MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Octopus-inspired smart skin uses 4D printing to encrypt data, chan

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Octopus-inspired smart skin uses 4D printing to encrypt data,

Researchers at Penn State have developed a new fabrication method that allows a programmable “smart synthetic skin” to change its appearance, texture, and shape while also hiding or revealing information on demand.

The material is made from hydrogel, a water-rich, gel-like substance, and is produced using a technique the team describes as 4D printing.

Unlike traditional synthetic materials with fixed properties, the smart skin can dynamically respond to external stimuli such as heat, solvents, or mechanical stress.

The approach allows a single sheet of material to perform multiple functions at once, including adaptive camouflage, information encryption and decryption, and shape morphing.

Researchers say this level of multifunctionality has been difficult to achieve with existing synthetic materials, which are typically designed for one specific role.

The work was inspired by cephalopods such as octopuses, which can rapidly alter their skin’s appearance and texture to blend into their surroundings or communicate.

The team aimed to recreate this kind of dynamic control in a soft, synthetic material using digital design rather than complex biological systems.

Printing instructions inside

The key to the smart skin lies in a technique called halftone-encoded printing. The method translates digital image or texture data into binary patterns that are printed directly into the hydrogel.

These patterns act as embedded instructions that determine how different regions of the material respond when exposed to changes in the environment.

“In simple terms, we’re printing instructions into the material,” said Hongtao Sun, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Penn State and the project’s principal investigator. “Those instructions tell the skin how to react when something changes around it.”

When exposed to stimuli such as temperature shifts, liquids, or mechanical forces, different areas of the hydrogel swell, soften, or deform in controlled ways. By designing the halftone patterns carefully, the researchers can decide how the material behaves as a whole.

One of the most striking demonstrations involved encoding an image of the Mona Lisa into the smart skin.

When washed with ethanol, the hydrogel appeared transparent, hiding the image entirely. The image became visible again when the material was immersed in ice water or gradually heated.

“This behavior could be used for camouflage, where a surface blends into its environment, or for information encryption, where messages are hidden and only revealed under specific conditions,” said Haoqing Yang, a doctoral candidate at Penn State and first author of the study.

Shape, texture, information

Beyond visual changes, the smart skin can also reveal hidden information through mechanical deformation. By gently stretching the material and analyzing how it deforms, encoded patterns can be detected using digital image correlation techniques.

The hydrogel proved highly malleable, transforming from flat sheets into complex, bio-inspired shapes without requiring multiple layers or different materials.

In another demonstration, images encoded into flat films gradually became visible as the material morphed into dome-like 3D structures.

“Similar to how cephalopods coordinate body shape and skin patterning, the synthetic smart skin can simultaneously control what it looks like and how it deforms, all within a single, soft material,” Sun said.

The researchers say the method could lead to scalable platforms for adaptive materials used in soft robotics, secure communication, biomedical devices, and advanced manufacturing.

The study was published in Nature Communications.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same

The artificial intelligence coding revolution comes with a catch: it's expensive.

Claude Code, Anthropic's terminal-based AI agent that can write, debug, and deploy code autonomously, has captured the imagination of software developers worldwide. But its pricing — ranging from $20 to $200 per month depending on usage — has sparked a growing rebellion among the very programmers it aims to serve.

Now, a free alternative is gaining traction. Goose, an open-source AI agent developed by Block (the financial technology company formerly known as Square), offers nearly identical functionality to Claude Code but runs entirely on a user's local machine. No subscription fees. No cloud dependency. No rate limits that reset every five hours.

"Your data stays with you, period," said Parth Sareen, a software engineer who demonstrated the tool during a recent livestream. The comment captures the core appeal: Goose gives developers complete control over their AI-powered workflow, including the ability to work offline — even on an airplane.

The project has exploded in popularity. Goose now boasts more than 26,100 stars on GitHub, the code-sharing platform, with 362 contributors and 102 releases since its launch. The latest version, 1.20.1, shipped on January 19, 2026, reflecting a development pace that rivals commercial products.

For developers frustrated by Claude Code's pricing structure and usage caps, Goose represents something increasingly rare in the AI industry: a genuinely free, no-strings-attached option for serious work.

Anthropic's new rate limits spark a developer revolt

To understand why Goose matters, you need to understand the Claude Code pricing controversy.

Anthropic, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company founded by former OpenAI executives, offers Claude Code as part of its subscription tiers. The free plan provides no access whatsoever. The Pro plan, at $17 per month with annual billing (or $20 monthly), limits users to just 10 to 40 prompts every five hours — a constraint that serious developers exhaust within minutes of intensive work.

The Max plans, at $100 and $200 per month, offer more headroom: 50 to 200 prompts and 200 to 800 prompts respectively, plus access to Anthropic's most powerful model, Claude 4.5 Opus. But even these premium tiers come with restrictions that have inflamed the developer community.

In late July, Anthropic announced new weekly rate limits. Under the system, Pro users receive 40 to 80 hours of Sonnet 4 usage per week. Max users at the $200 tier get 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet 4, plus 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4. Nearly five months later, the frustration has not subsided.

The problem? Those "hours" are not actual hours. They represent token-based limits that vary wildly depending on codebase size, conversation length, and the complexity of the code being processed. Independent analysis suggests the actual per-session limits translate to roughly 44,000 tokens for Pro users and 220,000 tokens for the $200 Max plan.

"It's confusing and vague," one developer wrote in a widely shared analysis. "When they say '24-40 hours of Opus 4,' that doesn't really tell you anything useful about what you're actually getting."

The backlash on Reddit and developer forums has been fierce. Some users report hitting their daily limits within 30 minutes of intensive coding. Others have canceled their subscriptions entirely, calling the new restrictions "a joke" and "unusable for real work."

Anthropic has defended the changes, stating that the limits affect fewer than five percent of users and target people running Claude Code "continuously in the background, 24/7." But the company has not clarified whether that figure refers to five percent of Max subscribers or five percent of all users — a distinction that matters enormously.

How Block built a free AI coding agent that works offline

Goose takes a radically different approach to the same problem.

Built by Block, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, Goose is what engineers call an "on-machine AI agent." Unlike Claude Code, which sends your queries to Anthropic's servers for processing, Goose can run entirely on your local computer using open-source language models that you download and control yourself.

The project's documentation describes it as going "beyond code suggestions" to "install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM." That last phrase — "any LLM" — is the key differentiator. Goose is model-agnostic by design.

You can connect Goose to Anthropic's Claude models if you have API access. You can use OpenAI's GPT-5 or Google's Gemini. You can route it through services like Groq or OpenRouter. Or — and this is where things get interesting — you can run it entirely locally using tools like Ollama, which let you download and execute open-source models on your own hardware.

The practical implications are significant. With a local setup, there are no subscription fees, no usage caps, no rate limits, and no concerns about your code being sent to external servers. Your conversations with the AI never leave your machine.

"I use Ollama all the time on planes — it's a lot of fun!" Sareen noted during a demonstration, highlighting how local models free developers from the constraints of internet connectivity.

What Goose can do that traditional code assistants can't

Goose operates as a command-line tool or desktop application that can autonomously perform complex development tasks. It can build entire projects from scratch, write and execute code, debug failures, orchestrate workflows across multiple files, and interact with external APIs — all without constant human oversight.

The architecture relies on what the AI industry calls "tool calling" or "<a href="https://platform.openai…

Konten dipersingkat otomatis.

🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com