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Subaquatic robot leverages biomimetics for natural movement

A few years ago, the same team designed an aquatic robot inspired by a manta ray. It could swim impressively fast, but it had one major drawback: a lack of three-dimensional maneuverability. Moving forward is one thing, but moving up and down, changing direction, and rotating in place is a whole different challenge. Many underwater robots have that same limitation, so the researchers decided to tackle this problem.

For their latest invention, they took inspiration from the feather star. These marine creatures have multiple flexible, feather-like limbs that help them move in different directions. Watching them, their movements seem almost effortless, but reproducing those maneuvers in robots is very difficult. It would typically require complex control systems and additional actuators – robotic components that produce movement.

But the new robot can maneuver in three dimensions using a few elastic limbs and just two actuators. And that’s exactly what makes it innovative.

MIT scientists build a tiny robot that swims using living muscle cells

MIT engineers have built a paper-thin swimming robot powered by living muscle cells that respond to flashes of light, allowing it to swim and steer through water. The breakthrough could pave the way for tiny, self-healing biological robots capable of exploring fragile environments that ordinary machines cannot safely navigate.

Matthew Cole on Vegan Sociology, Ethics, Transhumanism and Technology

“Every time technology tries to stand in for ethics, we do ourselves a disservice… we deny ourselves the opportunity for growth.”

Dr. Matthew Cole said that to me in late 2020. At the time, we were talking about vegan meat. Read it again with AI in mind.

Matthew is a criminologist at The Open University and the only #vegan sociologist I know. He studies how we raise children to love animals and eat them at the same time, and how that contradiction gets quietly filed under “normal.”

Over two hours, we went from thrash metal guitar to Doctor Who, breaching experiments, David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative, and the human exceptionalism hiding inside a lot of #transhumanism. He also changed how I think about the small daily inconveniences of my own choices.

If you’re certain you’re a predator, and nothing could change your mind, skip this one. Everyone else, a question worth sitting with: which of your ethical decisions are you hoping #technology will make for you?

The full 2-hour conversation with Dr. Matthew Cole, video and audio: [ https://snglrty.co/3ZN6fgl](https://snglrty.co/3ZN6fgl)

Continue reading “Matthew Cole on Vegan Sociology, Ethics, Transhumanism and Technology” | >

The intestinal microbiome in inflammatory bowel disease and spondyloarthritides

Alizadeh et al. review the shared links between inflammatory bowel disease and spondyloarthritis, with a focus on IBD-associated spondyloarthritis. There is a high degree of clinical overlap, and shared increases in gut permeability linked to altered microbiota and metabolites, suggesting those as common pathways driving disease.

Low-power neural chip reads brain signals to identify cognitive and emotional states

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a therapeutic technique that delivers electrical pulses to specific areas of the brain via an implant to modulate neural activity. It is already widely used for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and researchers are increasingly exploring its potential for severe psychiatric illnesses including major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

However, most existing DBS systems operate in what engineers call an “open loop” manner: stimulation is delivered according to predefined settings rather than continuously adapting to the patient’s brain activity. Even among closed-loop, or adaptive, systems, many rely on signals recorded from a single brain region. This is a major limitation for psychiatric disorders, where clinically relevant information may be distributed across networks of interacting brain regions.

“Our work is based on the growing body of research suggesting that psychiatric disorders arise more from disruptions in communication between brain regions than from dysfunction of any single region,” explains Mahsa Shoaran, head of the Integrated Neurotechnologies Lab in EPFL’s School of Engineering and Neuro-X Institute.

Yann LeCun, the David Hume of Our Time

Marc Rameaux, an AI specialist and regular contributor to The European Scientist, sees Yann LeCun as the David Hume of our time. Tracing the career of the pioneer of convolutional neural networks, from Bell Labs to Meta and on to Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, he shows how LeCun’s empiricism led him to expose the limits of large language models and to champion “world models”. He also sees in it a way to teach ethics to machines, rather than relying on regulation alone.

The word “visionary” is overused, worn thin by stereotyped corporate communication. That is a pity, because when used properly it denotes something far deeper. And if any expert in today’s AI landscape deserves it, it is Yann LeCun. Being a visionary does not mean making predictions about the future, nor even making them successfully because one has good intuition. It means, above all, grasping the deeper meaning of an emerging innovation and projecting its future course, because one has understood what is radically new about it, but also when and where it reaches its limits. Great scientific discoveries are said to bring about a paradigm shift. Being a visionary means seeing the new paradigm when most people see only one more innovation.

For nearly forty years, LeCun has anticipated – often against prevailing opinion – the successive turning points of artificial intelligence: the return of neural networks when no one believed in them any more, the power of convolutional architectures, the decisive role of deep learning, the strategic advantage of open source, and more recently the structural limits of large language models. LeCun is not one of those techno-prophets who pass off their bets as vision. He has shown by example the power of empiricist observation: looking at what machines actually see, how they learn, what still sets them apart from human learning. His approach revisits the philosophical categories through which we discover the world and learn from it.

Drug that targets an inflammatory enzyme could help prevent lung cancer

A new study by MIT researchers, including at a lab affiliated with IMES, shows that inhibiting caspase-1 can reduce the risk of tumor growth.

Anne Trafton | MIT News

Every year, lung cancer kills more than 100,000 people in the United States. Smoking is the leading risk factor for lung cancer, but other environmental exposures can also contribute to the disease.

How bionic eyes are becoming a reality

If you’ve delved into the worlds of “Star Trek,” “The Terminator” or William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer,” you’ll know that enhanced electronic vision is a staple of science fiction. Now, what was once futuristic fiction is becoming a reality.

Researchers have developed bionic eyes that can restore some lost vision. These devices’ capabilities are currently basic, but they have been steadily improving in recent years.

One day, they might even offer features that transcend the limits of natural human eyesight—for instance, by manipulating images in a way the human eye cannot or by seeing beyond the spectrum of visible light.

Low-dose aspirin linked to 70% lower dementia risk, but there’s a catch

A new analysis from Monash University suggests that low-dose aspirin may be linked to a dramatically lower risk of dementia in older adults with certain genetic characteristics. Researchers found that people with a specific genetic profile who took aspirin had a 70 percent lower relative risk of developing dementia, raising the possibility that genetic testing could eventually help identify people who might benefit from preventive treatments.

The findings, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, were based on genetic data from more than 13,500 participants in the landmark ASPREE Trial (Aspirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly). Scientists examined whether differences in participants’ genes could help explain why aspirin might affect dementia risk differently from one person to another.