The Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) will coordinate a project on 6G mobile networks funded by the Smart Networks and Services Joint Undertaking (SNS JU) under the Horizon Europe programme. Entitled 6G-TWIN, the project is one of the 27 new research and experimentation initiatives selected from the second SNS JU call for proposals, which will all start operating from January 1, 2024. Established by the European Commission in 2021, SNS JU serves as a foundation for fostering the growth of intelligent communication components, systems, and networks, which play a crucial role in constructing a top-tier European supply chain for cutting-edge 5G and upcoming 6G technologies.

Beyond 5G

The rapid integration of digital technology across industries like transportation and manufacturing has boosted the need for efficient communication and computing services. To meet this, innovative approaches for 6G architecture are crucial, aiming to go beyond current 5G capabilities.

“Each generation of mobile technology takes roughly a decade to evolve from conception to commercial deployment,” explains Sébastien Faye, 6G-TWIN Project Coordinator.  “Starting from the first generations, which brought basic cellular connectivity, through 5G, which facilitates revolutionary applications like connected and automated mobility, each iteration introduces new capabilities to meet a demand that is continually growing. Networks are becoming increasingly complex and distributed, requiring a large variety of technologies to operate. With 6G, which is now on the horizon for around 2030, it is essential to design, experiment and standardize new network architectures with more intelligence and automation – which is what we will be proposing in this project.”

European 6G roadmaps prioritize an AI-native management system for complex networks. These networks need to be sustainable, energy-efficient, and adaptable to various services and business models. Establishing a consistent unified communication and computing architecture requires unconventional methods, along with collaboration among standardization groups and industry leaders for practical market integration.

Leveraging AI for next-generation 6G architecture

To achieve this, the 6G-TWIN consortium “will explore the concept of Network Digital Twinning (NDT) and its integration into future 6G systems”, says Faye. Creating a real-time digital replica of the physical network infrastructure (i.e., NDTs) means creating a sandbox in which it is possible to train models and test different scenarios before deploying them on physical network controllers. “6G will enable real-time interaction between physical networks and these digital copies, with the aim of optimizing various parameters, anticipating failures, improving energy efficiency and so on,” he adds, “thus paving the way for highly efficient and intelligent networks.”

The project also includes plans to create demonstrators that validate the concepts developed, adds Faye. These demonstrators encompass teleoperated driving and energy-efficient network distribution. “By exploring these real-world applications, the project will not only contribute to the theoretical advancement of 6G but also demonstrate its practical feasibility – thanks to a wide range of expertise from the 11 project partners.”

The 6G-TWIN consortium is made up of multiple partners, ranging from universities and research centres (IMEC, Politecnico di Bari, Technische Universität Dresden, Université de Bourgogne) to SMEs (Accelleran, Research to Market Solution France, Ubiwhere) and large industrial entities (Ericsson Araştırma Geliştirme ve Bilişim Hizmetleri A.Ş., Proximus Luxembourg, VIAVI Solutions). From Luxembourg, the collaboration includes Proximus Luxembourg/Telindus, with whom LIST already has a collaboration agreement on the development of business use-cases based on advanced connectivity. With a total grand budget of €4 million over three years, this initiative exemplifies the European Commission’s commitment to fostering innovation and research that will shape the future of wireless communication, and, within LIST, another step towards the creation of a strong centre of excellence around Digital Twin Technologies.

Stimulating muscle fibers with magnets causes them to grow in the same direction, aligning muscle cells within tissue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston University investigators report October 20 in the journal Device. The findings offer a simpler, less time-consuming way for medical researchers to program muscle cell alignment, which is strongly tied to healthy muscle function.

“The ability to make aligned muscle in a lab setting means that we can develop model tissues for understanding muscle in healthy and diseased states and for developing and testing new therapies that combat muscle injury or disease,” says senior author Ritu Raman (@DrRituRaman), an MIT engineer. A better understanding of the rules that govern muscle growth could also have applications in robotics, she adds.

In a previous investigation, Raman and colleagues found that “exercising” muscle fibers by making them contract in response to electrical stimulation for 30 minutes a day over the course of 10 days made the fibers stronger. This time, the researchers wanted to explore whether mechanically stimulating the muscle fibers over the same time frame (rather than letting them respond on their own) would have the same result. To investigate, they developed a method to mechanically stimulate muscle tissue that differs from typical lab techniques.

“Generally, when people want to mechanically stimulate tissues in a lab environment, they grasp the tissue at both ends and move it back and forth, stretching and compressing the whole tissue,” said Raman. “But this doesn’t really mimic how cells talk to each other in our bodies. We wanted to spatially control the forces between cells within a tissue, matching native systems.”

To stimulate the muscle cells in a more true-to-life way, Raman and her team grew cells in a Petri dish on a soft gel that contained magnetic particles. When they would move a magnet back and forth under the gel, the particles moved back and forth, too, which “flexed” the cells. The researchers could precisely control the way the gel moved, and, in turn, the magnitude and direction of the forces the cells within experienced, by changing the strength and orientation of the magnet. To measure the alignment of the muscle fibers within the tissues and whether they contracted in synchrony, the team’s collaborators at Boston University developed a custom software that automatically tracked videos of the muscle and generated graphs of its movement.

“We were very surprised by the findings of our study,” said Raman. While mechanically stimulating the muscle fibers over the 10-day period did not seem to make them any stronger, it did cause them all to grow in the same direction.

“Furthermore, we were excited to find that, when we triggered muscle contraction, aligned muscle was beating synchronously, whereas non-aligned muscle was not beating rhythmically,” said Raman. “This confirmed our understanding that the form and function of muscle are intrinsically connected, and that controlling form can help us control function.”

Raman and colleagues plan to take the study further by investigating how different mechanical stimulation regimens impact both healthy and diseased muscle fibers. Additionally, they plan to study how mechanical stimulation affects other types of cells.

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The researchers were supported by the US DoD Army Research Office Early Career Program, the NSF CAREER program, the NEC Corporation Fund, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Device, Rios and Bu et al. “Mechanically programming anisotropy in engineered muscle with actuating extracellular matrices.” https://www.cell.com/device/fulltext/S2666-9986(23)00149-7 

Device (@Device_CP), is a physical science journal from Cell Press along with Chem, Joule, and Matter. Device aims to be the breakthrough journal to support device- and application-oriented research from all disciplines, including applied physics, applied materials, nanotechnology, robotics, energy research, chemistry, and biotechnology under a single title that focuses on the integration of these diverse disciplines in the creation of the cutting-edge technology of tomorrow. Visit http://www.cell.com/device/home. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

The fossils of a 170-million-year-old ancient marine reptile from the Age of Dinosaurs have been identified as the oldest-known mega-predatory pliosaur – a group of ocean-dwelling reptiles closely related to the famous long-necked plesiosaurs. The findings are rare and add new knowledge to the evolution of plesiosaurs. The study has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The fossils were found 40 years ago in north-eastern France. An international team of palaeontologists from the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld in Germany, the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University in Sweden have now analysed them and identified them as a new pliosaur genus: Lorrainosaurus.

Pliosaurs were a type of plesiosaur with short necks and massive skulls. They appeared over 200 million years ago, but remained minor components of marine ecosystems until suddenly developing into enormous apex predators. The new study shows that this adaptive shift followed feeding niche differentiation and the global decline of other predatory marine reptiles over 170 million years ago.

Lorrainosaurus is the oldest large-bodied pliosaur represented by an associated skeleton. It had jaws over 1.3 m long with large conical teeth and a bulky ‘torpedo-shaped’ body propelled by four flipper-like limbs.

“Lorrainosaurus was one of the first truly huge pliosaurs. It gave rise to a dynasty of marine reptile mega-predators that ruled the oceans for around 80 million years,” explains Sven Sachs, a researcher at the Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, who led the study.

This giant reptile probably reached over 6 m from snout to tail, and lived during the early Middle Jurassic period. Intriguingly, very little is known about plesiosaurs from that time.

“Our identification of Lorrainosaurus as one of the earliest mega-predatory pliosaurs demonstrates that these creatures emerged immediately after a landmark restructuring of marine predator ecosystems across the Early-to-Middle Jurassic boundary, some 175 to 171 million years ago. This event profoundly affected many marine reptile groups and brought mega-predatory pliosaurids to dominance over ‘fish-like’ ichthyosaurs, ancient marine crocodile relatives, and other large-bodied predatory plesiosaurs”, adds Daniel Madzia from the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who co-led the study.

Pliosaurs were some of the most successful marine predators of their time.

“Famous examples, such as Pliosaurus and Kronosaurus – some of the world’s largest pliosaurs – were absolutely enormous with body-lengths exceeding 10 m. They were ecological equivalents of today’s Killer whales and would have eaten a range of prey including squid-like cephalopods, large fish and other marine reptiles. These have all been found as preserved gut contents”, said senior co-author Benjamin Kear, Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Researcher in Palaeontology at The Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University.

The recovered bones and teeth of Lorrainosaurus represent remnants of what was once a complete skeleton that decomposed and was dispersed across the ancient sea floor by currents and scavengers.

“The remains were unearthed in 1983 from a road cutting near Metz in Lorraine, north-eastern France. Palaeontology enthusiasts from the Association minéralogique et paléontologique d’Hayange et des environs recognised the significance of their discovery and donated the fossils to the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg”, said co-author Ben Thuy, Curator at the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg.

Other than a brief report published in 1994, the fossils of Lorrainosaurus remained obscure until this new study re-evaluated the finds. Lorrainosaurus indicates that the reign of gigantic mega-predatory pliosaurs must have commenced earlier than previously thought, and was locally responsive to major ecological changes affecting marine environments covering what is now western Europe during the early Middle Jurassic.

“Lorrainosaurus is thus a critical addition to our knowledge of ancient marine reptiles from a time in the Age of Dinosaurs that has as yet been incompletely understood”, says Benjamin Kear.