Photoautotrophs–Bacteria Co-Cultures: Advances, Challenges and Applications

Photosynthetic microorganisms are among the fundamental living organisms exploited for millennia in many industrial applications, including the food chain, thanks to their adaptable behavior and intrinsic proprieties. The great multipotency of these photoautotroph microorganisms has been described through their attitude to become biofarm for the production of value-added compounds to develop functional foods and personalized drugs. Furthermore, such biological systems demonstrated their potential for green energy production (e.g., biofuel and green nanomaterials). In particular, the exploitation of photoautotrophs represents a concrete biorefinery system toward sustainability, currently a highly sought-after concept at the industrial level and for the environmental protection. However, technical and economic issues have been highlighted in the literature, and in particular, challenges and limitations have been identified. In this context, a new perspective has been recently considered to offer solutions and advances for the biomanufacturing of photosynthetic materials: the co-culture of photoautotrophs and bacteria. The rational of this review is to describe the recently released information regarding this microbial consortium, analyzing the critical issues, the strengths and the next challenges to be faced for the intentions attainment.

The Plant-Like Structure of Lance Sea Urchin Spines as Biomimetic Concept Generator for Freeze-Casted Structural Graded Ceramics

The spine of the lance sea urchin (Phyllacanthus imperialis) is an unusual plant-akin hierarchical lightweight construction with several gradation features: a basic core–shell structure is modified in terms of porosities, pore orientation and pore size, forming superstructures. Differing local strength and energy consumption features create a biomimetic potential for the construction of porous ceramics with predetermined breaking points and adaptable behavior in compression overload. We present a new detailed structural and failure analysis of those spines and demonstrate that it is possible to include at least a limited number of those features in an abstracted way in ceramics, manufactured by freeze-casting. This possibility is shown to come from a modified mold design and optimized suspensions.

PedestriANS: a bipedal robot with adaptive morphology

In diverse situations, humans produce natural and adaptable bipedal locomotion by cooperatively manipulating the interactions among the different parts of their bodies and the environment. Therefore, to realize a robot with adaptable behavior, it should be enabled to adjust its morphology accordingly in response to environmental changes. From this perspective, this study introduces the development of a bipedal robot with adaptive morphology. By implementing an actuator network system (ANS), the robot is able to manipulate the physical characteristics of its legs and the way they interact with each other. Two experiments have been conducted: main and supplementary experiments. The main experiment examined how effective is adjusting the robot’s morphology on changing the robot’s behavior. The experiment was conducted on different ground materials and under different connection patterns between the robot’s legs. During the experiment, the robot’s behavior was evaluated in reference to four aspects: walking style, stability, speed, and moving direction. The supplementary experiment took the results of the main experiment and used it to improve the robot’s behavior during locomotion. The robot was enabled to automatically switch between the different connection patterns of the ANS, which in turn changed the interaction between the robot’s legs and generated a more suitable dynamics for the surrounding environment.