It may even repair damaged enamel and improve your oral microbiome. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Whitening your teeth often comes at a financial and physical cost. Many of today's most popular products including gels, strips, and rinses rely on peroxide-based bleaching solutions. While effective, the chemical processes generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) compounds that not only destroy staining molecules--they can eventually erode tooth enamel .

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Oyster larvae that grow in water with traces of common drugs such as cocaine, ketamine, and fentanyl are slower swimmers that appear more stressed. This new research indicates that the common drugs do have an effect on oyster larvae that are found in contaminated water. The results were presented this week at the Society for Risk Analysis' annual conference and published in the journal All sorts of pharmaceuticals, from pain relievers to illegal drugs, can make it into the water supply via human excretion, manufacturing plants, or if they are flushed down the toilet . While that water does go through wastewater treatment, pharmaceuticals can pass right through.

Laboratory Automation (LA) has the potential to accelerate solid-state materials discovery by enabling continuous robotic operation without human intervention. While robotic systems have been developed for tasks such as powder grinding and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, fully automating powder handling at the milligram scale remains a significant challenge due to the complex flow dynamics of powders and the diversity of laboratory tasks. To address this challenge, this study proposes a novel, funnel-shaped, flexible robotic hand that preserves the softness and conical sheet designs in prior work while incorporating a controllable valve at the cone apex to enable precise, incremental dispensing of milligram-scale powder quantities. The hand is integrated with an external balance through a feedback control system based on a model of powder flow and online parameter identification. Experimental evaluations with glass beads, monosodium glutamate, and titanium dioxide demonstrated that 80% of the trials achieved an error within 2 mg, and the maximum error observed was approximately 20 mg across a target range of 20 mg to 3 g. In addition, by incorporating flow prediction models commonly used for hoppers and performing online parameter identification, the system is able to adapt to variations in powder dynamics. Compared to direct PID control, the proposed model-based control significantly improved both accuracy and convergence speed. These results highlight the potential of the proposed system to enable efficient and flexible powder weighing, with scalability toward larger quantities and applicability to a broad range of laboratory automation tasks.

Abstract-- Robotic automation is accelerating scientific discovery by reducing manual effort in laboratory workflows. However, precise manipulation of powders remains challenging, particularly in tasks such as transport that demand accuracy and stability. We propose a trajectory optimisation framework for powder transport in laboratory settings, which integrates differentiable physics simulation for accurate modelling of granular dynamics, low-dimensional skill-space parameterisation to reduce optimisation complexity, and a curriculum-based strategy that progressively refines task competence over long horizons. This formulation enables end-to-end optimisation of contact-rich robot trajectories while maintaining stability and convergence efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior task success rates and stability compared to the reinforcement learning baseline.

Centuries-old genetic material can solve historical mysteries, from lost species to what killed Napoleon's army. A glowing, digital double helix represents the billions of base pairs scientists analyze when sequencing ancient DNA. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 1976, workers excavating a tunnel for the Toronto subway system came across some very old bones. Using radiocarbon dating, researchers determined the partial cranium and fragments of antlers were roughly 12,000 years old.

Over 100 volunteers sampled meatballs made with the nutritious fruit. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Finely ground, freeze-dried apple leftovers may become a sustainable secret ingredient in many meat dishes. In recent taste tests at Cornell University, more than 100 volunteers could barely tell the difference between 100-percent pure meatballs and alternatives featuring as much as 20 percent fruit waste. As the food researchers behind this culinary concoction explained in their study published in the, the supplemental additive may also help close a glaring gap in the food industry's circular loop.

Autonomous manipulation of powders remains a significant challenge for robotic automation in scientific laboratories. The inherent variability and complex physical interactions of powders in flow, coupled with variability in laboratory conditions necessitates adaptive automation. This work introduces FLIP, a flowability-informed powder weighing framework designed to enhance robotic policy learning for granular material handling. Our key contribution lies in using material flowability, quantified by the angle of repose, to optimise physics-based simulations through Bayesian inference. This yields material-specific simulation environments capable of generating accurate training data, which reflects diverse powder behaviours, for training "robot chemists". Building on this, FLIP integrates quantified flowability into a curriculum learning strategy, fostering efficient acquisition of robust robotic policies by gradually introducing more challenging, less flowable powders. We validate the efficacy of our method on a robotic powder weighing task under real-world laboratory conditions. Experimental results show that FLIP with a curriculum strategy achieves a low dispensing error of 2.12 +/- 1.53 mg, outperforming methods that do not leverage flowability data, such as domain randomisation (6.11 +/- 3.92 mg). These results demonstrate FLIP's improved ability to generalise to previously unseen, more cohesive powders and to new target masses.

Automating small-scale experiments in materials science presents challenges due to the heterogeneous nature of experimental setups. This study introduces the SCU-Hand (Soft Conical Universal Robot Hand), a novel end-effector designed to automate the task of scooping powdered samples from various container sizes using a robotic arm. The SCU-Hand employs a flexible, conical structure that adapts to different container geometries through deformation, maintaining consistent contact without complex force sensing or machine learning-based control methods. Its reconfigurable mechanism allows for size adjustment, enabling efficient scooping from diverse container types. By combining soft robotics principles with a sheet-morphing design, our end-effector achieves high flexibility while retaining the necessary stiffness for effective powder manipulation. We detail the design principles, fabrication process, and experimental validation of the SCU-Hand. Experimental validation showed that the scooping capacity is about 20% higher than that of a commercial tool, with a scooping performance of more than 95% for containers of sizes between 67 mm to 110 mm. This research contributes to laboratory automation by offering a cost-effective, easily implementable solution for automating tasks such as materials synthesis and characterization processes.

Robots hold great promise for performing repetitive or hazardous tasks, but achieving human-like dexterity, especially in contact-rich and dynamic environments, remains challenging. Rigid robots, which rely on position or velocity control, often struggle with maintaining stable contact and applying consistent force in force-intensive tasks. Learning from Demonstration has emerged as a solution, but tasks requiring intricate maneuvers, such as powder grinding, present unique difficulties. This paper introduces Diffusion Policies For Compliant Manipulation (DIPCOM), a novel diffusion-based framework designed for compliant control tasks. By leveraging generative diffusion models, we develop a policy that predicts Cartesian end-effector poses and adjusts arm stiffness to maintain the necessary force. Our approach enhances force control through multimodal distribution modeling, improves the integration of diffusion policies in compliance control, and extends our previous work by demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world tasks. We present a detailed comparison between our framework and existing methods, highlighting the advantages and best practices for deploying diffusion-based compliance control.

Information extraction, e.g., attribute value extraction, has been extensively studied and formulated based only on text. However, many attributes can benefit from image-based extraction, like color, shape, pattern, among others. The visual modality has long been underutilized, mainly due to multimodal annotation difficulty. In this paper, we aim to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute information extractor. The cross-modality integration faces several unique challenges: (C1) images and textual descriptions are loosely paired intra-sample and inter-samples; (C2) images usually contain rich backgrounds that can mislead the prediction; (C3) weakly supervised labels from textual-established extractors are biased for multimodal training. We present PV2TEA, an encoder-decoder architecture equipped with three bias reduction schemes: (S1) Augmented label-smoothed contrast to improve the cross-modality alignment for loosely-paired image and text; (S2) Attention-pruning that adaptively distinguishes the visual foreground; (S3) Two-level neighborhood regularization that mitigates the label textual bias via reliability estimation. Empirical results on real-world e-Commerce datasets demonstrate up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relatively) F1 increase over unimodal baselines.