Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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If you’ve ever tried to kill an interloping cockroach, you’ve probably noticed two things: they’re fast and nearly invincible. While those features make roaches terrifying to most people, it’s a source of bioinspiration for roboticists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

Led by Robert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, researchers in the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory have developed a centimeter-scale robot inspired by cockroaches.

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Are you Ice cream lover? What a stupid question! We all love Ice cream and it loves us (except for those that are lactose intolerant, you have our sympathies).Scientists in Japan have come up with a ‘cool’ solution to stop ice cream from melting before you have had time to finish it. They’ve invented one that doesn’t melt.

Most ice cream starts melting just moments after it is scooped from a container and placed into a bowl or on a cone. Because of this, people have taken to eating it quickly. But now that may change, as a team in Japan has found a way to maintain the shape of ice cream no matter how slowly it is eaten.

ice cream

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Because of how much it impairs the ability to breathe, a seemingly simple injury—a broken rib—is the second leading cause of trauma deaths. A team of Penn State surgeons and a biomedical engineer have invented a better way to help broken ribs heal.

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As a group, simple creatures following simple rules can display a surprising amount of complexity, efficiency, and even creativity. Known as swarm intelligence, this trait is found throughout nature, but researchers have recently begun using it to transform various fields such as robotics, data mining, medicine, and blockchains.

Ants, for example, can only perform a limited range of functions, but an ant colony can build bridges, create superhighways of food and information, wage war, and enslave other ant species—all of which are beyond the comprehension of any single ant. Likewise, schools of fish, flocks of birds, beehives, and other species exhibit behavior indicative of planning by a higher intelligence that doesn’t actually exist.

It happens by a process called stigmergy. Simply put, a small change by a group member causes other members to behave differently, leading to a new pattern of behavior.

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