The 91̽�� has joined the Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience (ATN), a long-term research partnership between academia and industry geared to transform the fight against brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system.

in 2021 by the University of California, San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Genentech — a member of the Roche group — and Roche Holding AG, the ATN seeks to accelerate the development of new therapies for a broad range of brain and central nervous system conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, autism, depression and psychiatric disorders. As part of the ATN, Genentech and Roche committed up to $53 million over 10 years for research at the ATN’s participating academic institutions, a collaboration that is unique for both its duration and the breadth of its ambitions.

“The Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience is a new and transformative template for research and academia to partner, and it is an ideal collaboration for the 91̽��,” said , the Emeritus Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair and professor of biology at the 91̽��and CEO of the Washington Research Foundation, who led efforts to join the ATN. “Scientists at the 91̽��will be integrated with academic and industry partners in a way that has simply never been done before. And the 91̽��will bring its cross-disciplinary strengths and expertise in neuroscience — which span medicine, engineering and basic and clinical research — to address the urgent need for new therapies, remedies and treatments in neurological diseases and disorders.”

The new alliance builds on an existing academic partnership. In 2019, the UW, UCSF and UC Berkeley formed the , a $106-million, multidisciplinary endeavor supported by the Weill Family Foundation to speed discovery and innovation across neurological and psychiatric disorders, including basic research, technology development and patient care. With the UW’s accession to the ATN, scientists at all three Weill Neurohub institutions can now access this novel pipeline to channel academic discoveries toward new therapies and treatments.

“Pairing academic researchers with industry partners early in the research process will accelerate the transformation of academic research into clinical applications,” said Dr. , the Robert A. Fishman Distinguished Professor of Neurology at UCSF and director of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “And this long-term, 10-year commitment from Genentech and Roche means that researchers at UCSF, UC Berkeley and now the 91̽��will benefit from years-long, close collaborations with industry. It is a type of partnership that hasn’t been seen before in academic or industry research.”

“Membership of the 91̽��in ATN fully leverages the vision that we and the Weills have for the Weill Neurohub,” said , the Evan Rausch Chair in Neuroscience at UC Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Brain Initiative. “This collaboration with Roche and Genentech – world leaders in pharma and biotech — opens powerful new directions for Weill Neurohub researchers, with crucial resources and proven track records of bringing new treatments to patients and families.”

Teams of scientists at ATN institutions will drive efforts to profile the progression of disease, identify new targets for therapies and model their effectiveness. Existing organizational infrastructure within the Weill Neurohub will serve to coordinate the expanded ATN efforts. In addition to Daniel, the other 91̽��leader within the Weill Neurohub and the ATN is Dr. , professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences.

ATN endeavors are intended to meet current demands in neurological disease research and treatment, as well as lay the groundwork for future innovations in understanding and treating nervous system disorders.

“The ATN is focusing on pressing needs in neurological disorders across the board: not just therapies to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but also methods to diagnose them at early stages, as well as understand them at the cellular and molecular level,” said , director of strategic initiatives at the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

The 91̽��brings a variety of strengths to the ATN, according to Daniel. Neuroscience expertise at the 91̽��spans clinical trials, cell and molecular studies, computational modeling and even research into artificial intelligence. Neuroscientists are based across the UW’s STEM schools and colleges, including the School of Medicine, the College of Arts & Sciences and the College of Engineering. 91̽��researchers have a strong track record of innovative cross-institutional collaborations in neuroscience with scientists across the region, including at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Allen Institute, which they can also draw on for ATN research.

“Through the ATN, all partners will bring their best and brightest to bear on these ‘boiling hot,’ challenging problems in neuroscience,” said Daniel.

Wireless sensors can monitor how temperature, humidity or other environmental conditions vary across large swaths of land, such as farms or forests.

These tools could provide unique insights for a variety of applications, including digital agriculture and monitoring climate change. One problem, however, is that it is currently time-consuming and expensive to physically place hundreds of sensors across a large area.

Inspired by how dandelions use the wind to distribute their seeds, a 91̽�� team has developed a tiny sensor-carrying device that can be blown by the wind as it tumbles toward the ground. This system is about 30 times as heavy as a 1 milligram dandelion seed but can still travel up to 100 meters in a moderate breeze, about the length of a football field, from where it was released by a drone. Once on the ground, the device, which can hold at least four sensors, uses solar panels to power its onboard electronics and can share sensor data up to 60 meters away.

The team March 16 in Nature.

“We show that you can use off-the-shelf components to create tiny things. Our prototype suggests that you could use a drone to release thousands of these devices in a single drop. They’ll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop,” said senior author , a 91̽��professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “This is amazing and transformational for the field of deploying sensors, because right now it could take months to manually deploy this many sensors.”

Because the devices have electronics on board, it’s challenging to make the whole system as light as an actual dandelion seed. The first step was to develop a shape that would allow the system to take its time falling to the ground so that it could be tossed around by a breeze. The researchers tested 75 designs to determine what would lead to the smallest “terminal velocity,” or the maximum speed a device would have as it fell through the air.

“The way dandelion seed structures work is that they have a central point and these little bristles sticking out to slow down their fall. We took a 2D projection of that to create the base design for our structures,” said lead author , a 91̽��assistant professor in the Allen School. “As we added weight, our bristles started to bend inwards. We added a ring structure to make it more stiff and take up more area to help slow it down.”

To keep things light, the team used solar panels instead of a heavy battery to power the electronics. The devices landed with the solar panels facing upright 95% of the time. Their shape and structure allow them to flip over and fall in a consistently upright orientation similar to a dandelion seed.

Without a battery, however, the system can’t store a charge, which means that after the sun goes down, the sensors stop working. And then when the sun comes up the next morning, the system needs a bit of energy to get started.

“The challenge is that most chips will draw slightly more power for a short time when you first turn them on,” Iyer said. “They’ll check to make sure everything is working properly before they start executing the code that you wrote. This happens when you turn on your phone or your laptop, too, but of course they have a battery.”

The team designed the electronics to include a capacitor, a device that can store some charge overnight.

“Then we’ve got this little circuit that will measure how much energy we’ve stored up and, once the sun is up and there is more energy coming in, it will trigger the rest of the system to turn on because it senses that it’s above some threshold,” Iyer said.

These devices use backscatter, a method that involves sending information by reflecting transmitted signals, to wirelessly send sensor data back to the researchers. Devices carrying sensors — measuring temperature, humidity, pressure and light — sent data until sunset when they turned off. Data collection resumed when the devices turned themselves back on the next morning.

To measure how far the devices would travel in the wind, the researchers dropped them from different heights, either by hand or by drone on campus. One trick to spread out the devices from a single drop point, the researchers said, is to vary their shapes slightly so they are carried by the breeze differently.

“This is mimicking biology, where variation is actually a feature, rather than a bug,” said co-author , a 91̽��professor of biology. “Plants can’t guarantee that where they grew up this year is going to be good next year, so they have some seeds that can travel farther away to hedge their bets.”

Another benefit of the battery-free system is that there’s nothing on this device that will run out of juice — the device will keep going until it physically breaks down. One drawback to this is that electronics will be scattered across the ecosystem of interest. The researchers are studying how to make these systems more biodegradable.

“This is just the first step, which is why it’s so exciting,” Iyer said. “There are so many other directions we can take now — such as developing larger-scale deployments, creating devices that can change shape as they fall, or even adding some more mobility so that the devices can move around once they are on the ground to get closer to an area we’re curious about.”

, who completed this research as a 91̽��undergraduate majoring in electrical and computer engineering and is now an engineer at Gridware, is also a co-author. This research was funded by the Moore Inventor Fellow award, the National Science Foundation and a grant from the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

For more information, contact dandelions@cs.washington.edu.

Award numbers: #10617, FA9550-14-1-0398

One huge advantage of drones is that these little robots can go places where people can’t, including areas that might be too dangerous, such as unstable structures after a natural disaster or a region with unexploded devices.

Researchers are interested in developing devices that can navigate these situations by sniffing out chemicals in the air to locate disaster survivors, gas leaks, explosives and more. But most sensors created by people are not sensitive or fast enough to be able to find and process specific smells while flying through the patchy odor plumes these sources create.

Now a team led by the 91̽�� has developed Smellicopter: an autonomous drone that uses a live antenna from a moth to navigate toward smells. Smellicopter can also sense and avoid obstacles as it travels through the air. The team Oct. 1 in the journal IOP Bioinspiration & Biomimetics.

“Nature really blows our human-made odor sensors out of the water,” said lead author , a 91̽��doctoral student in mechanical engineering. “By using an actual moth antenna with Smellicopter, we’re able to get the best of both worlds: the sensitivity of a biological organism on a robotic platform where we can control its motion.”

The moth uses its antennae to sense chemicals in its environment and navigate toward sources of food or potential mates.

“Cells in a moth antenna amplify chemical signals,” said co-author , a 91̽��professor of biology who co-supervises Anderson’s doctoral research. “The moths do it really efficiently — one scent molecule can trigger lots of cellular responses, and that’s the trick. This process is super efficient, specific and fast.”

The team used antennae from the Manduca sexta hawkmoth for Smellicopter. Researchers placed moths in the fridge to anesthetize them before removing an antenna. Once separated from the live moth, the antenna stays biologically and chemically active for up to four hours. That time span could be extended, the researchers said, by storing antennae in the fridge.

By adding tiny wires into either end of the antenna, the researchers were able to connect it to an electrical circuit and measure the average signal from all of the cells in the antenna. The team then compared it to a typical human-made sensor by placing both at one end of a wind tunnel and wafting smells that both sensors would respond to: a floral scent and ethanol, a type of alcohol. The antenna reacted more quickly and took less time to recover between puffs.

To create Smellicopter, the team added the antenna sensor to an open-source drone platform that allows users to add special features. The researchers also added two plastic fins on the back of the drone to create drag to help it be constantly oriented upwind.

“From a robotics perspective, this is genius,” said co-author and co-advisor , a 91̽��assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “The classic approach in robotics is to add more sensors, and maybe build a fancy algorithm or use machine learning to estimate wind direction. It turns out, all you need is to add a fin.”

Smellicopter doesn’t need any help from the researchers to search for odors. The team created a “cast and surge” protocol for the drone that mimics how moths search for smells. Smellicopter begins its search by moving to the left for a specific distance. If nothing passes a specific smell threshold, Smellicopter then moves to the right for the same distance. Once it detects an odor, it changes its flying pattern to surge toward it.

Smellicopter can also avoid obstacles with the help of four infrared sensors that let it measure what’s around it 10 times each second. When something comes within about eight inches (20 centimeters) of the drone, it changes direction by going to the next stage of its cast-and-surge protocol.

“So if Smellicopter was casting left and now there’s an obstacle on the left, it’ll switch to casting right,” Anderson said. “And if Smellicopter smells an odor but there’s an obstacle in front of it, it’s going to continue casting left or right until it’s able to surge forward when there’s not an obstacle in its path.”

Another advantage to Smellicopter is that it doesn’t need GPS, the team said. Instead it uses a camera to survey its surroundings, similar to how insects use their eyes. This makes Smellicopter well-suited for exploring indoor or underground spaces like mines or pipes.

During tests in the 91̽��research lab, Smellicopter was naturally tuned to fly toward smells that moths find interesting, such as floral scents. But researchers hope that future work could have the moth antenna sense other smells, such as the exhaling of carbon dioxide from someone trapped under rubble or the chemical signature of an unexploded device.

“Finding plume sources is a perfect task for little robots like the Smellicopter and the ,” Fuller said. “Larger robots are capable of carrying an array of different sensors around and using them to build a map of their world. We can’t really do that at the small scale. But to find the source of a plume, all a robot really needs to do is avoid obstacles and stay in the plume while it moves upwind. It doesn’t need a sophisticated sensor suite for that — it just needs to be able to smell well. And that’s what the Smellicopter is really good at.”

, a 91̽��electrical and computer engineering doctoral student, and , an electrical and computer engineering associate professor at the University of Maryland College Park, are also co-authors. This research was funded by , the Washington Research Foundation, the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research with .

For more information, contact Anderson at melaniea@uw.edu, Fuller at minster@uw.edu and Daniel at danielt@uw.edu.

Grant number: FA9550-14-1-0398

Gift brings Weill Family Foundation philanthropic giving in neuroscience to over $300 million, enabling bold approaches to curing these diseases

With a $106 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation, UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco and the 91̽�� have launched the , an innovative research network that will forge and nurture new collaborations between neuroscientists and researchers working in an array of other disciplines — including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry and mathematics — to speed the development of new therapies for diseases and disorders that affect the brain and nervous system.

A 2016 study by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimated that, in the U.S. alone, neurological and psychiatric disorders and diseases — including Alzheimer’s; Parkinson’s; anxiety and depression; traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury; multiple sclerosis; ALS; and schizophrenia — carry an economic cost of more than $1.5 trillion per year, nearly 9 percent of GDP.

“The gains in knowledge amassed by neuroscientists over the past few decades can now be brought to the next level with supercomputers, electronic brain–computer interfaces, nanotechnology, robotics and powerful imaging tools,” said philanthropist Sanford I. “Sandy” Weill, chairman of the Weill Family Foundation. “The Neurohub will seize this opportunity by building bridges between people with diverse talents and training and bringing them together in a common cause: discovering new treatments to help the millions of patients with such conditions as Alzheimer’s disease and mental illness.”

Complementing the strengths of UCSF, Berkeley and the UW, the Weill Neurohub will draw on the expertise and resources of the 17 National Laboratories overseen by the Department of Energy, which excel in bioengineering, imaging, and data science. In August 2019, the Weill Family Foundation and the DOE signed a Memorandum of Understanding creating a new public–private partnership. The partnership is exploring the use of the Department’s artificial intelligence and supercomputing capabilities, in conjunction with Bay Area universities and the private sector, to advance the study of traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, who has spearheaded the creation of an AI and Technology Office during his tenure at DOE, said that the vision for the Weill Neurohub dovetails with his own mission to make publicly funded AI and supercomputing resources more widely accessible to advance scientific discovery. “We are on the cusp of great discoveries that could transform our approach to TBI, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological and psychiatric disorders, and easing access to the world-class computational power of our National Laboratories to initiatives like the Weill Neurohub is a win-win for science and the public sector — and, eventually, for patients.”

As many neurological disorders, such as dementia, are associated with aging, the costs of these unmet medical needs are expected to increase significantly in the coming years. California, with the largest aging population in the U.S., with one in five residents reaching age 65 or older in the next decade, faces particularly formidable challenges, said Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“Every day, millions of people in California, the nation, and the world are facing the uncertainty of neuro-related diseases, mental illness and brain injuries, and collaboration between different disciplines in science, academia, government and philanthropy is critical to meet this challenge. Together, we must accelerate the development and use cutting-edge technology, innovation and tools that will advance research and practical application that will benefit people across the world and for generations to come,” said Newsom. “I want to thank Sandy Weill and his wife, Joan, for their amazing work, kindness, dedication and commitment to philanthropic causes, especially when they open doors, bridge gaps, and make innovation and collaboration possible to advance causes that can truly have an impact on people’s quality of life.”

The Weill Neurohub will enable the three universities to work together on these pressing problems. For example, the 91̽��and UCSF, renowned research universities with long traditions of excellence in basic neuroscience research, also have federally sponsored Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, or ADRCs. Through the Weill Neurohub, members of the UW’s ARDC, part of the 91̽��Medicine Memory and Brain Wellness Center, and UCSF’s ADRC, led by the UCSF Memory and Aging Center, will collaborate with top neurodegeneration researchers at Berkeley.

The Weill Neurohub will provide funding for faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students at the UW, Berkeley and UCSF working on cross-disciplinary projects, including funding for “high-risk/high-reward” proposals that are particularly innovative and less likely to find support through conventional funding sources. But the bulk of the Weill Neurohub’s funding will support highly novel cross-institutional projects built on one or more of four scientific “pillars” that Weill Neurohub leaders have deemed priority areas for answering the toughest questions about the brain and discovering new approaches to disease: imaging; engineering; genomics and molecular therapeutics; and computation and data analytics.

The Weill Neurohub may seek additional academic, corporate and philanthropic partners to harness resources collaboratively, better scale research and development efforts, share information and data and create partnerships to make breakthroughs faster and at a lower cost than the current paradigm allows.

Relevant examples of interdisciplinary or cross-institutional neuroscience projects now underway at UCSF, Berkeley and/or the 91̽��include:

• Design and construction of “NextGen7T” MRI brain scanner technology, which will shatter current resolution limits, creating the world’s first clear images of brain structures as small as 200 to 300 microns — a quarter of the size of a grain of sand — which is about 60 times sharper than a standard hospital MRI. For brain function, NextGen7T will be able to detect activity in regions as small as 400 microns, allowing for the discovery of new brain circuits and, for the first time, detecting the direction of information flow in the brain. This breakthrough tool will provide Weill Neurohub investigators with deeper understanding of how brain structure and function change in disease, and to test the effectiveness of treatment innovations.
• Customized neurotherapies based on the CRISPR gene-targeting system to treat rare inherited movement disorders and eye diseases that can lead to blindness.
• Implants that read and decode brain signals that could allow paralyzed patients to easily control robotic limbs or exoskeletons, restoring their ability to use objects or walk; similar implants are under study to restore speech in stroke patients, to reduce chronic pain, and to treat severe, intractable depression and anxiety.
• Miniaturized, non-invasive Band-Aid–sized devices that could provide therapeutic stimulation through the skin to treat spinal cord injury.
• AI applications with the power to detect tiny but life-threatening hemorrhages in CT scans of the entire brain, which may contain over a million pixels, in minutes. With this information, neuroradiologists can quickly consult with neurologists and neurosurgeons, when time is of the essence, to zero in on the best treatment plan.
• Tablet-based applications that seamlessly draw together medical records, images and population-derived data, giving patients with neurological diseases such as multiple sclerosis an easy-to-use portal to record, analyze and understand their health.

This gift expands on the unique vision and mission of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established in 2016 with a $185 million gift from the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sandy Weill — whose giving to the neuroscience community now exceeds $300 million — said UCSF’s Dr. , the Robert A. Fishman Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Weill Institute director.

“The UCSF Weill Institute set out to break down walls between the clinical disciplines of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry, and also bring these clinical specialties together with the basic neurosciences,” said Hauser. “Now, with the Weill Neurohub, we’re going even further: eliminating institutional boundaries between three great public research universities, and also other disciplinary walls between ‘traditional’ neuroscience and ‘non-traditional’ approaches to understanding the brain. By embracing engineering, data analysis and imaging science at this dramatically higher level — areas in which both Berkeley and the 91̽��are among the best in the world — neuroscientists on all three campuses will gain crucial tools and insights that will bring us closer to our shared goal of reducing suffering from brain diseases.”

Hauser will serve as one of two co-directors of the new Weill Neurohub along with Berkeley’s , the Evan Rauch Chair of Neuroscience. Together with , the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed Chair and professor of biology at the UW, they will serve on the Weill Neurohub’s Leadership Committee.

“In the Weill Neurohub, the emphasis will be on technology to enable discovery of disease mechanisms, and thus development of novel treatments and early detection of neurologic diseases, to allow intervention before conditions become severe,” said Isacoff, who heads Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. “The technologies include next-generation neuroimaging and therapeutic manipulations ranging from brain implants to CRISPR gene editing, with major efforts in machine learning and high-speed computation. I think these three campuses can succeed in this joint mission in a way that no others can — the combined expertise this group brings to the table, especially when you bring in the National Labs, really is unparalleled.”

The UW’s Daniel added, “The Weill Neurohub brings together three outstanding public institutions, each with a deep commitment to bridge boundaries between science, engineering, computer science and data science to address fundamental problems in neuroscience and neural disorders. To my knowledge, this is a nationally unique enterprise — drawing on diverse approaches to accomplish goals no single institution could reach alone, as well as seeding and accelerating research and discovery.”

Neuroscientists have made huge strides in understanding the brain in the 30 years since President George H. W. Bush designated the 1990s as the “Decade of the Brain,” and subsequently through the National Institute of Health’s ongoing BRAIN Initiative, first announced by President Obama in 2013. But treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases have lagged far behind those for other common afflictions, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Much of the lack of progress on neurological and psychiatric disease is due to the unparalleled complexity of the nervous system, in which hundreds of billions of nerve cells and support cells form as many as 100 trillion connections in intricate three-dimensional networks throughout the brain and spinal cord. The Weill Neurohub’s leaders believe reaching beyond conventional approaches is essential to grappling with this complexity.

“Despite amazing advances in neuroscience, new therapies are not reaching patients with mental illness and neurological disorders nearly as quickly as they have for heart disease and cancer. And in addition to the terrible personal toll these illnesses exact on patients and their families, they also have a massive impact on our healthcare system and on the global economy,” said Joan Weill, president of the Weill Family Foundation. “Our goal, through the broad and multifaceted approach of the Weill Neurohub, is to begin to change that.”

Our nervous systems are remarkable translators, channeling information from many sources and initiating appropriate behavioral responses.

But though we know a lot about how neurons work, scientists do not fully understand how the nervous system integrates stimuli from different senses. You may smell smoke and feel heat, but how does the brain combining and interpret these different stimuli, signaling you to phone the fire department?

It turns out that insects are attractive models to investigate questions about integrating information from different sensory pathways. The ,��Manduca sexta,��uses a long, trunk-like proboscis to drink up sweet nectar meals from obliging flowers. A led by 91̽�� biology professor has teased out how hawkmoths integrate signals from two sensory systems: vision and touch.

Their findings, Oct. 24 in the , illustrate the computational basis of this integration, which may serve as a general model for insects, other animals and humans.

“Sensory integration remains one of the more interesting tasks that even simple nervous systems accomplish,” said Daniel. “From tasks like reaching in humans to nectar-feeding in insects, our challenge has been developing experimental ways to reveal the mechanisms and circuitry that underlie combined visual and mechanical sensing.”

The hawkmoth’s proboscis is longer than its body, so it can probe deep within a flower to find nectar while the hawkmoth hovers above. Even as the flower sways and blows with the wind, hawkmoths have been observed adjusting their position to track with the flower’s position.

Scientists can study tracking behavior in the laboratory using specially designed, artificial flowers constructed with their own small nectar pods. Hawkmoths respond to these pre-packaged dinners similarly to real flowers, and — if researchers manipulate the artificial flower to move when a hawkmoth is feeding — the hawkmoth its position to keep up.

In addition to its drinking duties, the proboscis is also a sensory organ, relaying information about the moving flower it is touching. To see how input from different sensory systems contributed to tracking behavior, Daniel’s team modified the artificial flowers to simultaneously deliver contradictory visual and tactile cues: the flower’s petals, which the hawkmoth follows using its eyes, move independently from the nectar pod, which the hawkmoth proboscis touches. By studying how moths respond to discordant visual and touch signals, they hoped to decipher how the hawkmoth brain processes and combines inputs from both sensory systems.

“Typically, to study how a particular sense contributes to a behavior, scientists try to design experiments in which the animal only receives that one kind of sensory cue,” said 91̽��postdoctoral researcher , who is lead author on the paper. “But this doesn’t reflect what’s happening when an ensemble of senses contribute concurrently. Our approach — sensory conflict­ — bombards the animal with rich multisensory cues simultaneously. This allows us to model how information is processed and combined concurrently across different senses.”

Daniel and his team . When the nectar chamber moved but the rest of the flower was still, the moths were generally able to sway in response to their moving meal. But when they kept the nectar chamber still and moved the flower petals, moths only swayed slightly. This indicated that, for feeding, tactile information transmitted by the proboscis may be a more important sensory input than vision.

“In nature, the visual and touch cues largely agree and either sense alone is enough for the job. Having both provides redundancy, a backup just in case,” said Roth. “But when we present the moth with conflicting stimuli, it must decide how to balance the mismatched information — which cue to follow. And it turns out, quite surprisingly, that touch beats out vision in this sensory tug-of-war.”

They measured hawkmoth positions during the tests and used these data to describe hawkmoth behavior in terms of a mathematical model. Though the sense of touch appeared to play a greater role in tracking behavior, moths do not rely on this sense alone. Their mathematical model indicated that the moth brain uses a simple additive or “linear summation” model to integrate signals from the proboscis and the eyes. And though moths rely heavily on the touch cues from the proboscis, the model suggests that both the visual and touch senses are acute enough for the moth to follow the flower.

The team used this model to predict how moths would behave in a new discordant setting in which the nectar chamber and flower were both moving, but quite differently. The researchers tested these predictions on a different set of hawkmoths, and they responded to this floral discord just as the model predicted. Daniel and his team believe that the mathematical underpinnings they describe here may represent a common mode of signal integration in animals.

Senior author is , a former 91̽��postdoc who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Co-author is 91̽��graduate, Robert Hall. The research was funded by , and the 91̽��.

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For more information, contact Daniel at danielt@u.washington.edu or 206-543-1659 and Roth at eatai@uw.edu or 205-543-7335.

Grant numbers: FA8651-13-1-0004, FA9550-14-1-0398.

Using high-speed infrared cameras and 3-D-printed robotic flowers, scientists have now learned how this insect juggles these complex sensing and control challenges – all while adjusting to changing light conditions. The work shows that the creatures can slow their brains to improve vision under low-light conditions – while continuing to perform demanding tasks.

What the researchers have discovered could help the next generation of small flying robots operate efficiently under a broad range of lighting conditions. The research is published in the June 12 edition of Science.

“There has been a lot of interest in understanding how animals deal with challenging sensing environments, especially when they are also doing difficult tasks like hovering in mid-air,” said lead author , a former 91̽�� postdoctoral researcher who is now an assistant professor in the School of Physics and School of Applied Physiology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This is also a very significant challenge for micro air vehicles.”

The hawkmoth has been studied extensively to investigate the fundamental principles governing the development and function of its neural system, said co-author , a 91̽��biology professor and director of the new at the UW.

Daniel’s research group has experimentally characterized the response of flying hawkmoths using a sensory input comprised of the linear sum of sine waves. This new paper extends application of the “sum of sines” approach, he said.

“Simon’s work took the formal methods of control theory to dissect out how neural circuits adapt to vast ranges of luminance levels,” added Daniel. “By looking at the time delays in the movement dynamics of a freely-flying moth – interacting with the input of a robotically moved flower – Simon was able to extract the luminance dependent processing of the moth’s central nervous system.”

Scientists already knew that the moths, which feed on flower nectar during the evening and at dusk and dawn, use specialized eye structures to maximize the amount of light they can capture. But they also surmised that the insects might be slowing their nervous systems to make the best use of this limited light. But if they were slowing their brains to see better, wouldn’t that hurt their ability to hover and track the motion of flowers?

Sponberg and colleagues at the 91̽��studied this question using high-speed infrared cameras and nectar-dispensing robotic flowers that could be moved from side-to-side at different rates. While varying both the light conditions and the frequency at which the flowers moved, the researchers studied how well free-flying moths kept their tongues – known as proboscises – in the flowers.

They also measured real flowers blowing in the wind to determine the range of motion the insects had to contend with in the wild.

“We expected to see a tradeoff with the moths doing significantly worse at tracking flowers in low light conditions,” said Sponberg. “What we saw was that while the moths did slow down, that only made a difference if the flower was moving rapidly – faster than they actually move in nature.”

In the experiments, the moths tracked robotic flowers that were oscillating at rates of up to 20 hertz – twenty oscillations per second. That was considerably faster than the two-hertz maximum rate observed in real flowers. Because the moth’s wings beat at a rate of about 25 strokes per second, they had to adjust their direction of movement with nearly every wingstroke – a major sensing, computational and control accomplishment.

“This is really an extreme behavior, though the moth makes it look simple and elegant,” said Sponberg. “To maneuver like this is really quite challenging.”

In the natural world, light intensity varies 10 billion-fold from noon on a sunny day to midnight a cloudy evening. Operating in that range of luminosity is a challenge for both moths and the sensors on human-engineered systems. Understanding how natural systems adjust to this range of conditions could therefore have broader benefits.

“If we want to have robots or machine vision systems that are working under this broad range of conditions, understanding how these moths function under these varying light conditions would be very useful,” Sponberg said.

To gather the data reported in this paper, the researchers used a robotic flower able to move in one dimension. Recently, they’ve used the actuator devices from a 3-D printer to build a robotic flower that moves in two or three dimensions, providing an additional challenge for the moths.

In future research, Sponberg and his colleagues hope to incorporate their robotic flower into a low-speed wind tunnel to study the aerodynamic challenges the moths overcome – including the role of wing vortices and the flow-effect interaction of the insect’s wings with the flowers.

Other co-authors are Jonathan Dyhr at Northwest University and Robert Hall at the UW.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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For more information, contact Daniel at danielt@uw.edu or 206-543-1659 and Sponberg at sponberg@gatech.edu.

This story was adapted from a Georgia Institute of Technology .

A involving hawk moths – a close relative of the species made famous by the film “Silence of the Lambs” – was published April 15 in the ‘s journal .

Since long before Charles Darwin, ecologists have been fascinated by flower shape, and in particular how animal pollinators have shaped the evolution of floral traits.

But studying the impact of flower shape on pollinator behavior is difficult.

Ecologists have either relied on plant breeding (which means they can only study flower shapes found in nature) or have made flowers by hand from papier mache (which can be time consuming and could make it difficult for ecologists to test each other’s results).

Now, graduate student and fellow 91̽��biologists have used 3-D printing to make artificial flowers so they can investigate how flower shape affects foraging behavior in the , or Manduca sexta.

Also known as the tobacco hornworm because the larvae feed on tobacco, the hawk moth is common in the southern and southeastern regions of the U.S. With a thumb-sized body and fist-sized wingspan, adult moths are adept at flying and hovering, which they do to feed from trumpet-shaped flowers such as petunias.

The researchers made flowers of two different shapes, one curved like a trumpet and the other a flat disc with a hole in the center. After filling each artificial flower with sugar water to simulate a real flower’s nectar, they arranged equal numbers of curved and flat flowers on a square grid. They then allowed hawk moths to fly freely around the artificial flowers for five minutes and compared how many of each flower shape the moths emptied.

“With their long proboscis and nocturnal habits, finding a flower’s nectar source isn’t easy for the fist-sized hawk moths we used in our study,” Campos said. “Imagine being given a garden hose that’s almost twice your height in length. Now imagine trying to thread the other end through a hole that’s scarcely wider than the hose itself – at dusk as the sun is setting or at night during a full moon. It may seem like a silly proposition, but it’s not too far off from what night-flying hawk moths have to contend with to get a meal.”They found the moths fed much more successfully from the curved than the flat flowers, which suggests that this nocturnal species is using touch rather than sight as the primary means of finding nectar.

By showing how 3-D printing can be used to make artificial flowers, the research opens up new ways for ecologists to study animal pollinators and the evolutionary role they play in shaping the flowers we see in nature today.

“3-D printing is a unique opportunity to explore the interactions between floral form and pollinator performance,” Campos said. “Such studies can help elucidate the details of how pollinator visitation influences the evolution of floral shape in nature, and the extent to which floral forms are the result of specializations between one plant and one pollinator species.”

Co-authors are , chair and professor of biology, and , professor of biology and director of the new at the UW.

The research was funded by the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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This story was adapted from a British Ecological Society news release. For more information or to see the 3-D printed flowers, contact Campos at eocampos@uw.edu.

Though many animals can move with more precision and accuracy than our best-engineered aircraft and technologies, gyroscopes are rarely found in nature. Scientists know of just one group of insects, the group including flies, that has something that behaves like a gyroscope — sensors called , clublike structures that evolved from wings.

Halteres provide information about the rotation of the body during flight, which helps flies perform aerial acrobatics and maintain stability and direction. But how do other insects without these sensors regulate flight dynamics, biologists have wondered?

91̽�� research suggests that insects’ wings may also serve a gyroscopic function — a discovery that sheds new insight on natural flight and could help with developing new sensory systems in engineering.

Published in January in the , the research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It was a key part of the successful proposal for an , a new 91̽��center focused on understanding how elements in nature can inform the development of remotely controlled small aircraft.

“I was surprised at the results,” said Brad Dickerson, a graduate student in biology and co-author of the study. “This idea of wings being gyroscopes has existed for a long time, but this paper is the first to really address how that would be possible.”

and another 91̽��graduate student, , conducted the research seeking to determine whether insects could use the bending of their wings to sense rotations of their bodies during flight. This could help explain how these master flyers are able to move with precision and speed.

The pair first developed a computational model of a flapping, flexing, rotating plate. To test their results, they built a robotic model using plastic sheeting mounted on a motor to simulate a flapping wing, then mounted that structure onto a second motor to rotate it.

They discovered that the model wing twisted when flapped and rotated around its base, causing changes in patterns of strain across the wing’s surface. The researchers believe that the strain might stimulate sensors embedded in the wing — suggesting that the wings of flying insects might, as halteres do, provide them with gyroscopic information.

Eberle, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and the paper’s corresponding author, said the results suggest that additional information about flight dynamics could be gleaned by embedding sensors onto the surface of manufactured wings. In turn, that knowledge could eventually help engineers design more efficient wings for structures such as micro air vehicles, helicopters and turbines.

But first, Eberle said, more research is needed to determine what relationship exists between animals’ wing flexibility and sensing capability.

“We don’t understand yet what those principles might be,” she said. “These are 10-year visions.”

The pair of researchers said they are excited about the opportunities that the new Air Force center offers to uncover biological principles and develop new bio-inspired designs.

Senior authors are , chair of the UW’s mechanical engineering department, and , a 91̽��professor of biology and director of the new Air Force center.

Even the most advanced aircraft can’t fly as skillfully as a housefly.

That’s why a new center focusing on learning how animals move, navigate and use their senses is being established at the 91̽�� with partners at other universities in the U.S. and Europe.

The is one of six nationwide centers funded by the U.S. Air Force and the only to focus on how elements in nature can help solve challenging engineering and technological problems related to building small, remotely operated aircraft.

“Our goal is to reverse-engineer how natural systems accomplish challenging tasks,” said center director , a 91̽��biology professor who holds the Joan and Richard Komen Endowed University Chair. “We are really trying to push hard on next-generation robotic systems and technologies that draw on how biology solves problems of control, complex maneuvering and manipulation.”

The center is housed within the Department of Biology at the 91̽��in partnership with the College of Engineering, and has strong ties to two Washington Research Foundation initiatives: the and the .

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland also are part of the research team. International partners include Imperial College London, the Royal Veterinary College, University of Bristol, University of Sussex and Oxford University, all in the U.K., and Lund University in Sweden.

The center will focus on three main research areas:

• Locating objects: Researchers will look at how animals are able to find prey, mates or food sources by encoding and processing information through their senses.
• Navigating in complex environments: Insects and bats often fly in windy and crowded spaces, skillfully avoiding collisions. Scientists will study how their neurological and physiological systems function to allow them to move in these ways.
• Navigating in sensory-deprived environments: Animals often fly in low light or nearly complete darkness, and in places where their ability to smell and hear might be compromised. Researchers will look more broadly at how animals use sensory information and how they make decisions about flight under different contexts.

Learning from the behavior of insects and animals could inspire more advanced , or small, flying robots. These could be used in difficult search-and-rescue missions, or to help detect explosives or mines when it would be too dangerous for humans to go on foot or in vehicles.

“Small autonomous unmanned vehicles have the ability to move into spaces and search for injured people or assess structural health in situations where human emergency responders simply cannot access in a safe way, such as in the Oso, Washington, mudslide or the Fukushima plant after the 2011 tsunami in Japan,” said , a 91̽��associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and one of the center’s faculty leads.

Researchers at the 91̽��will work in the center’s core lab in Kincaid Hall. A large animal wind tunnel to test how animals fly and process sensory information is already in place there, and the team hopes to build an additional motion-capture system to study animal flight and even , small helicopters that could become “smarter” flyers by using the sensing abilities of animals.

Aside from these applications, center researchers will also develop micro-air vehicles for environmental monitoring. A micro-scaled quadrotor could, for example, navigate through a thick forest to the tree canopy and measure temperature, moisture and gases at different levels in the atmosphere. Or, small unmanned aircraft could be used to track ocean mammals such as whales for more consistent monitoring.

Another looks at how insect wings actually serve as both a way to fly and offer real-time measurement of where the insect is moving in space.

Funding for the new center, which comes from the , is up to $9 million spread over six years, provided the center passes a renewal every two years. The Department of Biology, the Department of Applied Mathematics, the College of Arts & Sciences, the College of Engineering and the Office of the Provost also are providing money for the center.

At the UW, researchers ranging from high school students and undergraduates to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty members will work in the new center. Other 91̽��faculty leads are , assistant professor of mechanical engineering; , associate professor of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering; and , assistant professor of biology.

For the Air Force, the funding is part of an investment in basic research with universities and industry laboratories to help transition research results to support the Air Force’s needs, without specific applications or products in mind.

“That being said, it is possible that this information could be used for enabling more efficient aircraft flight, better control of remotely piloted vehicles or even better capabilities for rescue operations,” said Patrick Bradshaw, program officer with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “Being able to understand and mimic nature may enable us to do many other things we don’t even realize we can do yet.”

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For more information, contact Tom Daniel at danielt@uw.edu or 206-543-1659.