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Tag: University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin)

  • Advanced Virtual Reality Technology Enables Brain Activity Measurement

    Advanced Virtual Reality Technology Enables Brain Activity Measurement

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    Newswise — Researchers have modified a commercial virtual reality headset, giving it the ability to measure brain activity and examine how we react to hints, stressors and other outside forces.

    The research team at The University of Texas at Austin created a noninvasive electroencephalogram (EEG) sensor that they installed in a Meta VR headset that can be worn comfortably for long periods. The EEG measures the brain’s electrical activity during the immersive VR interactions.

    The device could be used in many ways, from helping people with anxiety, to measuring the attention or mental stress of aviators using a flight simulator, to giving a human the chance to see through the eyes of a robot.

    “Virtual reality is so much more immersive than just doing something on a big screen,” said Nanshu Lu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics who led the research. “It gives the user a more realistic experience, and our technology enables us to get better measurements of how the brain is reacting to that environment.”

    The research is published in Soft Science.

    The pairing of VR and EEG sensors has made its way into the commercial sphere already. However, the devices that exist today are costly, and the researchers say their electrodes are more comfortable for the user, extending the potential wearing time and opening up additional applications.

    The best EEG devices today consist of a cap covered in electrodes, but that does not work well with the VR headset. And individual electrodes struggle to get a strong reading because our hair blocks them from connecting with the scalp. The most popular electrodes are rigid and comb-shaped, inserting through the hairs to connect with the skin, an uncomfortable experience for the user.

    “All of these mainstream options have significant flaws that we tried to overcome with our system,” said Hongbian Li, a research associate in Lu’s lab.

    For this project, the researchers created a spongy electrode made of soft, conductive materials that overcome those issues, an effort led by Li. The modified headset features electrodes across the top strap and forehead pad, a flexible circuit with conductive traces similar to Lu’s electronic tattoos, and an EEG recording device attached to the back of the headset.

    This technology will play into another major research project at UT Austin: A new robot delivery network that will also serve as the largest study to date on human-robot interactions.

    Lu is a part of that project, and the VR headsets will be used by people either traveling with robots or in a remote “observatory.” They will be able to watch along from the robot’s perspective, and the device will also measure the mental load of this observation for long periods.

    “If you can see through the eyes of the robot, it paints a clearer picture of how people are reacting to it and lets operators monitor their safety in case of potential accidents,” said Luis Sentis, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics who is co-leading the robot delivery project and is a co-author on the VR EEG paper.

    To test the viability of the VR EEG headset, the researchers created a game. They worked with José del R. Millán, a faculty member in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Dell Medical School and an expert in brain-machine interfaces, to develop a driving simulation that has the user press a button to react to turn commands.

    The EEG measures the brain activity of the users as they make driving decisions. In this case, it shows how closely the subjects are paying attention.

    The researchers have filed preliminary patent paperwork for the EEG, and they’re open to partner with VR companies to create a built-in version of the technology.

    Other members of the research team include Hyonyoung Shin, Minsu Zhang, Nicholas Riveira and Susmita Gangopadahyay of the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Andrew Yu, Heeyong Huh, Zhengjie Li, and Yifan Rao from the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics; Sangjun Kim from the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, Jessie Peng of the Department of Biomedical Engineering; and Gubeum Kwon of Artue Associates Inc. in South Korea.

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  • “Golden” Fossils Show Exceptional Preservation Origins

    “Golden” Fossils Show Exceptional Preservation Origins

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    Newswise — All that glitters is not gold, or even fool’s gold in the case of fossils.

    A recent study by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and collaborators found that many of the fossils from Germany’s Posidonia shale do not get their gleam from pyrite, commonly known as fool’s gold, which was long thought to be the source of the shine. Instead, the golden hue is from a mix of minerals that hints at the conditions in which the fossils formed.

    The discovery is important for understanding how the fossils — which are among the world’s best-preserved specimens of sea life from the Early Jurassic — came to form in the first place, and the role that oxygen in the environment had in their formation.

    “When you go to the quarries, golden ammonites peek out from black shale slabs,” said study co-author Rowan Martindale, an associate professor at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “But surprisingly, we struggled to find pyrite in the fossils. Even the fossils that looked golden, are preserved as phosphate minerals with yellow calcite. This dramatically changes our view of this famous fossil deposit.”

    The research was published in Earth Science Reviews. Drew Muscente, a former assistant professor at Cornell College and former Jackson School postdoctoral researcher, led the study.

    The fossils of the Posidonia Shale date back to 183 million years ago, and include rare soft-bodied specimens such as ichthyosaur embryos, squids with ink-sacs, and lobsters. To learn more about the fossilization conditions that led to such exquisite preservation, the researchers put dozens of samples under scanning electron microscopes to study their chemical composition.

    “I couldn’t wait to get them in my microscope and help tell their preservational story,” said co-author Jim Schiffbauer, an associate professor at the University of Missouri Department of Geological Sciences, who handled some of the larger samples.

    The researchers found that in every instance, the fossils were primarily made up of phosphate minerals even though the surrounding black shale rock was dotted with microscopic clusters of pyrite crystals, called framboids.

    “I spent days looking for the framboids on the fossil,” said co-author Sinjini Sinha, a doctoral student at the Jackson School. “For some of the specimens, I counted 800 framboids on the matrix while there was maybe three or four on the fossils.”

    The fact that pyrite and phosphate are found in different places on the specimens is important because it reveals key details about the fossilization environment. Pyrite forms in anoxic (without oxygen) environments, but phosphate minerals need oxygen. The research suggests that although an anoxic seafloor sets the stage for fossilization — keeping decay and predators at bay — it took a pulse of oxygen to drive the chemical reactions needed for fossilization.

    These findings complement earlier research carried out by the team on the geochemical conditions of sites known for their caches of exceptionally preserved fossils, called konservat-lagerstätten. However, the results of these studies contradict long-standing theories about the conditions needed for exceptional fossil preservation in the Posidonia.

    “It’s been thought for a long time that the anoxia causes the exceptional preservation, but it doesn’t directly help,” said Sinha. “It helps with making the environment conducive to faster fossilization, which leads to the preservation, but it’s oxygenation that’s enhancing preservation.”

    It turns out, the oxygenation — and the phosphate and accompanying minerals — also enhanced the fossil’s shine.

    The research was funded by Cornell College and the National Science Foundation. The Posidonia fossil specimens used in this study are now part of the collections at the Jackson School’s Non-Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory.

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  • Scientists detect molten rock layer hidden under earth’s tectonic plates

    Scientists detect molten rock layer hidden under earth’s tectonic plates

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    Newswise — Scientists have discovered a new layer of partly molten rock under the Earth’s crust that might help settle a long-standing debate about how tectonic plates move. 

    Researchers had previously identified patches of melt at a similar depth. But a new study led by The University of Texas at Austin revealed for the first time the layer’s global extent and its part in plate tectonics.

    The research was published Feb. 6, 2023, in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

    The molten layer is located about 100 miles from the surface and is part of the asthenosphere, which sits under the Earth’s tectonic plates in the upper mantle. The asthenosphere is important for plate tectonics because it forms a relatively soft boundary that lets tectonic plates move through the mantle. 

    The reasons why it is soft, however, are not well understood. Scientists previously thought that molten rocks might be a factor. But this study shows that melt, in fact, does not appear to notably influence the flow of mantle rocks.   

    “When we think about something melting, we intuitively think that the melt must play a big role in the material’s viscosity,” said Junlin Hua, a postdoctoral fellow at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences who led the research. “But what we found is that even where the melt fraction is quite high, its effect on mantle flow is very minor.”

    According to the research, which Hua began as a graduate student at Brown University, the convection of heat and rock in the mantle are the prevailing influence on the motion of the plates. Although the Earth’s interior is largely solid, over long periods of time, rocks can shift and flow like honey. 

    Showing that the melt layer has no influence on plate tectonics means one less tricky variable for computer models of the Earth, said coauthor Thorsten Becker, a professor at the Jackson School.

    “We can’t rule out that locally melt doesn’t matter,” said Becker, who designs geodynamic models of the Earth at the Jackson School’s University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. “But I think it drives us to see these observations of melt as a marker of what’s going on in the Earth, and not necessarily an active contribution to anything.”

    The idea to look for a new layer in Earth’s interior came to Hua while studying seismic images of the mantle beneath Turkey during his doctoral research. 

    Intrigued by signs of partly molten rock under the crust, Hua compiled similar images from other seismic stations until he had a global map of the asthenosphere. What he and others had taken to be an anomaly was in fact commonplace around the world, appearing on seismic readings wherever the asthenosphere was hottest. 

    The next surprise came when he compared his melt map with seismic measurements of tectonic movement and found no correlation, despite the molten layer encompassing almost half the Earth. 

    “This work is important because understanding the properties of the asthenosphere and the origins of why it’s weak is fundamental to understanding plate tectonics,” said coauthor Karen Fischer, a seismologist and professor at Brown University who was Hua’s Ph.D. advisor when he began the research.

    The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Collaborating institutions included the UT Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and Cornell University.

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  • Vaccination gets a boost when people know their neighbors are doing it

    Vaccination gets a boost when people know their neighbors are doing it

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    Newswise — AUSTIN, Texas — Just as a highly transmissible variant prompts officials to extend COVID-19 emergency status, one of the largest surveys ever conducted shows people are more willing to get vaccinated when health workers reveal how many others are doing so.

    The massive global survey spawned two papers — one recently published in Nature Human Behavior and another in Nature Communications—showing people greatly underestimate vaccine uptake — both worldwide and in their own communities. “Our study shows that accurate information about what most other people are doing can substantially increase intentions to accept a COVID-19 vaccine,” says Avinash Collis, co-author and assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at The University of Texas McCombs School of Business.

    Key Takeaways:

    • Public health campaigns are more convincing when they focus on the percentage of people receiving vaccinations, as opposed to the dangers of refusing vaccination.
    • People all over the world severely underestimate vaccine uptake in their communities, in part because of wide coverage of vaccine hesitancy.
    • “But once they know that the majority has already received or are going to get the vaccine, they feel safer to get the vaccine,” says Collis.
    • The survey also found local health workers are the most trusted source of COVID-19 information, but in most countries, they don’t serve as public information sources. Politicians do — and they are the least trusted.
    • Facebook provided the survey sample and ads, yielding a record-setting 2 million responses in 67 countries.
    • The survey is a joint effort of The University of Texas at Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, the World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins University and Meta.
    • Other academics are now using this data in their own vaccination research — including studies on vaccination campaigns and political trust in Latin America, understanding drivers of vaccine hesitancy in South Asia, and promoting hand-washing in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, more than 40 peer reviewed papers have been published by other research teams using this data.

    Read the McCombs Big Ideas story.

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  • Palm e-tattoo can tell when you’re stressed out

    Palm e-tattoo can tell when you’re stressed out

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    Newswise — Our palms tell us a lot about our emotional state, tending to get wet when people are excited or nervous. This reaction is used to measure emotional stress and help people with mental health issues, but the devices to do it now are bulky, unreliable and can perpetuate social stigma by sticking very visible sensors on prominent parts of the body.

    Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University have applied emerging electronic tattoo (e-tattoo) technology to this type of monitoring, known as electrodermal activity or EDA sensing. In a new paper published recently in Nature Communications, the researchers created a graphene-based e-tattoo that attaches to the palm, is nearly invisible and connects to a smart watch.

    “It’s so unobstructive that people sometimes forget they had them on, and it also reduces the social stigma of wearing these devices in such prominent places on the body,” said Nanshu Lu, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics and leader of the project.

    Lu and her collaborators have been advancing wearable e-tattoo technology for many years. Graphene has been a favorite material because of how thin it is and how well it measures electrical potential from human body, leading to very accurate readings.

    But, such ultra-thin materials can’t handle much, if any strain. So that makes applying them to parts of the body that include a lot of movement, such as the palm/wrist, challenging.

    The secret sauce of this discovery is how the e-tattoo on the palm is able to successfully transfer data to a rigid circuit – in this case a commercially available smart watch, in out-of-lab, ambulatory settings. They used a serpentine ribbon that has two layers of graphene and gold partially overlapped. By snaking the ribbon back and forth, it can handle the strain that comes with movements of the hand for everyday activities like holding the steering wheel while driving, opening doors, running etc.

    Current palm monitoring tech uses bulky electrodes that fall off and are very visible, or EDA sensors applied to other parts of the body, which gives a less accurate reading.

    Other researchers have tried similar methods using nanometer-thick straight-line ribbons to connect the tattoo to a reader, but they couldn’t handle the strain of constant movement.

    Lu said the researchers were inspired by virtual reality (VR), gaming and the incoming metaverse for this research. VR is used in some cases to treat mental illness; however, the human-aware capability in VR remains lacking in many ways.

    “You want to know whether people are responding to this treatment,” Lu said. “Is it helping them? Right now, that’s hard to tell.”

    Other members of the team include Hongwoo Jang and Eunbin Kim from the Texas Materials Institute; Sangjun Kim and Kyoung-Ho Ha from the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering; Xiangxing Yang from the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Kaan Sel and Roozbeh Jafari from Texas A&M’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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  • Old bone links lost American parrot to ancient Indigenous bird trade

    Old bone links lost American parrot to ancient Indigenous bird trade

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    Newswise — For centuries, Indigenous communities in the American Southwest imported colorful parrots from Mexico. But according to a study led by The University of Texas at Austin, some parrots may have been captured locally and not brought from afar.  

    The research challenges the assumption that all parrot remains found in American Southwest archaeological sites have their origins in Mexico. It also presents an important reminder: The ecology of the past can be very different from what we see today.     

    “When we deal with natural history, we can constrain ourselves by relying on the present too much,” said the study’s author, John Moretti, a doctoral candidate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences. “These bones can give us kind of a baseline view of the animal life of the ecosystems that surrounded us before huge fundamental changes that continue today began.”  

    The study was published in print in the September issue of The Wilson Journal of Ornithology.  

    Parrots are not an uncommon find in southwestern archaeological sites dating as far back as the 7th or 8th centuries. Their remains have been found in elaborate graves and buried in trash heaps. But no matter the condition, when archaeologists have discovered parrot bones, they usually assumed the animals were imports, said Moretti.  

    There’s good reason for that. Scarlet macaws — the parrot most commonly found in the archaeological sites — live in rainforest and savannahs, which are not part of the local landscape. And researchers have discovered the remains of ancient parrot breeding facilities in Mexico that point to a thriving parrot trade.   

    But there is more to parrots than macaws. In 2018, Moretti found a lone ankle bone belonging to a species known as the thick-billed parrot. It was part of an unsorted bone collection recovered during an archaeological dig in the 1950s in New Mexico.   

    “There was a lot of deer and rabbit, and then this kind of anomalous parrot bone,” said Moretti, a student in the Jackson School’s Department of Geological Sciences. “Once I realized that nobody had already described this, I really thought there was a story there.” 

    Thick-billed parrots are an endangered species and do not live in the United States today due to habitat loss and hunting. But that was not the case even a relatively short time ago. As recently as the 1930s, their range stretched from Arizona and New Mexico to northern Mexico, where they live today. The boisterous, lime-green birds are also very particular about their habitat. They dwell only in mountainous old-growth pine forests, where they nest in tree hollows and dine almost exclusively on pine cones.  

    With that in mind, Moretti decided to investigate the connection between pine forests in New Mexico and Arizona and the remains of thick-billed parrots found at archaeological sites. He found that of the 10 total archaeological sites with positively identified thick-billed parrot remains, all contained buildings made of pine timber, with one settlement requiring an estimated 50,000 trees. And for half the sites, suitable pine forests were within 7 miles of the settlement.  

    Moretti said that with people entering parrot habitat, it’s plausible to think they captured parrots when gathering timber and brought them home.  

    “This paper makes the hypothesis that these [parrots] were not trade items,” Moretti said. “They were animals living in this region that were caught and captured and brought home just like squirrels and other animals that lived in these mountains.”  

    Moretti relied on thick-billed parrot bones from the United States and Mexico permanently archived in collections at The University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and the Smithsonian Institution to conclusively identify the lone bone that sparked the research. Mark Robbins, an evolutionary biologist and the collection manager of the ornithological collections at The University of Kansas, said this study shows the value of natural history collections and the innumerable ways they assist with research.  

    “The scientists who originally collected those specimens, they had no idea they would be used in this fashion,” Robbins said. “You can revisit old questions or formulate new questions based on these specimens.”  

    The research was funded by the Museum of Texas Tech University, where Moretti earned a master’s degree.   

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  • ‘Smart plastic’ material is step forward toward soft, flexible robotics and electronics

    ‘Smart plastic’ material is step forward toward soft, flexible robotics and electronics

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    Newswise — Inspired by living things from trees to shellfish, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin set out to create a plastic much like many life forms that are hard and rigid in some places and soft and stretchy in others­. Their success — a first, using only light and a catalyst to change properties such as hardness and elasticity in molecules of the same type — has brought about a new material that is 10 times as tough as natural rubber and could lead to more flexible electronics and robotics.

    The findings are published today in the journal Science.

    “This is the first material of its type,” said Zachariah Page, assistant professor of chemistry and corresponding author on the paper. “The ability to control crystallization, and therefore the physical properties of the material, with the application of light is potentially transformative for wearable electronics or actuators in soft robotics.”

    Scientists have long sought to mimic the properties of living structures, like skin and muscle, with synthetic materials. In living organisms, structures often combine attributes such as strength and flexibility with ease. When using a mix of different synthetic materials to mimic these attributes, materials often fail, coming apart and ripping at the junctures between different materials.

    Oftentimes, when bringing materials together, particularly if they have very different mechanical properties, they want to come apart,” Page said. Page and his team were able to control and change the structure of a plastic-like material, using light to alter how firm or stretchy the material would be.

    Chemists started with a monomer, a small molecule that binds with others like it to form the building blocks for larger structures called polymers that were similar to the polymer found in the most commonly used plastic. After testing a dozen catalysts, they found one that, when added to their monomer and shown visible light, resulted in a semicrystalline polymer similar to those found in existing synthetic rubber. A harder and more rigid material was formed in the areas the light touched, while the unlit areas retained their soft, stretchy properties.

    Because the substance is made of one material with different properties, it was stronger and could be stretched farther than most mixed materials.

    The reaction takes place at room temperature, the monomer and catalyst are commercially available, and researchers used inexpensive blue LEDs as the light source in the experiment. The reaction also takes less than an hour and minimizes use of any hazardous waste, which makes the process rapid, inexpensive, energy efficient and environmentally benign.

    The researchers will next seek to develop more objects with the material to continue to test its usability.

    “We are looking forward to exploring methods of applying this chemistry towards making 3D objects containing both hard and soft components,” said first author Adrian Rylski, a doctoral student at UT Austin.

    The team envisions the material could be used as a flexible foundation to anchor electronic components in medical devices or wearable tech. In robotics, strong and flexible materials are desirable to improve movement and durability.

    Henry L. Cater, Keldy S. Mason, Marshall J. Allen, Anthony J. Arrowood, Benny D. Freeman and Gabriel E. Sanoja of The University of Texas at Austin also contributed to the research.

    The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Robert A. Welch Foundation.

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