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, October 16, 2025
This stapler knows when you need it
CMU researchers use AI to turn everyday objects into proactive assistants
Alexandra Ion, faculty in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and Violet Han are part of a team using AI to turn everyday objects into proactive personal assistants.
A stapler slides across a desk to meet a waiting hand, or a knife edges out of the way just before someone leans against a countertop. It sounds like magic, but in Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) researchers are combining AI and robotic mobility to give everyday objects this kind of foresight.
Using large language models (LLMs) and wheeled robotic platforms, HCII researchers have transformed ordinary items — like mugs, plates or utensils — into proactive assistants that can observe human behavior, predict interventions and move across horizontal surfaces to help humans at just the right time.
"Our goal is to create adaptive systems for physical interaction that are unobtrusive, meaning they blend into our lives while still dynamically adapting to our needs," said Alexandra Ion, an HCII assistant professor who leads the Interactive Structures Lab. "We classify this work as unobtrusive because the user does not ask the objects to perform any tasks. Instead, the objects sense what the user needs and perform the tasks themselves."
The Interactive Structures Lab's unobtrusive system uses computer vision and LLMs to reason about a person's goals, predicting what they may do or need next. A ceiling-mounted camera senses the environment and tracks the position of objects. The system then translates what the camera sees into a text-based description of the scene. Next, an LLM uses this translation to infer what the person's goals may be and which actions would help them most. Finally, the system transfers the predicted actions to the item. This process allows for seamless help with everyday tasks like cooking, organizing, office work and more.
"We have a lot of assistance from AI in the digital realm, but we want to focus on AI assistance in the physical domain," said Violet Han, an HCII Ph.D. student working with Ion. "We chose to enhance everyday objects because users already trust them. By advancing the objects' capabilities, we hope to increase that trust."
Ion and her team have started studying ways to expand the scope of unobtrusive physical AI to other parts of homes and offices.
"Imagine, for example, you come home with a bag of groceries. A shelf automatically folds out from the wall and you can set the bag down while you're taking off your coat," Ion said during her episode of the School of Computer Science's "Does Compute" podcast. "The idea is that we develop and study technology that seamlessly integrates into our daily lives and is so well assimilated that it becomes almost invisible, yet is consistently bringing us new functionality."
The Interactive Structures Lab aims to create intuitive physical interfaces that bring safe, reliable physical assistance into homes, hospitals, factories and other spaces. The team's work in unobtrusive physical AI was accepted to the 2025 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, held recently in Busan, Korea.
To learn more about the research, visit the project website.
A stapler on top of a moveable platform that can anticipate when a person will need to use it.
Credit
Carnegie Mellon University
SPACE/COSMOS
Could these wacky warm Jupiters help astronomers solve the planet formation puzzle?
What do you do when you have an unanticipated astronomical phenomenon, a dataset made of planets thousands of light-years away and theoretical models that fail to explain what exactly you’re looking at?
If you’re Diego Muñoz, an assistant professor in Northern Arizona University's Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the answer is simple: You get to work on new models.
With support from the National Science Foundation and his co-primary investigators at Indiana University Bloomington, Muñoz will head a three-year investigation into the formation of eccentric warm Jupiters—gas giant planets that exist outside our solar system and have peculiar and sometimes unprecedented oval-shaped orbits.
By the end of the study in 2028, Muñoz hopes to theoretically understand not only how these planetary outliers formed, but also if and how these astrophysical processes could have influenced the creation of our solar system.
“The variability of extrasolar planets is just enormous,” Muñoz said. “Extrasolar systems can look like our solar system, but in some cases, they look entirely different and exotic. We’re very interested in seeing how the solar system forms in context by understanding systems that look like ours and ones that look completely different. We can get a sense of what the extremes are, how average our planet formation history is and how average our solar system is.”
Some of the most interesting extreme systems, Muñoz said, are those that house eccentric warm Jupiters.
Scientists previously believed warm Jupiters could form like their well-studied hot Jupiter cousins, which have similar masses and sizes but are closer to their host stars. However, as telescopes became more advanced and data grew more precise, astronomers discovered warm Jupiters may have complex origins of their own.
While hot Jupiters can orbit their stars in almost any orientation, warm Jupiters are almost universally aligned with their hosts’ equators. Data also suggest that the more eccentric, or oval-shaped, a warm Jupiter’s orbit, the more aligned it is with its star, a phenomenon no existing model of planet formation could have predicted.
Muñoz hopes to change that by building a small but growing sample of eccentric warm Jupiters using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and basing new models and existing model updates on what he finds.
“The data tells us that warm Jupiters are not just the tail end of hot Jupiters,” Muñoz said. “It tells us they may have a different history. We need to understand if this is just a quirk—if these are pathological cases that happen maybe once every million cases—or if there is an additional physical process that we have ignored in the past that we might be able to unveil.”
Knowing what processes are at work during an eccentric warm Jupiter’s formation could help astronomers uncover hidden truths about our solar system’s evolution and the creation of countless others just like it. But before diving into the implications, Muñoz has to interrogate multiple hypotheses until he can find one that is practical and plausible.
One possibility is that these eccentric warm Jupiters have companion planets that somehow alter their orbits without misaligning them relative to their stars’ equator. Having varying eccentricities and varying inclinations simultaneously is well understood from a modeling perspective, but having one and not the other is not as easily explained.
Another concerns the gaseous nebulas in which the planets and their stars formed. Muñoz reasons that these planets could have interacted with their surroundings in ways astronomers could never have anticipated as they were developing. Discoveries of this nature could permanently change the way astronomers map planet formation.
Last, and Muñoz’s favorite, is the idea that the stars in these systems are responsible. Because stars are fluid bodies, they can develop internal waves that can sometimes crash and extract energy from a planet’s orbit in peculiar ways. He said it’s mathematically feasible that these waves could also be the reason warm Jupiters align so closely with their host stars’ equators.
The answer to which theory is correct, as of now, is a mystery, but it’s one Muñoz will be hard at work solving with myriad modeling techniques.
“I’m a theorist, so I work on models using heavy-duty computers, pencil-and-paper calculations and anything in between,” Muñoz said. “We don’t have a model that predicted this to begin with, so we’re going to go crazy and dive into the most creative ways we can think about this problem. But once you have a mathematical model, that is just the beginning.”
Next year, Muñoz will hire a graduate student who excels in creative puzzle solving to assist him throughout his modeling study. In the meantime, he said his research into his host star hypothesis has been promising, and he hopes to publish his findings in the near future.
In industry risk models, mangroves significantly reduce surge and flood damages to properties built behind forests while properties built in front of mangroves face increased risks.
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. – A new study led by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Coastal Climate Resilience (CCCR) and East Carolina University (ECU) has found that mangroves significantly reduced storm surges and property damages during Hurricanes Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022. In collaboration with the catastrophe risk modeling firm Moody’s RMS, the team used industry models to price the mangrove benefits during these hurricanes at $725 million and $4.1 billion, respectively.
The study, published on October 14 in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, also assessed the expected benefits of mangroves for storm surge protection at $67 million annually in southwestern Florida’s Collier County. These natural flood defenses are especially important economically in Florida, with its extensive coastline, expensive coastal properties, extreme events, and some exceptional stands of mangrove forests still remaining.
Overall, the study found that mangroves reduce flood losses for coastal homes built inland of the trees. But in some locations, especially for properties in front of mangroves, the team found that properties actually face higher damages due to mangroves.
With their unique aerial root systems, mangroves thrive in marine environments because they can filter saltwater into freshwater. In Florida, an estimated 600,000 acres of mangrove forests contribute to the overall health of the state’s southern coastal zone and beyond, according to the state’s environmental protection department.
The study—a collaboration between CCCR, ECU, Moody’s RMS, and The Nature Conservancy—is the first to value the benefit of mangroves using catastrophe risk industry models.
“In this collaboration with the risk-modeling industry, we show the value of mangrove forests in reducing property damages from storm surges every year,” said study lead author Siddharth Narayan, a recent CCCR research fellow. “Similar to how salt-marsh wetlands from New York to North Carolina reduced damages during Hurricane Sandy, coastal properties in Florida avoided anywhere between 14 to 30% in surge losses during Hurricanes Ian and Irma due to mangroves acting as natural defenses.”
Now a professor of coastal studies at ECU, Narayan hails from Chennai, a tropical coastal city in South India where he completed his bachelor’s in civil engineering. At UC Santa Cruz and UC Santa Barbara, he focused on coastal adaptation and nature-based solutions.
Nationally, storm surges from tropical cyclones and hurricanes cause billions of dollars in coastal property damages every year. However, natural ecosystems such as mangrove forests can, by their presence on these coastlines, modify storm surges and affect property damages, the study states.
There is growing awareness that mangroves are an important part of storm defenses, and the study aims to increase understanding of when, where and how properties benefit from the effects of mangroves on storm surges.
“Mangroves provide many benefits to communities, and it is particularly important that we used a risk industry model to put a price on their flood protection benefits,” said CCCR Director Michael Beck, the study’s senior author. “Like it or not, we only protect what we value, and this is doubly true if it should influence the cost of insurance.”
Further, Beck noted: “The results of these industry models show the real benefits of conserving Florida’s mangroves for property protection and the real costs of choosing to develop in front of these natural barriers.”
Other co-authors of the study include Christopher Thomas, Kechi Nzerem, and Joss Matthewman at Moody’s RMS, Christine Shephard and Laura Geselbracht from The Nature Conservancy. Funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Herbert W. Hoover Foundation, AXA Research Fund, and the National Science Foundation supported this work.
The spatially variable effects of mangroves on flood depths and losses from storm surges in Florida
Article Publication Date
14-Oct-2025
COI Statement
Co-authors C.J.T. and K.N. are employees of Moody’s RMS, London. C.S. and L.G. are employees of The Nature Conservancy, USA. J.M. was an employee at Moody’s RMS and is currently an employee at Reask, London.
Fatal Attraction: Electric charge connects jumping worm to aerial prey
Scientists uncover new secrets of electrostatic ecology
A tiny worm that leaps high into the air — up to 25 times its body length — to attach to flying insects uses static electricity to perform this astounding feat, scientists have found. The journal PNAS published the work on the nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, a parasitic roundworm, led by researchers at Emory University and the University of California, Berkeley.
“We’ve identified the electrostatic mechanism this worm uses to hit its target, and we’ve shown the importance of this mechanism for the worm’s survival,” says co-author Justin Burton, an Emory professor of physics whose lab led the mathematical analyses of laboratory experiments. “Higher voltage, combined with a tiny breath of wind, greatly boosts the odds of a jumping worm connecting to a flying insect.”
The researchers showed how a charge of a few hundred volts, similar to that generated by an insect’s wings beating the air, initiates an opposite charge in the worm, creating an attractive force. They identified electrostatic induction as the charging mechanism driving this process.
“Using physics we learned something new and interesting about an adaptive strategy in an organism,” says Ranjiangshang Ran, co-lead author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Burton’s lab. “We’re helping to pioneer the emerging field of electrostatic ecology.”
Co-authors include Saad Bhamla and Sunny Kumar, who study biomechanics across species at Georgia Institute of Technology, where preliminary experiments were performed; and Adler Dillman, a nematode biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
The shocking lives of tiny organisms
Static electricity, that tiny zap you sometimes feel when your hand touches a metal doorknob or you pull a sweater over your head, occurs when a buildup of electrons discharges quickly upon contact with a conductor.
While the phenomenon is little more than an annoying shock at the human scale, emerging evidence shows that static electricity plays a crucial role in the lives of some small organisms.
Other research has shown how electrostatics help bees to collect pollen, flower mites to hitch rides on hummingbirds and balloon spiders to drift on silk strands over large distances.
For the current paper, the researchers wanted to investigate how electrostatic forces, in combination with aerodynamics, affects the success rate of S. carpocapsae to connect with a flying insect.
S. carpocapsae is an unsegmented roundworm, or nematode, that kills insects through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. The worm thrives in soils nearly everywhere on Earth except the Poles. It is increasingly used for biological pest control in agriculture, with researchers around the world studying how to further drive its effectiveness as a natural pesticide.
When the worm senses an insect overhead, it curls into a loop and then launches itself in the air as high as 25 times its body length. That’s the equivalent of a human being jumping higher than a 10-story building.
If the worm hits its target, it enters the insect’s body through a natural opening. It then deposits its symbiotic bacteria, which kills the insect within 48 hours. After the death of the host, the worm feeds on the multiplying bacteria, as well as on the insect tissue, and lays eggs. Several generations may occur in the insect’s cadaver until the juvenile worms emerge into the environment to infect other insects with bacteria.
Painstaking experiments
The researchers designed experiments to investigate the physics involved in the worm’s prowess at connecting with a flying insect.
He also created a tiny wind tunnel for some of the experiments, so that the physicists could analyze the role of ambient breeze in the worm’s target success rate.
Digitizing the data
Using computer software, Ran digitized the trajectories of the worms, drawing from about 60 videos of experiments. The process was time consuming in instances when a worm left the focal plane of the camera, blurring the image, in which case Ran needed to click by hand to record its position.
Ran used a computer algorithm known as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to analyze the digitized data. (“Markov” stands for the mathematician who developed the algorithm, while “Monte Carlo” refers to the area of Monaco famous for its casinos.)
“MCMC allows you to do random explorations, using different sets of parameters, to determine a mathematical probability for an outcome,” Ran explains.
Ran identified a set of 50,000 plausible values of fitting parameters for a single worm’s trajectory — such as the voltage of the insect, the physical dimensions and the launching velocity of the worm — to test the probability of a particular charge in a worm allowing it to hit its target.
With no electrostatics, only one out of 19 worm trajectories successfully reached the target.
The model showed that a charge of a few hundred volts — a magnitude commonly found in flying insects — generates an opposite charge in a jumping worm and significantly increases the odds of it connecting to a midair insect. A charge of just 100 volts resulted in a probability for hitting the target of less than 10%, while 800 volts boosted the probability of success to 80%.
A worm expends a vast amount of energy to jump and faces risks of predation or drying out while suspended in the air.
“Our findings suggest that, without electrostatics, it would make no sense for this jumping predatory behavior to have evolved in these worms,” Ran says.
Science past and future
The researchers had theorized that electrostatic induction was the mechanism driving the interplay between the worm and its target. Sifting through research papers eventually led them to a law of induction posited by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
“Maxwell, one of the most prolific physicists of all time, had a wild imagination, similar to Einstein,” Ran says. “It turns out that our model for the worm-charging mechanism agreed with a prediction for electrostatic induction that Maxwell made in 1870. There are many buried treasures in scientific history. Sometimes being a scientist is like being an archeologist.”
Drag force was another key part of the equation, due to the tiny size of the worm. The researchers use the comparison of a bowling ball flying through the air, which is not much affected by drag force, and a floating feather, which is highly dependent on it.
Ran drew from the experimental data to simulate the effects of electrostatic charge combined with various wind speeds. The results revealed how the faintest breeze, just 0.2 meters per second, combined with higher voltage further increased the likelihood of a worm hitting its target.
The work serves as a new framework for further investigations into the role of electrostatics in ecology.
