When we go hungry, we have the ability to ignore the urge to eat such that we can carry out the task at hand. It has long been known that the brain is involved in such decisions. But how the brain coordinates the response to nutritional stress so that the body can function normally is not understood very well. Now, researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, have discovered a brain circuit that allows fruit flies to take a major .
In a test lab, Bert2 — a humanoid robot with three separate displays, allowing its eyes and mouth to express various emotions — performed in three different ways. One was silent and made zero mistakes, while a second was mute and programmed to make a single blunder (which it would then correct, quietly). A third was able to speak and accept simple “yes” or “no” responses from the user. In a basic kitchen scenario, the vocal android would apologise for its mistakes — after dropping an egg, for instance — and give a heads-up when it was about to try a new technique.
While the slowest, it was the robot that most people preferred.
But here’s where it gets interesting. At the end of the exchange, the robot would ask for a job. Some participants were reluctant to say no — even if they preferred the silent, more efficient robot — because they thought it would upset the machine. “It felt appropriate to say no, but I felt really bad saying it,” one of the test participants said. “When the face was really sad, I felt even worse. I felt bad because the robot was trying to do its job.”
Posted in employment, food, robotics/AI, sustainability
In the US during the early 2000s there was an old political term for low skilled jobs, politicians called these jobs “the jobs that no one in America wanted.” Well, we now can start seeing the slogan by politicians as “the jobs that Robots can do for free.”
The focus of automation in farming has shifted from assisting humans to replacing them.
The average age of Japanese farmers is 67. Across all developed countries, the average age of growers is 60. Robotics and automation technologies are just now reaching the stage where agricultural robots can replace human farmers for many or most crop growing tasks.
Posted in biotech/medical, engineering, food
Biology is the world’s greatest manufacturing platform, according to MIT spinout Ginkgo Bioworks.
The synthetic-biology startup is re-engineering yeast to act as tiny organic “factories” that produce chemicals for the flavor, fragrance, and food industries, with aims of making products more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than traditional methods.
“We see biology as a transformative technology,” says Ginkgo co-founder Reshma Shetty PhD ’08, who co-invented the technology at MIT. “It is the most powerful and sophisticated manufacturing platform on the planet, able to self-assemble incredible structures at a scale that is far out of reach of the most cutting-edge human technology.”
Now, for my friends that luv reading about the truly bizarre or stupid tricks that humans do. 40 knives removed from a policeman today in the Tarn Taran district in India.
In an unusual case, as many as 40 knives were surgically removed from the stomach of a policeman here who claimed that he would feel an “urge” to eat them.
A team of five doctors carried out a five-hour long surgery on Surjeet Singh (40), who is employed with Punjab Police and is posted at Tarn Taran district.
Jitendra Malhotra, MD of Corporate Hospital, said on Tuesday that Mr. Singh had come to them complaining of stomach ache and excessive weight loss.
Want to be the next Captain Kirk or Spock; we’re getting more close of being a Star Trek & Star Wars world with drones and fighter jets with death lasers, cyborgs with BMI technology, sabers being developed, and now the Star Trek phaser is being developed.
Every year Star Trek’s futuristic sci-fi technology comes closer to just being “technology.” We live in a world where video chats, communicators, and real-time translators are normal, where androids are becoming more and more realistic and food replicators are almost here thanks to 3D printing. The next step? Phasers!
Next month the Smithsonian Channel will air a two-hour Star Trek special to celebrate the show’s 50th Anniversary, which will take a look at some of the technologies the show predicted. In this just-released segment of Building Star Trek, future phaser use is predicated by laser scientist Rob Afzal of Lockheed Martin who, let’s be honest, has one of the coolest titles in the world. (“What do you do?” “I’m a LASER SCIENTIST.”)
New way to farming.
Cellular agriculture enables production of animal protein without the need to raise and manage livestock. This is an alternative which could help meet the challenges facing the agricultural sector, given the need to produce more food because of demographic changes and growing urbanisation.
The world’s population is increasing inexorably. According to the United Nations, the planet will play host to 9.7 billion inhabitants by 2050 and and cities and towns will be accommodating the majority of the population. Back in 1960, city dwellers accounted for 34% of the world’s population, but this figure had risen to 54% by 2014 and the number of people living in cities is expected to rise by 2% per year on average until 2030. These two billion extra mouths to feed and the concentration of people in urban areas means that the entire food production and distribution chain will have to be re-thought.
The environmental stakes are also high. NGO Global Footprint Network has calculated that if we continue growing at the same rate as we are now, we will need two planets to provide us with sufficient natural resources by 2030.
Posted in 3D printing, food
