A team of researchers from the University of Maryland has 3D printed a soft robotic hand that is agile enough to play Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros.—and win!

The feat, highlighted on the front cover of the latest issue of Science Advances, demonstrates a promising innovation in the field of “soft robotics”, which centers on creating new types of flexible, inflatable robots that are powered using water or air rather than electricity. Soft robots’ inherent safety and adaptability has sparked interest in their use for applications like prosthetics and biomedical devices. Unfortunately, controlling the fluids that make these soft robots bend and move has been especially difficult—until now.
President Joe Biden has nominated Laurie Locascio, bioengineering professor at the University of Maryland, to serve as under secretary for standards and technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce. If confirmed by the Senate, she would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal lab that conducts research in subjects ranging from cybersecurity to quantum computing to monitoring of election technology.
Taylor Woehl and Chen Zhang, both professors in the University of Maryland Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, received CAREER grants, the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty members. The CAREER (Faculty Early Career Development) Program supports exemplary junior faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
An entirely new class of fire, spherical cool diffusion flames or simply “cool flames,” has been documented aboard the International Space Station. The discovery of these dim, quiet flames—led by fire protection engineer Peter Sunderland at the University of Maryland—could literally ignite development of the combustion engine of the future. Sunderland and his collaborators launched an experiment designed to generate controlled cool flames that burn, steadily, for at least two minutes.
Rapid-Seal®, a new gel that can stop bleeding in seconds, has hit both virtual and brick-and-mortar shelves as the first consumer product released by Medcura Inc., a company launched at the University of Maryland. Rapid-Seal uses a proprietary modification of chitosan, a nontoxic, biodegradable biopolymer found in the shells of crustaceans and certain plants, to seal minor cuts and scrapes while preventing harmful bacteria from growing.