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Category: habitats – Page 86

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O’Neill Cylinders space stations are examples of large rotating habitats able to be constructed in space in which people and even a complex ecology might be transplanted. But what would it be like living in one and how would civilizations based inside them in the future tend to operate?

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Credits:
Life on board an O’Neill Cylinder
Episode 223; Jan 30, 2020

Writers:

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Elon Musk is recruiting for his AI team at Tesla, and he says education is “irrelevant.” The team members will report “directly” to Musk and “meet/email/text” with Musk “almost every day.” Musk will also throw a “super fun” party at his house with the Tesla artificial intelligence and autopilot teams.

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The Pacific Ocean is becoming more acidic, and the cash-crabs that live in its coastal waters are some of its first inhabitants to feel its effects.

The Dungeness crab is vital to commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, but lower pH levels in its habitat are dissolving parts of its shell and damaging its sensory organs, a new study found.

Their injuries could impact coastal economies and forebode the obstacles in a changing sea. And while the results aren’t unexpected, the study’s authors said the damage to the crabs is premature: The acidity wasn’t predicted to damage the crabs this quickly.

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Michigan State University and Stanford University scientists have invented a nanoparticle that eats away—from the inside out—portions of plaques that cause heart attacks.

Bryan Smith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at MSU, and a team of scientists created a “Trojan Horse” nanoparticle that can be directed to eat debris, reducing and stabilizing plaque. The discovery could be a potential treatment for atherosclerosis, a leading cause of death in the United States.

The results, published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, showcases the nanoparticle that homes in on due to its high selectivity to a particular immune cell type—monocytes and macrophages. Once inside the macrophages in those plaques, it delivers a drug agent that stimulates the cell to engulf and eat cellular debris. Basically, it removes the diseased/dead in the plaque core. By reinvigorating the macrophages, size is reduced and stabilized.

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GORHAM, Maine (AP) — A Maine woman who was harassed by a drone for two days says police told her they could do nothing about it.

Mary Dunham says a drone tracked her in her car on Tuesday as she drove to a gas station, where she called police, and then to her home in Gorham. It followed her eight miles to her brother’s house in Standish the following day.

It was an “unnerving” experience, she said. “The officer arrived and said, ‘Yeah, I see it. I don’t know what to tell you though. We can’t do too much,’” she said.

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The algorithm lets robots find the shortest route in unfamiliar environments, opening the door to robots that can work inside homes and offices.

The news: A team at Facebook AI has created a reinforcement learning algorithm that lets a robot find its way in an unfamiliar environment without using a map. Using just a depth-sensing camera, GPS, and compass data, the algorithm gets a robot to its goal 99.9% of the time along a route that is very close to the shortest possible path, which means no wrong turns, no backtracking, and no exploration. This is a big improvement over previous best efforts.

Why it matters: Mapless route-finding is essential for next-gen robots like autonomous delivery drones or robots that work inside homes and offices. Some of the best robots available today, such as Spot and Atlas made by Boston Dynamics and Digit made by Agility Robotics, are packed with sensors that make them pretty good at keeping their balance and avoiding obstacles. But if you dropped them off at an unfamiliar street corner and left them to find their way home, they’d be screwed. While Facebook’s algorithm does not yet handle outside environments, it is a promising step in that direction and could probably be adapted to urban spaces.

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Zoonotic diseases may become the source of more outbreaks in the future. People must take note and pass the appropriate regulations to prevent future outbreaks.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/01/22/996315/are-bats-to-blame-for-chinas-virus#

As bats and humans cross paths more viruses are making the jump from bat to people. China’s latest scare is the latest coronavirus to affect humans likely to have its origins in bats.

The outbreak of a brand new virus in China has put humans’ relationship with bats under the spotlight again.

As the human population grows, so too are our interactions with bats, either through people and domestic animals sharing bat habitats, or increased hunting of bats for meat.

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Fungus Among Us

The idea is to ship dormant fungus to a Moon base and, once it arrives, give it water and the right conditions to trigger growth, according to a NASA press release. That would also require a supply of photosynthetic bacteria to provide the fungus with nutrients. Once the fungus grows into the shape of a structure, it would be heat-treated, effectively killing it and turning it into a compact brick.

“Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs — a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs,” lead researcher Lynn Rothschild said in the release. “Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.”

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