Effect of eccentricity on sensing in spider web inspired cable nets

Spider webs are multifunctional tools that, besides capturing prey, monitor vibration in the web to localize the prey. Spiders obtain an evolutionary benefit from improving monitoring because better information processing leads to more successful captures, leading to higher chances for survival. Based on this, combined with the costly energy requirements of signaling, biologists observe that the spider's web operates as an extended cognition of the spider's central nervous system. Here an extended cognition means that the web filters signals to make decoding information easier. Spider webs contain characteristic design patterns, such as an eccentric location of the central hub. This paper investigates how this eccentricity enables a spatially dependent dynamic response of web-like structures, potentially enabling extended cognition. Modeling consists of modal analyses in a Finite Elements Model on web-like structures where a mass is sequentially moved across all nodes. This yields the natural frequencies of the structure depending on the mass location. Analysis shows that the natural frequency forms patterns based on the mass location, and more importantly, it shows how these patterns become more intricate by including eccentricity. The resulting maximum change in natural frequency grows as the eccentricity in the design grows. This shows that eccentricity influences the dynamic response, hence indicating that eccentricity could enable the web's extended cognition. The numerical model of spider web-inspired structures can investigate the effects of the geometry on any network-like structures besides spider webs. The authors believe the model can be utilized for impact/anomaly detection on network-like structures.</p

4D printing roadmap

Four-dimensional (4D) printing is an advanced manufacturing technology that has rapidly emerged as a transformative tool with the capacity to reshape various research domains and industries. Distinguished by its integration of time as a dimension, 4D printing allows objects to dynamically respond to external stimuli, setting it apart from conventional 3D printing. This roadmap has been devised, by contributions of 44 active researchers in this field from 32 affiliations world-wide, to navigate the swiftly evolving landscape of 4D printing, consolidating recent advancements and making them accessible to experts across diverse fields, ranging from biomedicine to aerospace, textiles to electronics. The roadmap’s goal is to empower both experts and enthusiasts, facilitating the exploitation of 4D printing’s transformative potential to create intelligent, adaptive objects that are not only feasible but readily attainable. By addressing current and future challenges and proposing advancements in science and technology, it sets the stage for revolutionary progress in numerous industries, positioning 4D printing as a transformative tool for the future

SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python.

SciPy is an open-source scientific computing library for the Python programming language. Since its initial release in 2001, SciPy has become a de facto standard for leveraging scientific algorithms in Python, with over 600 unique code contributors, thousands of dependent packages, over 100,000 dependent repositories and millions of downloads per year. In this work, we provide an overview of the capabilities and development practices of SciPy 1.0 and highlight some recent technical developments