Toggle light / dark theme

Circa 2019


MIT’s Biomimetics Robotics department took a whole herd of its new ‘mini cheetah’ robots out for a group demonstration on campus recently – and the result is an adorable, impressive display of the current state of robotic technology in action.

The school’s students are seen coordinating the actions of 9 of the dog-sized robots running through a range of activities, including coordinated movements, doing flips, springing in slow motion from under piles of fall leaves, and even playing soccer.

The mini cheetah weights just 20 lbs, and its design was revealed for the first time earlier this year by a team of robot developers working at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. The mini cheetah is a shrunk-down version of the Cheetah 3, a much larger and more expensive to produce robot that is far less light on its feet, and not quite so customizable.

Executive director & co-founder of kiss the ground, and producer of kiss the ground the movie, discussing regenerative agriculture for planetary regeneration.


Ryland Engelhart, is Executive Director & Co-Founder of Kiss The Ground (https://kisstheground.com/), a non-profit organization dedicated to planetary regeneration, and is the producer of Kiss The Ground, the Movie, recently released on Netflix.

Mr. Engelhart has spent the last 15 years as an entrepreneur working in hospitality and building a family business of organic, plant-based restaurants called Cafe Gratitude and Gracias Madre, located in Southern California.

He is also a co-creator of the award-winning, documentary film, “May I Be Frank” on the transformational aspects of a vegan lifestyle.

Mr. Engelhardt is a public speaker and community organizer and works to inspire more love & gratitude in his organizational culture and culture at large. He speaks on the topics of sacred commerce, gratitude, love as an inside job, 10 tools for building community, and planetary regeneration, and is the host of Kiss the Ground’s “We Can Do This Podcast”.

The world is far from perfect, and 2020 did throw the proverbial spanner is the works, but the improvements we have made are not to be ignored!!

We are winning…


I will review the lesser shared news the world is not as bad as you might have been led to believe, even if it is not yet perfect.
I will show the signs and discuss the reasons the world is better than ever before, and why it is better than you thinks…probably.

We will come to see that life is better now than in the past and the world is still improving.

Disagree, feel free to leave your thoughts with relevant data to back up your comments smile

On a high, dry terrace overlooking a green river valley in the Andes Mountains of Peru, sits a complex of American pyramids that may be older than the pyramids of Egypt. These structures are remnants of the ancient city of Caral, which some have called the oldest society in the Americas. Caral was built around 5000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, according to groundbreaking research published in Science back in 2001. That origin date places it before the Egyptian pyramids in Africa and roughly 4000 years before the Incan Empire rose to power on the South American continent. That history, and the shear scope of the site, prompted UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to dub it a World Heritage Site in 2009.


These pyramids in Peru are older than the ones in Egypt, and predate the Incan Empire by roughly 4000 years.

It looks like virtual education(which is happening more now) is actually preparing students for the workplace of the future.


That said, there may be a silver lining to virtual classrooms and distance learning, which many universities and schools this academic year are defaulting to, in various degrees, due to the coronavirus. As students and teachers may have to compensate for logistic challenges, collaborating online might prepare high school students with the kind of organizational acumen, emotional intelligence and self-discipline needed for modern careers, particularly those that allow for the growing trend of working in remote, distributed teams. The sooner that students master those proficiencies, the better off they’ll be when they reach the job market.

Humans have taken spiders into space more than once to study the importance of gravity to their web-building. What originally began as a somewhat unsuccessful PR experiment for high school students has yielded the surprising insight that light plays a larger role in arachnid orientation than previously thought.

The spider experiment by the US space agency NASA is a lesson in the frustrating failures and happy accidents that sometimes lead to unexpected research findings. The question was relatively simple: on Earth, spiders build asymmetrical webs with the center displaced towards the upper edge. When resting, spiders sit with their head downwards because they can move towards freshly caught prey faster in the direction of gravity.

But what do arachnids do in zero gravity? In 2008, NASA wanted to inspire middle schools in the US with this experiment. But even though the question was simple, the planning and execution of the experiment in space was extremely challenging. This led to a number of mishaps.

In 2016, combined venture investments in VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) exceeded $1.25 billion. In 2019, that number increased more than 3X to $4.1 billion. And today, major players are bringing new, second-generation VR headsets to market that have the power to revolutionize the VR industry, as well as countless others. Already, VR headset sales volumes are expected to reach 30 million per year by 2022. For example, Facebook’s new Oculus Quest 2 headset has outsold its predecessor by 5X in the initial weeks of the product launch. With the FAANG tech giants pouring billions into improving VR hardware, the VR space is massively heating up. In this blog, we will dive into a brief history of VR, recent investment surges, and the future of this revolutionary technology.


“Virtual reality is not a media experience,” explains Bailenson. “When it’s done well, it’s an actual experience. In general our findings show that VR causes more behavior changes, causes more engagement, causes more influence than other types of traditional media.”

Nor is empathy the only emotion VR appears capable of training. In research conducted at USC, psychologist Skip Rizzo has had considerable success using virtual reality to treat PTSD in soldiers. Other scientists have extended this to the full range of anxiety disorders.

VR, especially when combined with AI, has the potential to facilitate a top shelf traditional education, plus all the empathy and emotional skills that traditional education has long been lacking.

While Jupiter and Saturn have been stealing the headlines lately, this week on “The Cosmic Controversy Podcast,” I’m pleased to welcome planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel to talk about the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. They remain the largely forgotten gatekeepers to our outer solar system.


Renowned planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel and I chat about our solar system’s mysterious ice giant planets, Uranus and Neptune. There’s only been one flyby of these giant planets by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft back in the late 1980s. Hammel, who was part of the Voyager 2 science team, explains what that mission taught us about these objects and why we need to go back.

Nice lecture with both technical info and analogy.


Latest study from David Sinclair’s lab have used cellular reprogramming to restore vision in aged mice & more! Suggests reversing aging *may* be possible.

*Get 10% off at DoNotAge using my discount code “SHEEKEY”*
https://bit.ly/Sheekey_DoNotAgeShop.
DoNotAge are supporting my channel in the education of longevity and aging research. They also sell a variety of supplements including NMN, resveratrol, fisetin and more! smile
Disclaimer — using this discount will provide the channel with a small commission, so only use if you want to support the channel! smile

TIMESTAMPS;
Intro — 00:00
Aging is loss of information — 00:45
Correction device & epigenetics — 02:49
Yamanaka factors & OSKM — 04:45
Study results from Sinclair lab — 07:25
Aging reversed? — 10:29
Working model — 12:00
Cellular reprogramming in humans? — 12:36.

REFERENCES;