Besides offering an incredibly cool way to get stuff into space, promises to reduce the cost of a launch by 20-fold.
Category: science – Page 60
Learnings For Regenerative Morphogenesis, Astro-Biology And The Evolution Of Minds — Dr. Michael Levin, Tufts University, and Dr. Josh Bongard, University of Vermont.
Xenobots are living micro-robots, built from cells, designed and programmed by a computer (an evolutionary algorithm) and have been demonstrated to date in the laboratory to move towards a target, pick up a payload, heal themselves after being cut, and reproduce via a process called kinematic self-replication.
In addition to all of their future potential that has been mentioned in the press, including Xenobot applications for cleaning up radioactive wastes, collecting micro-plastics in the oceans, and even helping terraform planets, Xenobot research offers a completely new tool kit to help increase our understanding of how complex tissues/organs/body segments are cooperatively formed during the process of morphogenesis, how minds develop, and even offers glimpses of possibilities of what novel life forms we may encounter one day in the cosmos.
This cutting edge Xenobot research has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team composed of scientists from University of Vermont, Tufts University, and Harvard, and our show is honored to be joined by two members of this team today.
Dr. Josh Bongard, Ph.D. (https://www.uvm.edu/cems/cs/profiles/josh_bongard), is Professor, Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, University of Vermont.
If you are a scientist, willing to share your science with curious teens, consider joining Lecturers Without Borders!
Established by three scientists, Luibov Tupikina, Athanasia Nikolau, and Clara Delphin Zemp, and high school teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, Lecturers Without Borders (LeWiBo) is an international volunteer grassroots organization that brings together enthusiastic science researchers and science-minded teens. LeWiBo founders noticed that scientists tend to travel a lot – for fieldwork, conferences, or lecturing – and realized scientists could be a great source of knowledge and inspiration to local schools. To this end, they asked scientists to volunteer for talks and workshops. The first lecture, delivered in Nepal in 2017 by two researchers, a mathematician and a climatologist, was a great success. In the next couple of years, LeWiBo volunteers presented at schools in Russia and Belarus; Indonesia and Uganda; India and Nepal. Then, the pandemic forced everything into the digital realm, bringing together scientists and schools across the globe. I met with two of LeWiBo’s co-founders, physicist Athanasia Nikolaou and math teacher Mikhail Khotyakov, as well as their coordinator, Anastasia Mityagina, to talk about their offerings and future plans.
Julia Brodsky: So, how many people volunteer for LeWiBo at this time?
Anastasia Mityagina: We have over 200 scientists in our database. This year alone, volunteers from India, Mozambique, Argentina, the United States, France, Egypt, Israel, Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Botswana, Portugal, Croatia, Malaysia, Spain, Colombia, Italy, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Poland, the United Kingdom, Austria, Albania, Iran, Mexico, Russia, and Serbia joined us. Their areas of expertise vary widely, from informatics, education, and entrepreneurship, to physics, chemistry, space and planetary sciences, biotechnology, oceanography, viral ecology, water treatment, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, astrobiology, neuroscience, and sustainability. We collaborate with hundreds of schools, education centers, and science camps for children in different parts of the world. In addition, our network includes more than 50 educational associations in 48 countries that help us reach out to approximately 8,000 schools worldwide.
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket back in 2015, and its second stage is on course to hit the Moon. The DSCOVR craft stage could send up lunar regolith.
“Here’s How Humans Might Beat Other Intelligent Life in a Science Fictional Space Race | Tor.com”
Suppose for the moment that one is a science fiction writer. Suppose further that one desires a universe in which intelligence is fairly common and interstellar travel is possible. Suppose that, for compelling plot reasons, one wants humans to be the first species to develop interstellar flight. What, then, could keep all those other beings confined to their home worlds?
Here are options, presented in order of internal to external.
The easiest method, of course, is that while our Hypothetical Aliens—Hypotheticals for short!—are just as bright as we are, a glance at human prehistory suggests that there is no particular reason to think we were fated to go down the technological path that we did. Sure, the last ten thousand years have seen breakneck technological development, but that’s just a minute portion of a long history. Anatomically modern humans date back 300,000 years. The last ten thousand years have been highly atypical even for our sort of human. Other human species appear to have come and gone without ever venturing out of the hunter-gatherer niche. Perhaps the development of agriculture was a wildly unlikely fluke.
Records of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) in ancient history: what they tell us and what not.
An analysis of UAP in classical antiquity.
Throughout most of human history, the goal was to establish a better life for people. Whether proponents of change admit to it or not, they hope to make everything perfect. However, this very impulse to improve security against everything bad and eliminate all physical ills could precipitate just another kind of doom.
To borrow the words of a Jeff Goldblum character, those of us who did the most to uplift humanity may have been “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, he pointed out that the modern world is complicated. Everything we don’t understand is something to fear (unless you are a specialist in it), and it is a thing that can be ignorantly speculated about in a vacuum, as vaccines are by many on social media.
Rather than give up on humanity’s ability to come to correct judgments, Sagan offers the tools of critical thinking, taking the form of the famous Baloney Detection Kit. The rules are things you can always try to offer someone if they believe nonsensical conspiracy theories.
Sonifying science: from an amino acid scale to a spider silk symphony – Physics World.
Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo explain how they have been able to explore new avenues of research by translating living structures into sound.