It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, September 04, 2025
Researchers design robot that can find, pick hidden strawberries
PULLMAN, Wash. -- Strawberries are delicate and hard to harvest—easily bruised and often hidden under a canopy of leaves.
This creates headaches for scientists trying to design robotic harvesters. Now a Washington State University-led team has designed one that combines an artificial-intelligence vision system, soft silicone “fingers,” and a fan that gently move leaves out of the way to get at hidden fruit.
Experiments in the lab and in outdoor fields showed that the harvester correctly detected strawberries 80% of the time, on average, and could classify whether the berries were hidden 93% of the time.
The lead author was Zixuan He, who completed the work and earned his PhD at WSU before taking a position as a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. Co-authors included Manoj Karkee, a former WSU professor studying agricultural automation engineering who recently took a position at Cornell University; and Qin Zhang, professor emeritus and former director of WSU’s Center for Precision & Automated Agricultural Systems in Prosser.
The $20 billion strawberry market is projected to grow by 6% a year over the next decade, but labor shortages beleaguer the industry, driving up costs and potentially limiting harvests.
University and private researchers have pursued robotic harvesting technology for years, but the efforts to make them commercially workable have so far fallen short. Among the problems: many of the berries on strawberry plants are hidden under leaves, which makes it hard for robotic systems to identify and pick the fruit.
“Novel approaches like these are essential to improve the fruit accessibility and picking efficiency, and thus enhance the practical applicability of harvesting robots,” Karkee said.
Much of the previous work on robotic harvesting has focused on greenhouse-grown berries or “table-top” systems, in which the berries droop below the plant, making occlusion less of a problem and allowing simpler robotic harvesters to successfully pick the fruit.
The WSU team developed a more complex harvester targeting conditions in the field. The robot—a four-wheeled cart with a platform for the computer system that rolls above the row of strawberries—uses a vision system that applies artificial intelligence methods to locate the fruit
“We have a 3-D camera that takes two images – one is the color image and one shows the depth,” Zixuan He said. “We then use the machine learning model to find the strawberry based on the fruit feature information matched to the depth information, and then we know its location.”
The harvester calculates how the robotic arms and grippers should approach and pick the fruit. A key feature is its fan system, which blows a steady stream of air through tubes located near soft, silicone grippers.
The airstreams move the leaves for the grippers to reach the strawberry. The picking efficiency of the system was substantially improved by the fan system. In tests without the fans, the harvesters picked 58% of the ripe fruit; using the fan improved the picking rate to 74%.
Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the system would be important to make it work in the fields. In particular, the speed would need to be improved—it took the harvester 20 seconds, on average, to identify and pick a berry with the fan system.
Zixuan He said that the fan system could be useful in developing robotic harvesters for other crops where occlusion is a challenge, such as grapes. He said that it is unlikely that robotic harvesters would fully replace human workers in the foreseeable future—it’s more likely that strawberry growers could use robotic systems to supplement human labor.
“Right now, it won’t totally replace the manual labor but it could be a very promising supplement when you don’t have enough people in the field,” he said.
University of Iowa researchers outfitted an undewater vehicle to mimic how an octopus uses its skin to move more easily in the water. The tests with an underwater vehicle with raised coils had less drag and more lift.
University of Iowa researchers have reported a key advance in the ease of flow and maneuverability for underwater vehicles.
In a new study, the research team outfitted the wings of an underwater hydrofoil with a series of coiled spires that, when activated, would unspool, reducing drag and creating more lift for the craft as water current was moved around it.
The technology comes from the lab of Caterina Lamuta, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering, who has been working on technology that mimics the skin, muscles, and tissue of an octopus. The goal is to build, and eventually deploy, underwater vehicles that move with ease in any underwater environment, with appendages that can reach into the smallest of spaces. The potential applications are numerous, ranging from inspecting undersea pipes to collecting deep-water specimens.
In this study, Lamuta’s research group demonstrated a proof of concept for the coiled spires, which they call twisted spiral artificial muscles. These synthetic coils are designed to mimic an octopus’ papillae muscles, which are located on the animal’s skin and can be uncoiled on a moment’s notice for camouflage and to aid movement when flow conditions change in the water.
The team modified a hydrofoil’s wings with two rows of four twisted spiral artificial muscles, each one powered by two tiny electrical motors, called actuators. In experiments with water moving at different speeds, the researchers report the hydrofoil generated a lift up to 30% and reduced drag by up to 10% during certain maneuvers. With the increased lift and reduced drag, the hydrofoil displaced the water more easily during different flow conditions, even when the craft was tilted steeply against the direction of water flow.
“This study can help make unmanned underwater vehicles more efficient, using low-cost artificial muscles that are bioinspired by the motion of octopus papillae muscles. It can help save energy and improve the portability and maneuverability of seafaring vehicles,” says Rabiu Mamman, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering and a graduate research assistant in IIHR Hydroscience & Engineering.
The authors say this is the first demonstration of an underwater flow control device powered by twisted artificial muscles.
Lamuta is the study’s corresponding author. Mamman is the paper’s first author. Thilina Weerakkody, a doctoral student in Lamuta’s lab, is a co-author.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research funded the research.
Caterina Lamuta, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Iowa, who is working on technology that mimics the skin, muscles, and tissue of an octopus that would be applied to underwater vehicles.
Researchers associated with a fictitious research network and funding source have collectively netted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money for current studies from the United States, Japan, Ireland, and other nations. That’s according to investigations led by Digital Science’s VP of Research Integrity, Dr Leslie McIntosh.
The results of her investigations raise serious concerns about the lack of accountability for those involved in questionable research publications.
“This example illustrates how weaknesses in research and publishing systems can be systematically exploited, so that researchers can game the system for their own benefit,” Dr McIntosh says.
While not naming the individual researchers involved, Dr McIntosh’s presentation was centered on a group known as the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network, a non-existent body listed on more than 120 research publications from 2019–2022 until being exposed as fictitious. These publications involved 331 unique authors and were associated with 232 organizations and institutions across 40 countries.
Research network raised multiple red flags
The Pharmakon Neuroscience Network functioned as a loosely organized collaboration of predominantly early-career researchers, such as postdoctoral and PhD students, whose publications included:
Funding acknowledgments with unverifiable organizations
Use of questionable or unverifiable institutional affiliations
Suspiciously large citations in a short timeframe
Globally connected despite a young publication age
“Despite clear concerns about the legitimacy of their work, only three papers have been formally retracted to date,” Dr McIntosh says.
Using Digital Science’s research solutions Dimensions and Altmetric, Dr McIntosh and colleagues have tracked the progress of the authors connected with this network.
“Once the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network was exposed as being fake in 2022, it no longer appeared on publications, but many of the researchers associated with it have continued to publish and attract significant funding for their work,” she says.
Millions in funding for current research
Of the initial 331 researchers associated with the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network’s publications, Dr McIntosh has established that more than 20 currently have funding either as a Principal Investigator or a Co-Principal Investigator from sources where the grant commenced in 2022 or later. During this time, those researchers have collectively been awarded the equivalent of at least US$6.5 million from seven countries: US, Japan, Ireland, France, Portugal, and Croatia, and an undisclosed sum from Russia.
One researcher with more than US$50 million in funding has authorship on one of the Pharmakon papers. It is not clear if he knowingly participated in the network or was part of a former student activity.
“Many of the researchers had grants before and after Pharmakon. This is legitimate, taxpayer money in most instances that are funding very unethical practices,” Dr McIntosh says.
“One aspect we need more time to vet is the possibility that a few of these researchers do not know they were authors on papers within this network. We are still completing this work.”
Of the funded researchers, five had never previously received funding for their research, but following their involvement with the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network they have since been awarded grants from the following sources ($US equivalent):
Science Foundation Ireland – $649,891
Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (Portugal) – $538,904 total
Croatian Science Foundation – $206,681
Russian Science Foundation – undisclosed sum
“Here we have evidence that some authors have secured legitimate funding, including large sums of taxpayers’ money, following their participation in questionable research and publication activity,” Dr McIntosh says.
“We can presume that their publication portfolio, no matter how it was obtained, helped in securing this funding from legitimate sources.”
Dr McIntosh says this case has implications across the research system and emphasizes the need for stronger verification, monitoring, and cooperation.
“Although most of these publications remain in circulation and have been cited widely, corrective actions have been limited. This highlights the challenge of addressing such networks once their work is embedded in the scholarly record,” she says.
Recommendations
Dr McIntosh recommends the following:
Oversight to be reinforced by requiring the use of verified institutional identifiers, such as GRID or ROR, in all publications to ensure affiliations are legitimate and traceable.
Transparency to be mandated through clearer author contribution statements and verified funding acknowledgments, creating a more reliable and accountable record of how research is conducted and supported.
Monitoring mechanisms should be improved by supporting the adoption of forensic scientometrics, which can detect unusual collaboration patterns or questionable authorship practices before they become systemic.
“By addressing these gaps, governments, publishers and research institutions alike can help protect the integrity of the research system and ensure that trust in science is maintained,” Dr McIntosh says.
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New research from Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science shows that GitHub users increasingly buy or trade for fake stars, then use their ill-gotten gains to attract unsuspecting users so they can steal their cryptocurrency, swipe their credentials or trick them into downloading malicious software.
Millions of users of GitHub, the premier online platform for sharing open-source software, rely on stars to establish their software product's credibility. But new research from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science shows this star-based system has grown star-crossed.
Researchers in the Software and Societal Systems Department found that users increasingly buy or trade for fake stars. Some use their ill-gotten cachet to quickly build up the reputation of repositories, the GitHub homes for software projects. More diabolically, other bad actors use fake stars to attract unsuspecting users so they can steal their cryptocurrency, swipe their credentials or trick them into downloading malicious software.
From July 2019 to December 2024, the CMU researchers counted six million stars on GitHub that appear to be fakes.
"We're not the first people to talk about this, so we weren't surprised to find fake stars that were associated with scams," said Bogdan Vasilescu, an S3D associate professor. "But we were surprised by their volume."
Social media platforms have long used popularity signals — such as stars, likes, followers or retweets — to establish user reputations. And for just as long, some users have boosted their profiles by buying or otherwise acquiring fake, unearned stars or other signals.
"One way to think of the GitHub ecosystem as a whole is as an attention economy, much like social media," Vasilescu said.
GitHub is organized such that each software project resides in its own repository. There are millions of repositories, and they all seek to attract users who might download their software or help further develop a project. In such a competitive enterprise, accumulating stars can be critical.
Fake stars might seem like a shortcut to such acceptance, and various vendors have cropped up to sell them. (Try Googling "buy GitHub stars.") But it's also possible to trade for stars on exchange sites. The use of fake stars on GitHub began growing in 2022 and surged in 2024. At their peak — to date, in July 2024 — more than 16 percent of GitHub repositories were associated with fake star campaigns.
The CMU researchers found that fake star campaigns intended simply to boost the popularity of a repository usually don't work for long. Unfortunately, most fake star campaigns are associated with malicious sites that pose a real security threat.
Some of these scam repositories try to entice someone to download a bit of software — a cheat for a videogame, for example. Launching the software activates a bit of hidden, nasty software. For example, the researchers cite a file that appeared to be a blockchain application but actually stole cryptocurrency from the user.
A more ambitious approach, called a software supply chain attack, involves a piece of malicious code attached to legitimate, widely used software.
"No software these days is written from scratch," Vasilescu said. "We reuse things as much as possible. Every bit of software is built upon other bits of software."
These packages of reused and overlapping bits of software constitute the software supply chain. A bit of nefarious software inserted in the right place can affect a substantial number of applications downstream in the supply chain.
Last year, computer scientists uncovered a software supply chain attack that came to be known as the XZ Backdoor. A fraudster gained access to XZ Utils, a package of compression/decompression software that has been incorporated into many computer systems. The fraudster added hidden software that created a "backdoor" that enabled unauthorized access to any computer system using this modified software.
"XZ Backdoor was the most famous attack of this kind to date and also the most elaborate," Vasilescu said.
The perpetrator spent about two years earning the trust of the people who controlled the XZ Utils repository until he was given authorization to modify the code. The scheme was cut short, however, when a Microsoft software engineer discovered the backdoor while investigating the cause of unusual software test results.
While the XZ Backdoor supply chain attack was not propped up by fake stars, it illustrates how vulnerable open-source software can be when nefarious actors are involved. Fake stars muddy the waters when trying to differentiate the good from the bad.
To study the fake star phenomenon, the researchers — including Hao He, a Ph.D. student in software engineering, and Christian Kästner, an associate professor in S3D — created a tool called StarScout that scans GitHub activity looking for anomalous behaviors.
The behaviors of interest fall into two categories. One is an account that has little activity and often has empty profiles and default avatars. The other behavior involves large groups of accounts that seem to act in lockstep, all awarding stars within a short time span.
This latter category seems to identify accounts linked with star vendors, Vasilescu said.
"It's necessarily the case that if you're one of these merchants, the delivery of fake stars happens quickly because otherwise you would have a dissatisfied customer," he explained.
What's to be done about the fake star problem? The researchers suggest that reducing the reliance on stars for GitHub's reputation system would make sense. Another approach might be to not count everyone's stars equally. Perhaps only users who have held accounts for a long time or have otherwise established their own reputations should be allowed to issue stars.
Vasilescu said that regular use of a tool such as StarScout would also be advisable. In this case, the people who run GitHub have advantages in using such tools. Unlike the CMU researchers, who could only access public data, GitHub operators can access private data, such as user IP addresses.
The research team's report on StarScout and GitHub fake stars has been accepted for the 2026 International Conference of Software Engineering. In addition to He, Vasilescu and Kästner, the team included Haoqin Yang, an undergraduate CMU computer science major; Alexandros Kapravelos, a computer scientist at North Carolina State University; and Philipp Burckhardt, a data scientist with Socket Inc., a cybersecurity firm that specializes in software supply chain attacks.
New insight into yam disease defense: how leaf traits and ABA stop anthracnose
The study assessed resistance across 46 yam varieties and investigated how physiological and hormonal traits correlate with disease defense. Their findings, based on pathogen inoculation, microscopy, gene expression, and hormone profiling, shed light on how wax content, stomatal behavior, and ABA levels work together to resist fungal invasion.
The greater yam (Dioscorea alata L.) is a vital staple food across tropical regions, especially in Africa and Asia. However, its cultivation faces serious setbacks due to anthracnose, a fungal disease caused by species of the Colletotrichum genus. While chemical control remains the dominant strategy, it raises issues of toxicity, environmental pollution, and resistance. To build sustainable and safe crop protection, identifying naturally resistant varieties is key. Plants defend themselves using structural barriers such as wax and stomatal control, along with biochemical responses regulated by hormones like ABA. These mechanisms, when properly understood, can inform breeding programs aimed at enhancing disease resistance in yams and reducing reliance on agrochemicals.
A study (DOI: 10.48130/tp-0025-0013) published inTropical Plantson 30 June 2025 by Qinghong Zhou & Sha Luo’s team, Jiangxi Agricultural University, not only identifies Colletotrichum alatae as a new yam pathogen but also opens the door to breeding high-quality, disease-resistant varieties for long-term.
To identify the causal agent of anthracnose in greater yam, researchers isolated the pathogen from infected leaves and cultured it on potato dextrose agar (PDA). Morphological analysis revealed traits typical of Colletotrichum species, including radial colony growth and darkening aerial hyphae. Molecular characterization followed: sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region showed >99% similarity to both C.gloeosporioides and C. alatae, while further analysis of the rDNA CAL region confirmed the pathogen as C. alatae. Next, 46 greater yam varieties were subjected to in vitro inoculation to assess disease resistance, which was classified into five levels. Results showed a wide range of resistance: 16.3% were immune, 23.3% resistant, while 45.3% were susceptible. To understand physiological traits linked to resistance, leaf stomatal density and wax content were measured. Immune varieties like D-28 showed lower stomatal density and higher wax content than susceptible varieties like D-404. Stomatal closure after infection was more pronounced in resistant varieties, impeding fungal entry. Scanning electron microscopy confirmed that C. alatae hyphae penetrated through open stomata, with faster fungal growth in susceptible varieties. Hormone profiling revealed that abscisic acid (ABA) levels surged early in resistant varieties and were linked to stomatal closure. External ABA application enhanced resistance in susceptible plants by reducing lesion spread. Finally, defense enzyme assays showed that resistant and immune varieties rapidly increased the activity and expression of key enzymes like peroxidase (POD) and phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL), whereas the response in susceptible varieties was delayed. Collectively, these findings highlight a multi-layered defense involving physical barriers, hormonal signaling, and enzymatic responses that contribute to anthracnose resistance in greater yam.
This research provides a valuable roadmap for developing anthracnose-resistant yam cultivars through traditional breeding or biotechnological approaches. By selecting varieties with high wax content, low stomatal density, and robust ABA signaling, breeders can enhance natural disease resistance. The findings also suggest potential in using ABA-based sprays as a sustainable, chemical-free control strategy.
This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32460767), and the Jiangxi Provincial Key Research and Development Project of China (Grant Nos 20232BBF60007 and 20212BBF61004).
Tropical Plants (e-ISSN 2833-9851) is the official journal of Hainan University and published by Maximum Academic Press. Tropical Plants undergoes rigorous peer review and is published in open-access format to enable swift dissemination of research findings, facilitate exchange of academic knowledge and encourage academic discourse on innovative technologies and issues emerging in tropical plant research.
