types of interactions and investigating the various complex physics questions that their work opens up. 

“We’re showing capabilities that we haven’t shown before, so many people in the field are getting really excited about this result,” said Lau. 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Aatmaj Rajesh, Emilio Codecido, Daria Sharifi, Zheneng Zhang, Youwei Liu and Marc Bockrath, as well as Alejandro Jimeno-Pozo, Pierre Pantaleon and Paco Guinea from Imdea Nanoscience in Spain, and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi from the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. This work was supported by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. 

A group at The Ohio State University has created “STUART,” a Small Transportable Uncrewed Aerial Rescue Technology flight vehicle. The team — called The Sloopy Works — designed STUART as an entry for the GoAERO Prize, a three-year international competition aimed at helping first responders save lives by designing new medical aircraft. In the process, they set a new Ohio State record. 

Weighing 120 pounds and spanning nearly 8 feet across, it is the heaviest drone ever built in the university’s history to successfully take off vertically and fly on its own. As a prototype, the drone is only about one-third the footprint it would be if it were full-scale, yet its total lifted weight is 70% greater than the world-speed-record holding autonomous drone flown by Ohio State that took to the skies in 2017. 

“What normally takes an aerospace company five plus years to develop a new vehicle from scratch, we did within one year,” said Kevin Disotell, a research scientist in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State and the director of the team. “This shows that our team was really resilient to be able to deliver an actual flying machine so quickly.” 

The GoAERO Prize competition comprises three stages, for which the total prize purse is $2 million. Stage 1 teams submitted an aircraft design and Stage 2 teams had to validate that concept by having their drone complete a 100-foot flight while carrying a small payload. Stage 3, which won’t begin until 2027, will involve a final fly-off at NASA’s Ames Research Center that will make the vehicles carry a 125-pound manikin in an obstacle-style course meant to test specific skills and capabilities relevant to future drone missions. 

While the drone with the best performance will earn a $1 million top prize, Ohio State was one of 14 university entries to GoAERO from the United States to have been awarded concept-building funds from NASA’s University Innovation project, which promotes university-led research into transformative technologies. 

Self-flying vehicles, for instance, can be extremely useful for overcoming obstacles, assessing situations or reaching remote areas that would be impossible for humans to reach alone. 

In the United States, more than 4.5 million people currently live in “ambulance deserts,” areas where it could take emergency services 25 minutes or longer to reach them. High-tech drones can be used to quickly render aid and deliver life-saving supplies, such as bandages, medicines and blood bags, to these vulnerable communities.  

Still, because autonomous technologies can struggle to complete certain tasks in their entirety, such as the rescue portion of a search-and-rescue mission, scientists hope to create aircraft that are more versatile than the small surveillance drones and large rescue helicopters typically used in emergency response situations, as well as help curb the shortage of pilots in rural areas. 

“This project is so important, not just here in Ohio, but around the world, because we’re tackling technical challenges that can have a real-world impact on families,” said Disotell. “Few things are worse than an emergency victim that needs air evacuation, and you can’t get a helicopter.”

With this goal in mind, STUART, named in honor of Stuart Roberts, an Ohio State College of Medicine professor in the 1960s who developed the world’s first hospital-based medical helicopter rescue program, was designed to be a smaller, portable vehicle that could both take off and land vertically. Guided by Matthew McCrink, co-adviser for The Sloopy Works group and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State who has built and flown more than 50 complex aircraft, STUART is unlike a traditional helicopter. 

Instead, its powerful propellers are enclosed inside ducts to protect their components and people from damage, and onboard computers control the drone’s movements in real time without the need for a human pilot.  

During its flight attempt on a particularly cloudy day at The Ohio State University Airport last year, STUART reached the 100-foot marker while flying at 23 feet above ground at an average speed of about 3.4 feet per second. The successful flight demonstration yielded valuable engineering data, said Disotell. 

“There were so many real-world lessons along the way in building and flying this prototype,” he said. “It was a signature experience that I hope all our students on the team carry with them into their careers.”

To document their achievement, the team will present their flight test results at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aviation Forum in June, during which teams can showcase their prototypes to the larger scientific community. 

Despite the hurdles the team faced in bringing such a new design to life, many members found the challenges behind the experience inspiring, said Aditya Chittari, president of The Sloopy Works and a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. 

“Taking on the challenge of creating an aircraft for real people and patients is something that we took charge of and did really well,” he said. “This experience really pushed me to understand how different aspects of the design can all come together.”

While the team did not receive one of the eight prizes for Stage 2, entrants aren’t required to win a previous stage prize to continue into the next round of the competition – so the Ohio State team, powered by its enthusiasm for helping bring a new class of technologies to market, is working to forge ahead. 

“We’re very passionate about where we want to end up in the future,” said Chittari. “We’re going to keep pushing forward with ways to make an impact.”

The project was supported by Farva Technology LLC. 

Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers melted fake lunar soil – a synthetic version of the fine dusty material on the moon surface, called regolith simulant – into layers and fused it with a base surface to manufacture small, heat-resistant objects. 

If utilized on the lunar surface, the material may help build sturdy, nontoxic habitats and tools for future astronauts, capabilities that would be vital to the NASA Artemis missions that aim to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by the end of the decade.

But to assess how well this new construction material may work in space, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions, revealing that the overall quality of the material depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.  

“By combining different feedstocks, like metal and ceramics, in the printing process, we found that the final material is really sensitive to the environment,” said Sizhe Xu, lead author of the study and a graduate research associate in industrial systems engineering at The Ohio State University. “Different environments lead to different properties, which directly affect the mechanical strength and the thermal shock resistance of certain components.”

The study was recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

There are two types of lunar regolith simulants that scientists use to study the surface of the moon. The one this team used, called LHS-1, is designed to replicate soil found in the lunar highlands, a heavily cratered area rife with dark-colored basaltic rock. 

In this case, researchers discovered that while trying to print LHS-1 on stainless steel and glass surfaces was challenging, it adhered well to alumina-silicate ceramic, likely because the two compounds form crystals that enhance thermal stability and mechanical strength. 

Other environmental factors, such as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, the strength of the laser and even the speed of the printing process, were also shown to impact the stability of the structure, said Sarah Wolff, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

“There are conditions that happen in space that are really hard to emulate in a simulant,” she said. “It may work in the lab, but in a resource-scarce environment, you have to try everything to maximize the flexibility of a machine for different scenarios.”

Unsurprisingly, developing special systems for prolonged space travel is one of the most challenging aspects of successful human exploration, as technologies created for In-Situ Resource Utilization, or the harnessing of local natural resources at mission destinations, must be engineered to survive extreme vacuum, dust and thermal environmental conditions.

To accomplish this, scientists are rapidly evolving additive manufacturing systems, which would help reduce the need to transport large quantities of materials and heavy equipment from Earth and enable astronauts to create an array of structures, tools and habitats. 

The promise of these technologies would not only save essential mission time but also allow for extended independence as crews travel into deep space. 

Still, more data is needed to overcome any potential limitations future travelers might face as they lift off for other worlds. This study, for example, suggests that instead of being powered by electricity as their printing system is on Earth, future designs of the system could likely be scaled up using solar-driven or other hybrid power architectures. 

“There are so many applications that we’re working toward that with new information, the possibilities are endless,” said Xu. 

This team’s work also extends beyond supporting humanity’s push to the stars, as gaining a better sense of how manufacturing might work in space could help researchers discover new ways to address critical material shortages back home, said Wolff. 

“If we can successfully manufacture things in space using very few resources, that means we can also achieve better sustainability on Earth,” she said. “To that end, improving the machine’s flexibility for different scenarios is a goal we’re working really hard toward.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Marwan Haddad, Aslan Bafahm Alamdari, Annabel Shim and Alan Luo. 

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Institute for Materials and Manufacturing Research and the Center for Electron Microscopy and Analysis. 

In new research, experiments showed that robots trained with this dataset, called RoboSpatial, outperformed those trained with baseline models at the same robotic task, demonstrating a complex understanding of both spatial relationships and physical object manipulation. 

For humans, visual perception shapes how we interact with the environment, from recognizing different people to maintaining an awareness of our body’s movements and position. Despite previous attempts to imbue robots with these skills, efforts have fallen short as most are trained on data that lacks sophisticated spatial understanding.  

Because deep spatial comprehension is necessary for intuitive interactions, if left unaddressed, these spatial reasoning challenges could hinder future AI systems’ ability to comprehend complex instructions and operate in dynamic environments, said Luke Song, lead author of the study and a current PhD student in engineering at The Ohio State University.

“To have true general-purpose foundation models, a robot needs to understand the 3D world around it," he said. “So spatial understanding is one of the most crucial capabilities for it.”

The study was recently given as an oral presentation at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. 

To teach robots how to better interpret perspective, RoboSpatial includes more than a million real-world indoor and tabletop images, thousands of detailed 3D scans, and 3 million labels describing rich spatial information relevant to robotics. Using these vast resources, the framework pairs 2D egocentric images with full 3D scans of the same scene so the model learns to pinpoint objects using either flat-image recognition or 3D geometry. 

According to the study, it’s a process that closely mimics visual cues in the real world. 

For instance, while current training datasets might allow a robot to accurately describe a “bowl on the table,” the model would lack the ability to discern where on the table it actually is, where it should be placed to remain accessible, or how it might fit in with other objects. In contrast, RoboSpatial could rigorously test these spatial reasoning skills in practical robotic tasks, first by demonstrating object rearrangement and then by examining the models’ capacity to generalize to new spatial reasoning scenarios beyond their original training data.

“Not only does this mean improvements on individual actions like picking up and placing things, but also leads to robots interacting more naturally with humans,” said Song. 

One of the systems the team tested this framework on was a Kinova Jaco robot, an assistive arm that helps people with disabilities connect with their environment. 

During training, it was able to answer simple close-ended spatial questions like “can the chair be placed in front of the table?” or “is the mug to the left of the laptop?” correctly. 

These promising results reveal that normalizing spatial context by improving robotic perception could lead to safer and more reliable AI systems, said Song. 

While there are still many unanswered questions about AI development and training, the work concludes that RoboSpatial has the potential to serve as a foundation for broader applications in robotics, noting that more exciting spatial advancements will likely branch from it. 

“I think we will see a lot of big improvements and cool capabilities for robots in the next five to ten years,” said Song. 

Co-authors include Yu Su from Ohio State and Valts Blukis, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree and Stan Birchfield from NVIDIA. This work was supported by the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Leading these advances are researchers at The Ohio State University: Engineers are developing a nuclear propulsion system that uses liquid uranium to directly heat rocket propellant as an alternative to solid fuel elements used by traditional nuclear propulsion systems.  

Their concept, called the centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), is specially designed to improve rocket performance while simultaneously minimizing any engine risk.  

While similar breakthroughs in the field have focused more on affordability than performance, CNTR potentially offers a substantial advantage for future crewed space missions even compared to other types of nuclear-powered systems in that it can approximately double an engine’s efficiency, said Dean Wang, a senior member of the project and an associate professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. 

“In recent years, there has been quite an increased interest in nuclear thermal propulsion technology as we contemplate returning humans to the moon and working in cis-lunar space,” said Wang. “But beyond it, a new system is needed, as traditional chemical engines may not be feasible.” 

Chemical engines have been used in spaceflight since the very beginning of the space age.  However, they are limited in thrust, and use large quantities of propellant. Consequently, missions to the outer reaches of the solar system can take a very long time – nine years in the case of the New Horizons spacecraft that flew by Pluto.  

Because of these limitations, future missions will require propulsion systems that can reduce travel time, increase the amount of material sent on the mission, or both, if researchers want to safely send astronauts to far-off destinations — all vital reasons why demonstrating the potential of these approaches is so important, said Wang.  

“The longer you are in space, the more susceptible you are to all types of health risks,” he said. “So if we can make that any shorter, it’d be very beneficial.”  

If the team’s design is successful, implementing their engine in future rockets could make it easier to travel farther on less fuel, as the highest specific impulse — the amount of thrust achievable from a specific amount of propellant — of a chemical engine is about 450 seconds.  Nuclear propulsion engines based on designs tested in the 1960s achieved approximately 900 seconds and, according to the team, a CNTR could achieve even higher values. 

Utilizing nuclear thermal propulsion would also mean more flexibility for mission operations, as rockets could take advantage of additional flight trajectories not possible with chemical engines,  to help reach deep-space targets in shorter periods of time. More notably, because these systems can utilize a range of potential substances as propellant, widespread use could quickly facilitate the development of in-space resources such as asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, said Wang.  

Overall, these heightened capabilities could allow quicker round-trip human missions to Mars as well as support novel one-way robotic missions to the outer planets, including Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, said Spencer Christian, a PhD student in engineering at Ohio State. Under John Horack, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, Christian leads prototype construction of CNTR.  

“You could have a safe one-way trip to Mars in six months, for example, as opposed to doing the same mission in a year,” said Christian. “Depending on how well it works, the prototype CNTR engine is pushing us towards the future.” 

Despite these newfound avenues for increased space exploration, like with any emerging innovation, there are many engineering challenges that still have to be addressed, said Wang.  

“We have a very good understanding of the physics of our design, but there are still technical challenges that we need to overcome,” he said.  

Many of these challenges were detailed in a study the team recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica. Some potential hurdles include ensuring that the methods used for startup, operation and shutdown avoid instabilities as well as envisioning ways to minimize the loss of uranium fuel and accommodate potential engine failures. 

This team’s CNTR concept is expected to reach design readiness within the next five years — but in preparing their model for potential next-generation use, researchers are most looking forward to showing how well it could fare under extreme conditions.  

After all, a final laboratory demonstration will likely help inform the direction of future nuclear thermal propulsion technologies. “We need to keep space nuclear propulsion as a consistent priority in the future, so that technology can have time to mature,” said Wang. “It’s a huge benefit that we can’t afford to miss out on.”  

The team’s effort was supported by a grant provided by NASA.

NASA’s Human Lander Challenge is an annual competition that invites university groups to explore innovative solutions to help support future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars. This year, participants created solutions for super-cold liquid propellant storage and transfer technologies, critical apparatuses vital to spacecraft propulsion and human life support systems.

Among all entrants, 12 student teams were chosen as finalists and brought to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to showcase their projects. After presenting their prototypes to a panel of NASA and industry experts, the agency announced that the Ohio State group who began their work in March with their project, the autonomous magnetized cryo-couplers with active alignment control (AMCC-AAC), was named Best Prototype. 

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott was the overall winner and recipient of a $10,000 award. The second place team, Old Dominion University was awarded $5,000, while the third place team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received $3,000.

“Our project is unique in the sense that we want to future-proof the system,” said Max Heil, the team’s project manager and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “If you’re going to colonize Mars, you’re going to need technology that is pretty universal.”

While current technologies allow cryogenic liquids to be stored for short periods, scientists are looking for ways to improve the efficiency and reliability of these systems because long-term human spaceflight will require them to function effectively for weeks or even months.

Unlike other propellant transfer technologies, the AMCC-AAC is designed to eliminate the need for constant human interaction when performing refueling missions in space, said Heil. In space, safely transferring liquid propellant between two spacecraft can be challenging, but this team’s prototype suggests such issues could be solved by using AI to fully automate the process. 

“AI is so adaptable, it can do just about anything,” said Heil. “The beauty of the system is there are different ways that we could utilize it, so that’s why we're really excited about it.” 

Using a combination of LIDAR distance measurements, cameras, onboard human landing system sensors and artificial intelligence algorithms, their system would achieve autonomous coupling via robotic cooling rods. In this way, the Ohio State team’s solution would work to mitigate misalignment during cryogenic docking and reduce opportunities for potential propellant leakage, said Heil.   

Although implementation of these promising technologies may be years away, if adopted, the AMCC-AAC would also benefit NASA’s Artemis Program in its push to return humans to the moon as well as the agency’s planned operation of Gateway, an outpost in lunar orbit that will act as both a scientific hub and fuel outpost for sustained deep space exploration. 

After the event, participants also had the opportunity to connect with other subject matter experts working on NASA’s Human Landing System capabilities. Some reflected on how the chance to polish unique ideas for future spaceflight risks inspired new interest in the field.

“This started as more of a small hobby for me, but Ohio State’s support for space technology and research has turned it into a real passion,” said Zafar Shaik, another member of the team and an undergraduate student in aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “I don’t know if I would have gotten this far without the university’s big push into space.”

Overall, many in the group hope that the experience opens doors for upcoming Ohio State students to get involved in NASA’s Human Lander Challenge and, more widely, helps them jump-start fulfilling careers in the emerging commercial space sector. 

“Ohio State has invested quite a bit into the space industry, and the rise in the amount of people that want to work in it is growing so rapidly,” said Heil. “So to imagine our project could be implemented on future mission systems is really rewarding for our whole team.”

The group was advised by Ohio State’s John Horack, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Other engineering members of the team include Rahul Ravishankar, Will Rueter, Kevin Subin, Nishanth Kunchala, Anastasia Anikina, Ryan Endicott, Artur Leonel Machado Ulsenheimer, Shiv Amin and Tejdeep Somi Reddy.

John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, devised a way to bake starch into aerogel, a type of ultralight styrofoam typically used to provide effective insulation. Two launchers propelled tennis balls into a mock head at point-blank range. Results showed the material was able to both halt high-speed projectiles and protect against blunt force trauma.

“We found that our composite could absorb about 70% of the impact force under the best conditions,” said LaRocco. “In other words, only 30% of that impact force was going through.”

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies.

Concussions can be financially and physically costly, so the low-cost design of this material makes it apt for use across many industries, including construction and defense, the researchers said. While many of these injuries can be prevented with helmets or other protective equipment, typical gear can sometimes be too bulky or impractical to provide sufficient shielding from severe head injuries. That’s why implementing the new material could provide better protection for sports players, said Taeyoon Eom, co-author of the study and a recent graduate of Ohio State.

“Our material is lightweight and inexpensive, so it should be used to increase the standard that people are using now for concussion safety and offer more protection at less weight,” said Eom, who recently experienced a severe concussion of his own after a boxing match. His incident inspired him to help look for ways to refine current concussion safety methods. 

To do this, the team tested the protectiveness of three material samples: one with no protection, another with aerogel foam padding, and the composite aerogel foam with cornstarch baked into it. In some cases, a hardhat was added as an additional variable to determine if any of the material samples would work well as a helmet liner. 

Next, a commercially available spring-powered gun that shoots tennis balls for dogs to chase and a combustion-fired potato cannon were used to launch tennis balls at the mock heads. To accurately measure the deflection and kinetic energy of each projectile, sensitive electronics were also sandwiched between the layers of each material, and its data sent to a computer vision program the team developed. 

Their results showed that the fully composite material was shown to bend only about 31% as much as the aerogel alone, meaning it was better at absorbing more impact. It also prevented the electronics from being physically damaged, unlike the gel alone. “It was essentially an iterative process of trial and error,” said Eom. 

Although past studies involving aerogel composite have reported impact absorptions of 80% relative to this team’s composite, the study notes the materials used in previous research were much costlier. 

The researchers said the advantage of combining the starch with the aerogel is that it improves impact resistance, with the composite absorbing and dissipating the energy of a blunt hit more effectively on impact. This allows for thinner and more flexible protective gear, without compromising safety. 

“This project was a real knockout,” said LaRocco. 

Other Ohio State co-authors were Tanush Duggisani, Ian Zalcberg, Jinyi Xue, Ekansh Seth, Nicolas Zapata, Dheeraj Anksapuram, Nathaniel Muzumdar and Eric Zachariah.

Constructed using 22 small pressure sensors and fueled by small solar panels on the tops of shoes, the system offers real-time health tracking based on how a person walks, a biomechanical process that is as unique as a human fingerprint. 

This complex personal health data can then be transmitted via Bluetooth to a smartphone for quick and detailed analysis, said Jinghua Li, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Our bodies carry lots of useful information that we’re not even aware of,” said Li. “These statuses also change over time, so it’s our goal to use electronics to extract and decode those signals to encourage better self health care checks.”

It’s estimated that at least 7% of Americans suffer from ambulatory difficulties, activities that include walking, running or climbing stairs. While efforts to manufacture a wearable insole-based pressure system have risen in popularity in recent years, many previous prototypes were met with low energy limitations and unstable performances. 

To overcome the challenges of their precursors, Li and Qi Wang, the lead author of the study and a current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Ohio State, sought to ensure that their wearable is durable, has a high degree of precision when collecting and analyzing data, and can provide consistent and reliable power, said Li. 

“Our device is innovative in terms of high resolution, spatial sensing, self-powering capability, and its ability to combine with machine learning algorithms,” she said. “So we feel like this research can go further based on the pioneering successes of this field.”

The study was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

This team’s system is also made unique through its use of AI. Using an advanced machine learning model, the wearable can recognize eight different motion states, including static ones like sitting and standing to more dynamic movements such as running and squatting. 

Additionally, since the materials the insoles are made of are flexible and safe, the device, much like a smartwatch, is low-risk and safe for continuous use. For instance, after the solar cells convert sunlight to energy, that power is stored in tiny lithium batteries that don’t harm the user or affect daily activities.

Because of the distribution of sensors from toe to heel, the researchers could see how the pressure on parts of the foot is different in activities such as walking versus running.  

During walking, pressure is applied sequentially from the heel to the toes, whereas during running, almost all sensors are subjected to pressure simultaneously. In addition, during walking, the pressure application time accounts for about half of the total time, while during running, it accounts for only about a quarter.

In health care, the smart insoles could support gait analysis to detect early abnormalities associated with foot pressure-related conditions (such as diabetic foot ulcers), musculoskeletal disorders (such as plantar fasciitis) and neurological conditions (such as Parkinson’s disease).

The new system also used machine learning to learn and classify different types of motion. That offers opportunities for personalized health management, including real-time posture correction, injury prevention and rehabilitation monitoring. Customized fitness training may also be a future use, the researchers said.

According to the study, these smart insoles showed no notable deterioration in performance after 180,000 cycles of compression and decompression, showing their long-term durability. 

“The interface is flexible and quite thin, so even during repetitive deformation, it can remain functional,” said Li. “The combination of the software and hardware means it isn’t as limited.”

Researchers expect the technology will likely be available commercially within the next three to five years. Next steps to advance the work will be aimed at improving the system’s gesture recognition abilities, which, according to Li, will likely be helped with further testing on more diverse populations. 

“We have so many variations among individuals, so demonstrating and training these fantastic capabilities on different populations is something we need to give further attention to,” said Li.

Created through a combination of soft chemistry gels and electrospinning — a technique where electrical force is applied to liquid to craft small fibers — the team constructed thin fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO₂), a compound often utilized in solar cells, gas sensors and various self-cleaning technologies. 

Despite being a great alternative energy source, solar fuel systems that utilize TiO₂ nanoparticles are often power-limited because they can only undergo photocatalysis, or create chemical reactions, by absorbing non-visible UV light. This can cause significant challenges to implementation, including low efficiency and the need for complex filtration systems. 

Yet when researchers added copper to the material to improve this process, their new structures, called nanomats, were able to absorb enough light energy to break down harmful pollutants in air and water, said Pelagia-Iren Gouma, lead author of the study and a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

“There hasn’t been an easy way to create something like a blanket that you can lay on water and start creating energy,” she said. “But we are the only ones who have made these structures and the only ones to demonstrate that they actually work.”

The study was recently published in the journal Advanced Science.

When titanium dioxide absorbs light, electrons are formed that oxidize water and attack pollutants, slowly destroying them until they become benign. When copper is added, that process is supercharged, making it even more effective. 

To determine this, researchers worked to characterize the nanomat’s updated properties to understand how it behaved and what made it different from other self-cleaning nanoparticles, said Gouma. Surprisingly, researchers found that compared to traditional solar cells, these nanomats can be more successful at power generation when placed under natural sunlight, she said.

“These nanomats can be used as a power generator, or as water remediation tools,” she said. “In both ways, you have a catalyst with the highest efficiency reported to date.”

These lightweight, easy-to-remove fiber mats can float and operate atop any body of water and are even reusable through multiple cleaning cycles. Because nanomats are so effective, researchers envision that they could be used to rid water of industrial pollutants in developing countries, turning otherwise contaminated rivers and lakes into sources of clean drinking water. 

Additionally, because this technology doesn’t generate any toxic byproducts like some solar cell systems, nanomats are extremely environmentally friendly. “It’s a safe material, it won’t hurt anything, and it’s as clean as it can be,” said Gouma. 

Still, although this team’s technology is incredibly efficient, how long it will take to scale up commercially depends on how quickly industries take notice of the product. “We have the tools to make them in large quantities and translate them to various industries,” said Gouma. “The only limitation is that it needs someone to take advantage of these abundant resources.”

Overall, the study’s findings suggest that nanomats could be a promising tool in many future photocatalytic applications, including long-term sustainability efforts like environmental remediation as well as solar-driven hydrogen production. 

In the meantime, the team plans to examine ways to optimize the material further. 

“This material is completely novel in terms of a new form of nanotechnology,” said Gouma. “It’s really impressive and something that we are very excited about.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Fateh Mikaeilia and Mohammad Mahafuzur Rahaman. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

The interface, dubbed ‘e-Taste’, uses a combination of sensors and wireless chemical dispensers to facilitate the remote perception of taste – what scientists call gustation. These sensors are attuned to recognize molecules like glucose and glutamate — chemicals that represent the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Once captured via an electrical signal, that data is wirelessly passed to a remote device for replication. 

Field testing done by researchers at The Ohio State University confirmed the device’s ability to digitally simulate a range of taste intensities, while still offering variety and safety for the user. 

“The chemical dimension in the current VR and AR realm is relatively underrepresented, especially when we talk about olfaction and gustation,” said Jinghua Li, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State. “It’s a gap that needs to be filled and we’ve developed that with this next-generation system.”

The system, whose development was inspired by previous biosensor work of Li’s, utilizes an actuator with two parts: an interface to the mouth and a small electromagnetic pump. This pump connects to a liquid channel of chemicals that vibrates when an electric charge passes through it, pushing the solution through a special gel layer into the mouth of the subject. 

Depending on the length of time that the solution interacts with this gel layer, the intensity and strength of any given taste can easily be adjusted, said Li. 

“Based on the digital instruction, you can also choose to release one or several different tastes simultaneously so that they can form different sensations,” she said. 

The study was published today in the journal Science Advances. 

Taste is a subjective sense that can change from one moment to another. Yet this complex feeling is the product of two of the body’s chemical sensing systems working in tandem to ensure what you eat is safe and nutritious, the gustation and the olfactory (or smell) senses. 

“Taste and smell are greatly related to human emotion and memory,“ said Li. “So our sensor has to learn to capture, control and store all that information.” 

Despite the difficulty involved in replicating similar taste sensations for a majority of people, researchers found that in human trials, participants could distinguish between different sour intensities in the liquids generated by the system with an accuracy rate of about 70%. 

Further tests assessing e-Taste’s ability to immerse players in a virtual food experience also analyzed its long-range capabilities, showing that remote tasting could be initiated in Ohio from as far away as California. Another experiment involved subjects trying to identify five food options they perceived, whether it was lemonade, cake, fried egg, fish soup or coffee. 

While these results open up opportunities to pioneer new VR experiences, this team’s findings are especially significant because they could potentially provide scientists with a more intimate understanding of how the brain processes sensory signals from the mouth, said Li. 

Plans to enhance the technology revolve around further miniaturizing the system and improving the system’s compatibility with different chemical compounds in food that produce taste sensations. Beyond helping to build a better and more dynamic gaming experience, the study notes that the work could be useful in promoting accessibility and inclusivity in virtual spaces for individuals with disabilities, like those with traumatic brain injuries or Long Covid, which brought gustatory loss to mainstream attention. 

“This will help people connect in virtual spaces in never-before-seen ways,” said Li. “This concept is here and it is a good first step to becoming a small part of the metaverse.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Shulin Chen, Yizhen Jia, Tzu-Li Liu, Qi Wang and Prasad Nithianandam and Chunyu Yang, including Bowen Duan and Zhaoqian Xie from Dalian University of Technology, Xiao Xiao and Changsheng Wu from the National University of Singapore, Xi Tian from Tsinghua University. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute Of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the Chronic Brain Injury Pilot Award Program at Ohio State, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Center for Emergent Materials; the Center for Exploration of Novel Complex Materials, the Institute for Materials Research, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Dalian Outstanding Young Talents in Science and Technology.

Nuclear power plants, which generate about 20% of all electricity produced in the United States, produce almost no greenhouse gas emissions. However, these systems do create radioactive waste, which can be dangerous to human health and the environment. Safely disposing of this waste can be challenging. 

Using a combination of scintillator crystals, high-density materials that emit light when they absorb radiation, and solar cells, the team, led by researchers from The Ohio State University,  demonstrated that ambient gamma radiation could be harvested to produce a strong enough electric output to power microelectronics, like microchips. 

To test this battery, which is a prototype about 4 cubic centimeters small, researchers used two different radioactive sources, cesium-137, one of the most significant fission products that comes from spent nuclear fuel, and cobalt-60, a nuclear activation product. The battery was tested at Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory. The NRL supports student and faculty research, student education, and service to industry – it does not produce electrical power.

Their results showed that when cesium-137 was used, the battery generated 288 nanowatts. Yet with the much stronger isotope cobalt-60, the battery produced 1.5 microwatts of power, about enough to switch on a tiny sensor. 

Although most power outputs for homes and electronics are measured in kilowatts, this suggests that with the right power source, such devices could be scaled up to target applications at or beyond the watts level, said Raymond Cao, lead author of the study and a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.

The study was recently published in the journal Optical Materials: X.

The researchers said these batteries would be used near where the nuclear waste is produced, such as in nuclear waste storage pools or nuclear systems for space and deep sea exploration – they aren’t designed for public use. Fortunately, although the gamma radiation utilized in this work is about a hundred times more penetrating than a normal X-ray or CT scan, the battery itself does not incorporate radioactive materials, meaning it is still safe to touch. 

“We're harvesting something considered as waste and by nature, trying to turn it into treasure,” said Cao, who also serves as the director of Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Lab. 

According to the study, the team’s battery may also have experienced an increase in power due to the makeup of the prototype scintillator crystal the team opted to use. They found that even the shape and size of the crystals can impact the final electrical output, as a larger volume allows it to absorb more radiation and convert that extra energy into more light. A larger surface area also helps the solar cell generate power.

“These are breakthrough results in terms of power output,” said Ibrahim Oksuz, co-author of the study and a research associate in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. “This two-step process is still in its preliminary stages, but the next step involves generating greater watts with scale-up constructs.” 

Since batteries of this type would most likely end up in environments where high levels of radiation already exist and aren't easily accessible to the public, these long-lasting devices wouldn’t pollute their surroundings. Even more significantly, they could also operate without the need for routine maintenance.

Scaling this technology up would be costly unless these batteries could be reliably manufactured, said Cao. Further research is needed to assess the batteries’ usefulness and limitations, including how long they might last once safely implemented, said Oksuz.

“The nuclear battery concept is very promising,” he said. “There's still lots of room for improvement, but I believe in the future, this approach will carve an important space for itself in both the energy production and sensors industry.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Other co-authors include Sabin Neupane and Yanfa Yan from The University of Toledo. 

Built as an alternative to traditional firefighting countermeasures like toxic chemical foams or hydrants whose use can strain water resources, this device works to suppress flames using the power of conductive aerosols, small particles that can direct electricity. 

These aerosols are carried by vortex rings — small donut-shaped bands of air — that transform the particles into short pulses of wind that convert nearby oxygen into ozone. Once released, their accelerated airflow generates rapid turbulence, disrupting the natural combustion process and quickly extinguishing the target fire, said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 

“Using a combination of electricity and this vortex ring technology, we found a more efficient way of solving an environmental problem that will improve our quality of life,” said LaRocco. 

The launcher device resembles a small bucket, attached to an arm brace. Firefighters would aim the bucket toward the fire, and the bucket would use bursts of compressed air or an elastic diaphragm to deliver aerosols in an electric arc to fight the fire.

The idea to create this low-cost, safe and portable device originally began as a method to help refine current fire management techniques, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering.

The study’s first step was to determine what chemical combinations would best make up the conductive aerosols. Once seven mixtures were tested across two trials, the most conductive of them, a coarse copper solution, was chosen as vortex ring material. After the study’s simulations showed that the device would succeed in suppressing fires, researchers aimed to test how they could further optimize the launcher’s power. 

To do this, they tested two versions of their prototype: a compressed air launcher with a conical muzzle that generated vortex rings by releasing compressed air and an elastic diaphragm launcher with a square-edged muzzle that generated vortex rings with an elastic membrane. 

Although the compressed air vortex generator was significantly more efficient than its counterpart, their work revealed that both prototypes had an effective range of nearly 2 meters, or about 6.5 feet.

“In both instances, we were blown away by the invention,” said LaRocco. 

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies. 

Depending on the size of a fire and how many firefighters are deployed to battle it, it’s likely that several of these devices would be required in a real-life emergency. 

“The design of our Vortex Launcher is actually really simple in nature,” said John Simonis, another co-author of the study and an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering, “One of the benefits of that simplicity is it’s also very scalable.”

“It’s maneuverable in tight spaces so that you can walk through doors and indoor environments, but also large enough to have the practical benefits of generating those vortex rings,” he said. 

Since vortex rings also retain their shape as they dissipate, they can carry chemical payloads over longer distances — an advantage over other methods — that will make firefighters safer as they wouldn’t have to risk injury by getting close to the flames to put them out.  

The study concludes that their device could be further developed by integrating multimodal sensors or image analysis into the system. These computer vision upgrades would allow the launcher to target fires caused by a wide variety of sources, said Simonis. 

The research also has future implications for industrial automation and aerospace technologies, where the device could be used to protect military vehicles and even spacecraft interiors from fires.

“There are lots of applications for our device to make a difference,” said Simonis.

Stan Essel of Ohio State was a co-author. 

In a significant breakthrough, researchers from The Ohio State University have developed a technology to transform materials like plastics and agricultural waste into syngas, a substance most often used to create chemicals and fuels like formaldehyde and methanol. 

Using simulations to test how well the system could break down waste, scientists found that their approach, called chemical looping, could produce high-quality syngas in a more efficient manner than other similar chemical techniques. Altogether, this refined process saves energy and is safer for the environment, said Ishani Karki Kudva, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State. 

“We use syngas for important chemicals that are required in our day-to-day life,” said Kudva. “So improving its purity means that we can utilize it in a variety of new ways.”

Today, most commercial processes create syngas that is about 80 to 85% pure, but Kudva’s team achieved a purity of around 90% in a process that takes only a few minutes.

This study builds on decades of previous research at Ohio State, led by Liang-Shih Fan, a distinguished university professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering who advised the study. This previous research used chemical looping technology to turn fossil fuels, sewer gas and coal into hydrogen, syngas and other useful products.

In the new study, the system consists of two reactors: a moving bed reducer where waste is broken down using oxygen provided by metal oxide material, and a fluidized bed combustor that replenishes the lost oxygen so that the material can be regenerated. The study showed that with this waste-to-fuel system, the reactors could run up to 45% more efficiently and still produce about 10% cleaner syngas than other methods. 

The study was recently published in the journal Energy and Fuels.

According to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency, 35.7 million tons of plastics were generated in the U.S. in 2018, of which about 12.2% is municipal solid waste, such as plastic containers, bags, appliances, furniture, agricultural residue, paper and food.

Unfortunately, since plastics are resistant to decomposition, they can persist in nature for long periods and can be difficult to completely break down and recycle. Conventional waste management, such as landfilling and incineration, also poses risks to the environment.  

Now, the researchers are presenting an alternative solution to help curb pollution. For example, by measuring how much carbon dioxide their system would pump out compared to conventional processes, findings revealed it could reduce carbon emissions by up to 45%. 

Their project’s design is just one of many in the chemical sector being driven by the urgent need for more sustainable technologies, said Shekhar Shinde, co-author of the study and a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State.

In this study’s case, their work could help drastically reduce society’s dependence on fossil fuels. 

“There has been a drastic shift in terms of what was done before and what people are trying to do now in terms of decarbonizing research,” he said. 

While earlier technologies could only filter biomass waste and plastics separately, this team’s technology also has the potential to handle multiple types of materials at once by continuously blending the conditions needed to convert them, noted the study. 

Once the team’s simulations yield more data, they eventually hope to test the system’s market capabilities by conducting experiments over a longer time frame with other unique components. 

“Expanding the process to include the municipal solid waste that we get from recycling centers is our next priority,” Kudva said. “The work in the lab is still going on with respect to commercializing this technology and decarbonizing the industry.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Rushikesh K. Joshi, Tanay A. Jawdekar, Sudeshna Gun, Sonu Kumar, Ashin A Sunny, Darien Kulchytsky and Zhuo Cheng. The study was supported by Buckeye Precious Plastic.

As more than 2 billion people around the world are estimated to lack access to clean drinking water, improving conventional ways to collect such a valuable resource would make it significantly more attainable for water-scarce regions, said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 

“You can survive three minutes without air, three weeks without food, but only three days without water,” said LaRocco. “But with it, you can begin to solve a lot of problems, like national security, mental health or sanitation, just by improving the accessibility of clean drinking water.”

Whereas many existing water harvesting technologies are large, energy-intensive and slow, this team’s device is unique due to elastocaloric cooling, which uses materials that can reduce energy use, size and complexity. This design is what also allowed their prototype to become portable enough to fit inside a backpack, said LaRocco. 

Researchers compared their creation with a dehumidifier that operates using desiccant wheels, rotating cylinders lined with hydrophilic materials that work to trap and remove humidity from the surrounding airflow. They tested the performance of each device in sessions of 30 minutes each, evaluating their energy consumption, heat generation and water-harvesting efficiency.

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies.

The trial’s results revealed significant differences in power consumption and highlighted what conditions their prototype might be best suited for. For example, said John Simonis, co-author of the study and an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering, the humidity level of the region where their device is used could influence the effectiveness of its water collection capabilities. 

“Compared to the traditional desiccant wheel system, our system has the ability to scale more dynamically to fit the needs of the environment,” said Simonis. “Because our device is more modular, there’s room for a lot of adaptability.”

The authors noted that places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Haiti, and even Ohio are a few of the places where the standard humidity would fall just right enough for their prototype to achieve maximum efficiency. 

The water produced from their device is readily drinkable, said Simonis, but because their device is also made with 3D printed materials that can degrade over time, must be heavily filtered to limit the amount of microplastics someone could ingest if they drank it immediately. 

According to statistics provided by the United Nations, only about 0.5% of Earth’s water is freshwater and safe for human consumption. Environmental changes caused by war, pollution and climate change also remain risk factors for an ongoing global water crisis. 

Because natural disasters and international emergencies will continue to exacerbate these issues, it’s imperative to find ways to creatively harvest water to support marginalized populations, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and associate professor of practice in electrical and computer engineering.

That said, being able to ensure consistency of devices that can harvest a renewable resource out of thin air will help make the process both more economical and more feasible, the study notes. It’s a goal that if achieved, will impact every facet of life on Earth, said LaRocco. 

“We’re hoping that clean water for the rest of the world isn’t just a pipe dream,” he said. 

Using the team’s models, it is possible for the public to experiment with creating a dehumidifier of their own. But while their prototype is as of now meant for individual use, in the future, it could be easily optimized to care for the needs of a household or larger community, said Simonis. 

“It is possible to develop an incredibly large version of our prototype,” he said. “It could extract as much water in a limited amount of time and get the same energy efficiency as somebody who may have a smaller device who’s running theirs continuously.”

Vidhaath Vedati of Ohio State was also a co-author. 

A group of College of Engineering senior capstone students and faculty at The Ohio State University, along with a team of NASA engineers, are developing an alternative – a robotic laser welding machine that can manufacture and join materials in space. The research project is funded by the Ohio Federal Research Network which is managed by Parallax Advanced Research.  

However, to accurately test the machine, their research would have to go to new heights, literally.  

During the first week of classes this semester, Ohio State’s LUNAR Weld team traveled to Santa Maria, California, to test the machine’s capability in microgravity through parabolic flight, in which an aircraft flies up and down at 45-degree angles to reproduce gravity-free conditions. 

Those brief weightless moments simulated a space environment in which the team was able to conduct a series of tests on several materials commonly found in spacecraft: aluminum, titanium and stainless steel.  

The collaboration began in 2021, when NASA reached out to Welding Engineering Professors Antonio Ramirez and Boyd Panton to begin development on this groundbreaking technology.  

“We started with five capstone students and an old vacuum chamber loaned to us from NASA Langley,” said Ramirez. “This has been one of the most rewarding projects of my career. These [students] are the people who will develop the technology to make robotic laser welding in space possible.” 

Eugene Choi was one of the students on the first capstone team as an undergraduate in 2021. He is continuing to work on the project while pursuing a PhD in welding engineering.  

“This is a very big project, and we couldn’t have done it with just one or two people. We needed people from different majors, such as electrical, mechanical and material sciences engineering,” said Choi. “Everyone coming together and making this work has been pretty amazing – if we didn’t have any one of them, we wouldn’t have been able to do this.”

The complete Ohio State student team to make the trip were Choi, fellow welding engineering graduate students Aaron Brimmer and Will McAuley, senior mechanical engineering student Grant Smith, and recent electrical and computer science engineering graduate Sarah Huetter. 

Together, the team worked countless hours leading up to the trip to make additions to the machine’s hardware and software in preparation for flight, along with meeting with NASA engineers multiple times a week to provide updates. 

“The collaboration on this project has been amazing – one second you’re a college student, and another you’re working on something incredibly important for NASA,” said Huetter. “I really liked how we all had our own specializations within the project.”  

After two separate flights consisting of 70 parabolas, the team was able to conduct 69 successful tests, producing valuable samples and data for further analysis.  

“The fact these parabolic flights went near perfectly was by far one of the most rewarding, and relieving, moments of my life,” said Brimmer. “With this first flight under our belt, I’m eagerly looking forward to more opportunities to work with our many collaborators on more parabolic flights.” 

Now, the group is back at Ohio State’s Starlab-George Washington Carver Science Park Payload and Analog Research Facility (PARF), analyzing the data and preparing for more parabolic flights to advance this critical technology. 

This alarming educational gap may be due in part to a mismatch between the mathematics preparation that many undergraduate students have and the math requirements for STEM students in introductory physics courses, said Geraldin​​e Cochran, an associate professor of physics at The Ohio State University. 

To help solve this issue, Cochran, whose research revolves around improving and expanding access to undergraduate and graduate physics education, was recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a project aimed at transforming introductory physics courses to help broaden participation in STEM. 

“Nationally, people are rethinking college admissions processes to support every student, especially at public institutions,” Cochran said. “The models I’m trying to document and evaluate are creating physics courses that are really aimed at supporting all enrolled students, regardless of math preparation.”

Her project, titled “INCLUDES Network Connector: A Network to Facilitate Transforming Introductory Physics Courses to Support All Students,” will seek to create physics courses that reduce course-specific math requirements for students by integrating quantitative literacy, a method that involves interpreting numerical information and applying it to real-world examples to solve scientific problems, and in-context math skills. 

NSF connector awards are typically centered around research that relies on shared visions, leadership, communication and scalability to help drive systemic change in education. 

In this case, Cochran plans to build a national community of instructors and researchers interested in making systemic changes to undergraduate physics education. Because a one-size-fits-all model of teaching doesn’t work well, Cochran’s project will document, evaluate and redesign introductory physics courses of various styles to better fit the needs of students. 

To investigate the efficacy of these material adjustments, project members will conduct a mixed-methods study to compare long-term student success through traditional teaching versus the newly transformed models. This process will include analyzing the next-year performances of those in sophomore and junior courses as well as the success rate for students of various demographics. 

Future probes will also encourage participants to share how their experiences with an altered physics sequence impacted their physics, math and engineering identity and if they have any reflections on the course experience post-graduation. 

The plan builds on work already done at the University of Washington, Rutgers University and Lamar University, whose programs sought to foster policies that support students from all backgrounds at the undergraduate level by allowing students to incorporate their real-world knowledge of physics in traditional assessments and created additional time to be mentored by approachable physics faculty members and advanced undergraduates.

One of the ways the project will seek to do something similar at Ohio State is by incorporating skills from algebra, trigonometry and calculus into the physics class. 

“One of the reasons that so many people are resistant to math is because they don’t understand its usefulness,” said Cochran. “They don’t see it in context, but physics can illuminate the real world and connect problems you want to solve.”

Funding from the award will support the creation of additional physics sequences within three participating universities’ physics departments. At Ohio State, one such physics course with the new curriculum, which will be taught by Cochran, will begin this coming fall. 

Cochran, who has worked with Ohio State’s Thomas Gramila, Lisa Barclay and Mary Leist to better understand students’ current needs, hopes to collaborate with other members of the Ohio State community engaged in similar work. For instance, because many individuals in the class will be majoring in engineering, Cochran will also collaborate with Ohio State’s CARE Office to support the development of students’ engineering identities. 

“Regardless of their math background, all accepted students should have the opportunity to succeed in physics and enjoy themselves while doing it,” Cochran said.   

Their findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reveal that by combining direct air carbon dioxide capture technologies (DACC) and geothermal energy, large-scale carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal systems could potentially be supplied with enough energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and safely store it underground. 

Emitted when humans burn fossil fuels for things like heat, electricity and transportation, carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities in the atmosphere. Because this accumulation is one of the main drivers of climate change, efforts to address the excess have focused on methods for extracting carbon dioxide, either at the original source of emission or directly from the air. 

“Carbon removal technologies are especially helpful in mitigating climate change because we can capture types of emissions that would be hard to cap in other ways,” said Martina Leveni, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “So we thought, could we combine technologies that could be beneficial to one another to meet this goal more efficiently?” 

Typical DACC methods can be expensive and require energy to operate, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, said Leveni. But she set out to investigate if it was possible to integrate the recycled carbon dioxide into the system to make it more efficient.

Called Direct Air CO₂ Capture with  CO₂ Utilization and Storage (DACCUS), Leveni’s proposed method uses the natural heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface within deep saline aquifers – underground geologic formations containing sedimentary rock and saltwater – to continuously produce renewable energy for DACC systems. The carbon dioxide captured from the air is isolated in these geologic formations, and part of it can be circulated to extract the geothermal heat. This circulation brings the heat to the surface, where it can either be used directly or converted to electricity to power the system. 

Such a system requires a lot of energy, which can often mean more pollution. But it’s an issue their work accounts for, said Jeff Bielicki, co-author of the study and an associate professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State. 

Geothermal energy in general has a very small carbon footprint, and this particular approach is even lower because it uses carbon dioxide, Bielicki said.  

To demonstrate the potential of their system, the researchers developed a case study of how it might work in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. They determined that DACCUS could be deployed there to great success, due to it being well-known for having ample geothermal resources.  

“The Gulf Coast also has the right geology to safely put carbon dioxide underground and a decent enough heat flux that its geothermal energy could be sufficient to use,” said Bielicki. “These characteristics are very favorable.”

In order for their system to work, the geothermal heat extraction system first has to be primed, much like a car engine. That takes about five years of storing carbon from point sources, such as factories that emit carbon dioxide, before a DACCUS facility begins extracting the greenhouse gas from the air. Assuming their system could be operational by 2025, the study suggests its method could start removing carbon by 2030. The researchers estimate there could be as many as 25 DACCUS systems set up in just one of the 27 geologic formations in the Gulf Coast by 2050. 

Nevertheless, this study offers hope for our climate future by emphasizing the importance of fusing new ideas and concepts together to better reach a faraway goal, said Leveni. The study suggests that if implemented, this team’s work could even help society meet the current goal of limiting Earth’s warming, while averting some of the worst consequences of climate change. 

“New technologies can enable one another, and in integrating them, we can tackle climate change,” said Leveni. “There’s a lot of work to be done to take into account technological readiness and the policies needed to make that research happen.” 

The study was supported by the Sloan Foundation and The Ohio State LEGACY Postdoctoral Scholars Program.

In the three decades since it was first released into the public domain, the world wide web has become an incredibly intricate, dynamic system. Yet because internet function is now so integral to society’s well-being, its complexity also makes it considerably harder to navigate.  

Today there are billions of websites available to help access information or communicate with others, and many tasks on the internet can take more than a dozen steps to complete. That’s why Yu Su, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State, said their work, which uses information taken from live sites to create web agents — online AI helpers — is a step toward making the digital world a less confusing place.

“For some people, especially those with disabilities, it’s not easy for them to browse the internet,” said Su. “We rely more and more on the computing world in our daily life and work, but there are increasingly a lot of barriers to that access, which, to some degree, widens the disparity.” 

The study was presented in December at the Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), a flagship conference for AI and machine learning research. 

By taking advantage of the power of large language models, the agent works similarly to how humans behave when browsing the web, said Su. The Ohio State team showed that their model was able to understand the layout and functionality of different websites using only its ability to process and predict language.  

Researchers started the process by creating Mind2Web, the first dataset for generalist web agents. Though previous efforts to build web agents focused on toy simulated websites, Mind2Web fully embraces the complex and dynamic nature of real-world websites and emphasizes an agent’s ability of generalizing to entirely new websites it has never seen before. Su said that much of their success is due to their agent’s ability to handle the internet’s ever-evolving learning curve. The team lifted over 2,000 open-ended tasks from 137 different real-world websites, which they then used to train the agent.  

Some of the tasks included booking one-way and round-trip international flights, following celebrity accounts on Twitter, browsing comedy films from 1992 to 2017 streaming on Netflix, and even scheduling car knowledge tests at the DMV. Many of the tasks were very complex – for example, booking one of the international flights used in the model would take 14 actions. Such effortless versatility allows for diverse coverage on a number of websites, and opens up a new landscape for future models to explore and learn in an autonomous fashion, said Su.  

“It’s only become possible to do something like this because of the recent development of large language models like ChatGPT,” said Su. Since the chatbot became public in November 2022, millions of users have used it to automatically generate content, from poetry and jokes to cooking advice and medical diagnoses.  

Still, because one website could contain thousands of raw HTML elements, it would be too costly to feed so much information to a single large language model. To address this gap, the study also introduces a framework called MindAct, a two-pronged agent that uses both small and large language models to carry out these tasks. The team found that by using this strategy, MindAct significantly outperforms other common modeling strategies and is able to understand various concepts at a decent level. 

With more fine-tuning, the study points out, the model could likely be used in tandem with both open-and closed-source large language models such as Flan-T5 or GPT-4. However, their work does highlight an increasingly relevant ethical problem in creating flexible artificial intelligence, said Su. While it could certainly serve as a helpful agent to humans surfing the web, the model could also be used to enhance systems like ChatGPT and turn the entire internet into an unprecedentedly powerful tool, said Su.  

“On the one hand, we have great potential to improve our efficiency and to allow us to focus on the most creative part of our work,” he said. “But on the other hand, there’s tremendous potential for harm.” For instance, autonomous agents able to translate online steps into the real world could influence society by taking potentially dangerous actions, such as misusing financial information or spreading misinformation. 

“We should be extremely cautious about these factors and make a concerted effort to try to mitigate them,” said Su. But as AI research continues to evolve, he notes that it’s likely society will experience major growth in the commercial use and performance of generalist web agents in the years to come, especially as the technology has already gained so much popularity in the public eye.  

“Throughout my career, my goal has always been trying to bridge the gap between human users and the computing world,” said Su. “That said, the real value of this tool is that it will really save people time and make the impossible possible.” 

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Lab and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Other co-authors were Xiang Deng, Yu Gu, Boyuan Zheng, Shijie Chen, Samuel Stevens, Boshi Wang and Huan Sun, all of Ohio State.  

William Ausich, a professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University who has studied paleontology for over five decades, believes so. 

In a letter published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ausich offered commentary on a study published in the same issue on a new soft robot that may help researchers in the field test their hypotheses regarding how long-extinct creatures might have maneuvered through their environments. 

“Being able to test how these organisms once operated is really important for understanding paleoecology and the history of life on Earth,” said Ausich. “Making soft robots is a very innovative new approach for us to accomplish that goal.”

Ausich discussed a study led by Richard Desatnik and Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University, and Zach J. Patterson from Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The researchers developed a soft robot prototype, named “Rhombot,” which is a biomimetic – meaning it uses concepts from nature to solve complex problems.

The Rhombot was modeled after a genus of echinoderms called Pleurocystites. Echinoderms generally refer to invertebrates like starfish, sea cucumbers and sand dollars that possess distinct internal skeletons, but the Pleurocystites are extinct organisms that have a flattened body with two large feeding appendages that move along the seafloor.

Unfortunately, there are no known pleurocystitid fossils whose imprints could reveal more about the mechanics of their movement, so interpreting these animals’ life habits has been restricted to investigating their skeletal morphology, said Ausich. 

Now, with the rise of paleobionics – a field that combines advances in robotics with tried-and-true paleontological principles – researchers are beginning to fill in those deep gaps within the fossil record.

According to Ausich, the creators of Rhombot began by mimicking the special connective tissue echinoderms have and setting up various theoretical and physical simulations for the Rhombot to successfully move across a contact-rich surface meant to represent an ancient, hard seafloor. 

The letter then notes that the authors found their experiments confirmed one of researchers’ previous predictions about the organisms’ motions, as the robot moved in an anterior direction with its feeding appendages first as a result of the movement of its stem, or the wide tail that extends from its back. The team also learned that Rhombot’s speed was maximized by the sweeping gait of its tail and that real-life specimens with certain body-to-tail ratios might have developed an evolutionary trend for increased speed.

These findings are particularly informative for modeling extinct organisms for which current scientists have no modern analog to compare them to, said Ausich. It’s so innovative that the letter suggests that Rhombot and other soft robotic technologies like it could also be utilized to analyze behavioral data from animals in other taxa, as well as evaluate evolutionary changes from one ancient form to the next.

Because scientists are working on a timescale of millions of years, having a clearer picture of the evolutionary puzzle could provide clues into why some species lived and others died off. 

“Extinction is a big issue on Earth today, and there’s only so much biologists can do to mitigate it,” said Ausich. “But by studying what came before and after extinction and understanding the lifestyles of the organisms that worked or didn’t work back then, we can actually provide  a perspective on survival that nobody else can.” 

And it’s possible that these new perspectives and theories could shine a light on what kinds of species will survive the next great extinction event. 

Although the robot is still a long while away from mass development, it could one day serve as an educational tool, animating long-gone prehistoric beings before researchers’ very eyes. Something like this would be especially useful for getting younger generations to fall in love with a lesser-known side of paleontology – that is, the side without dinosaurs, Ausich said. 

“To be able to show a child or student how a specimen lying in rock might have actually moved – it just excites the imagination,” said Ausich.

Continual learning is when a computer is trained to continuously learn a sequence of tasks, using its accumulated knowledge from old tasks to better learn new tasks. 

Yet one major hurdle scientists still need to overcome to achieve such heights is learning how to circumvent the machine learning equivalent of memory loss – a process which in AI agents is known as “catastrophic forgetting.” As artificial neural networks are trained on one new task after another, they tend to lose the information gained from those previous tasks, an issue that could become problematic as society comes to rely on AI systems more and more, said Ness Shroff, an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

“As automated driving applications or other robotic systems are taught new things, it’s important that they don’t forget the lessons they’ve already learned for our safety and theirs,” said Shroff. “Our research delves into the complexities of continuous learning in these artificial neural networks, and what we found are insights that begin to bridge the gap between how a machine learns and how a human learns.”

Researchers found that in the same way that people might struggle to recall contrasting facts about similar scenarios but remember inherently different situations with ease, artificial neural networks can recall information better when faced with diverse tasks in succession, instead of ones that share similar features, Shroff said. 

The team, including Ohio State postdoctoral researchers Sen Lin and Peizhong Ju and professors Yingbin Liang and Shroff, will present their research this month at the 40th annual International Conference on Machine Learning in Honolulu, Hawaii, a flagship conference in machine learning. 

While it can be challenging to teach autonomous systems to exhibit this kind of dynamic, lifelong learning, possessing such capabilities would allow scientists to scale up machine learning algorithms at a faster rate as well as easily adapt them to handle evolving environments and unexpected situations. Essentially, the goal for these systems would be for them to one day mimic the learning capabilities of humans.

Traditional machine learning algorithms are trained on data all at once, but this team’s findings showed that factors like task similarity, negative and positive correlations, and even the order in which an algorithm is taught a task matter in the length of time an artificial network retains certain knowledge. 

For instance, to optimize an algorithm’s memory, said Shroff, dissimilar tasks should be taught early on in the continual learning process. This method expands the network’s capacity for new information and improves its ability to subsequently learn more similar tasks down the line. 

Their work is particularly important as understanding the similarities between machines and the human brain could pave the way for a deeper understanding of AI, said Shroff. 

“Our work heralds a new era of intelligent machines that can learn and adapt like their human counterparts,” he said. 

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office.

Researchers found that by listening to the signals of eight LEO satellites for about 10 minutes, their algorithm could achieve unprecedented accuracy in locating a stationary receiver on the ground and was able to converge on it with an error of only about 5.8 meters.

The research, led by Zak Kassas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University and director of the Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN), was presented last week at the IEEE/ION Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) 2023 conference in Monterey, California. Along with Ohio State PhD students Sharbel Kozhaya and Haitham Kanj, the paper, which demonstrated the first ever exploitation of unknown OneWeb LEO satellite signals, won the conference’s Best Student Paper award. 

The researchers did not need assistance from the satellite operators to use the signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites – only to publicly available information related to the satellites’ downlink transmission frequency and a rough estimate of the satellites’ location.

From transportation to communication systems to the power grid and emergency services, nearly every aspect of modern society relies on positioning, navigation and timing data from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), or GPS, that orbit the Earth. Despite this, because GPS system signals are weak and susceptible to interference, they can often become unreliable in certain places such as indoor environments or in deep urban canyons. In addition, GNSS signals are spoofable, which poses serious security risks in safety-critical applications, such as aviation.

In the long term, such complications could lead to a number of navigational and cybersecurity issues, especially as virtually all of our current systems rely heavily on GPS, Kassas said. Technologies on the rise, such as autonomous vehicles, he noted, are beginning to amplify the limitations of our current GNSS systems.

“It’s becoming more pressing to find civilian and military alternatives to GPS, whether as a backup or in the case when GPS isn’t there whatsoever,” said Kassas. 

This study builds on previous research by Kassas’ lab that solely used six SpaceX satellite signals to pinpoint a location within 10 meters of accuracy, which was recently reduced to 6.5 meters.

“The Starlink study scratched the surface of what is possible,” said Kassas.

His work suggests utilizing signals from LEO satellites as an alternative for humans’ positioning, navigation and timing needs, as they reside about 20 times closer to Earth compared to GNSS satellites, which reside in medium Earth orbit – a little more than 20,000 kilometers above the planet. According to Kassas, the technology could potentially usher in a new era of positioning, navigation and timing. 

“We are witnessing a space renaissance. Tens of thousands of LEO satellites will be launched into space over the next decade, leading to what is referred to as mega-constellations,” he said. “Signals transmitted by these satellites will revolutionize numerous technologies and benefit scientific inquiry in fields such as remote sensing.” 

What also makes the study so different from all other attempts at creating an alternative to GPS is, unlike previous studies, this algorithm doesn’t reverse engineer the signal, said Kassas.  

“Our algorithm is agnostic to the LEO constellation,” said Kassas. “Our receiver can listen to virtually any satellite signal, trains on the data it’s receiving on-the-fly, then deciphers certain features of the signal in a way where we can reconstruct what they are transmitting into location data.” To demonstrate the team’s new approach, the team applied the algorithm to four different LEO satellite constellations: Starlink, OneWeb, Orbcomm and Iridium. The algorithm cracked all these signals, with virtually no prior knowledge about what is being transmitted.

Additionally, their algorithm is so sophisticated that the researchers were also able to estimate where the satellites are in space. In order to use the satellite to position ourselves, we need to know where the satellite is located. “That’s a very challenging problem because LEO satellites don’t normally broadcast their location, and our publicly available estimates of where they are is off by a few kilometers,” said Kassas.

During a stationary experiment to test how the signals worked as an accurate positioning system, researchers set a ground receiver's initial position estimate to the roof of an engineering parking structure at the University of California, Irvine, a spot more than 2,000 miles away from its actual position: the roof of Ohio State’s Electroscience Laboratory (ESL) in Columbus, Ohio. Using the satellite constellations to guess where exactly in the country the receiver actually was, the algorithm was only off by about 5 meters. 

In another experiment, the researchers tested how the algorithm would fare on a moving vehicle, and mounted the receiver onto the top of a car. First, they used today’s navigation technology, which relies on a GPS receiver coupled with an inertial navigation system (INS). They navigated for about 100 meters before cutting GPS off, after which they drove for nearly a kilometer. They found that by relying on today’s GPS-INS system, they were said to be located about 500 meters away from their true location, but with their algorithm, they were found about 4.4 meters away. “Our result showed that our system is getting close to what you can do with GPS today,” said Kassas.

Although a patent has been filed on the algorithm, the team does plan to continue evolving all of the algorithm’s technical abilities, said Kassas.

“GPS is a very mature system that we trust with our lives,” he said. “To be able to trust new types of signals with our lives, there will have to be more studies on their accuracy, integrity and continuity.”

Other Ohio State co-authors were Joe Saroufim, Samer Hayek and Mohammad Neinavaie. The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Transportation and the National Science Foundation.

They found that only 6% of 178 countries provide for all their citizens in an ecologically sustainable way in both carbon sequestration and water consumption.

The study found that while 67% of nations operate safely and sustainably in regard to water use, only 9% do in regard to carbon sequestration, or reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. 

The study showed the United States was among the majority of countries that was able to safely and justly provide water to its citizens. While it provides for its citizens in regard to carbon use, it is not doing so in an ecologically sustainable manner.

The study was published recently in the journal One Earth.

For a country to be self-sufficient, its population needs access to food, water and energy, resources that can often only be provided by the surrounding ecosystem. Yet because human activities tend to cause unintended side effects like global warming or ozone depletion, said Bhavik Bakshi, co-author of the study and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State, it’s imperative that experts look for ways to develop society in an ecologically sustainable manner. At the same time, in order to be socially just, countries need to secure resources to meet the basic needs of all of its citizens. 

“Most engineering disciplines traditionally ignore the role that nature plays in supporting our activities and more broadly, our well-being,“ said Bakshi, who has been working to advance the concept of sustainable engineering – the practice of designing products or systems with nature-positive decisions in mind – for decades. “In this study, we sought to ensure we could quantify these challenges in a way engineers could use to make better decisions.” 

This study’s framework was created using a system called the framework of planetary boundaries and the concept of a “safe and just operating space,” which identifies a country’s ecological ceiling, or the scope human activities must work within to reduce the risk of causing irreparable damage to the Earth.

Ideally, human activities should exist between the limits of a society’s ecological ceiling and its social foundation, a boundary that describes the resources necessary to avoid critical human deprivation of food, water or energy, said Bakshi. 

“If you are exceeding the ecological ceiling, then you're not sustainable from an environmental perspective,” he said. “If you’re below the social foundation, then you’re not meeting basic human needs, and that can be frustrating from an equity point of view.”

Using recent water and carbon sequestration data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other international agencies, Bakshi and his co-author and former PhD student Yazeed Aleissa analyzed how the needs of 178 nations around the world stacked up against their regions’ ecosystems. 

The team found that the majority of countries emit far more than their national ecosystem can handle in terms of carbon, but tend to operate close to their water supply limits.

Sometimes countries do not have much of a choice. Findings showed that 37% of countries do not have the ability to provide for their citizens in a safe and just way in terms of carbon sequestration, and 10% lack the ability to do that with regard to water.

While the socioeconomic status of countries is often related to how well they can provide for their citizens in a sustainable manner, it doesn’t always work that way, the researchers said. “There are rich countries that are doing well and there are also some poor countries that are doing well, but the reasons for their successes are very different,” Bakshi said. 

These differences often come down to how a nation deals with supply and demand.

Take Canada, a large, rich country with a relatively low population that has a large supply of natural capital like forests and lakes that can capture carbon. Because it has more than enough resources for its population, consumption levels would meet the safe and just limits of the framework.

On the other hand, poor countries such as Gabon have adequate natural capital to support more activities that improve human well-being, Bakshi said.

Other countries, such as those in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, cannot meet safe and just requirements for carbon because they lack vegetation to help carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon the country emits. Essentially, they need to rely more on carbon capture technologies and global trade.

Despite the study’s potentially bleak outlook, the researchers believe their work offers a glimmer of hope in combating the environmental risks of human development. The team’s results imply that many nations could secure the necessary resources they need to thrive at a much lower demand than current levels suggest.

One way to do this would be to adopt more renewable energy resources, introduce more plant-based diets into our food cycles, and change the way we produce certain goods and services to develop a sustainable circular economy instead of a linear one, said Bakshi. 

Furthermore, if implemented when considering future engineering projects, the study suggests the framework could be used to guide technology, policy and trade decisions to better assist nations to meet their needs in a more safe and just fashion.

“From a positive perspective, our work provides opportunities for engineers and other professions to innovate and come up with new ways of doing things right,” said Bakshi. “Whoever is going to figure that out is going to be the future of a more sustainable and just world.”