A lot of focus over the past 12 months has been on NASA’s journey to Mars. But a group of space experts, including leading NASA scientists, has now produced a special journal edition that details how we could establish a human colony on the Moon in the next seven years — all for US$10 billion.
Although that’s pretty awesome, the goal isn’t really the Moon itself — from an exploratory point of view, most scientists have bigger targets in sight. But the lessons we’ll learn and the technology we’ll develop building a human base outside of Earth will eventually be the key to colonising Mars, and other planets, according to the experts.
For those unfamiliar, SXSW is a week-long, trendy, if not seriously geeky festival of film and culture, panels and discussions. This year, one of the strangest – and either most disturbing or most compelling, depending on where you stand – talks was delivered by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a Japanese inventor and roboticist. The Osaka University professor was speaking about human-like androids and what roles they might fill within society in the near future. Ishiguro discussed his greatest and most marvellous creation to date: a “Geminoid” (robot in his own likeness) whose human appearance has been deftly created through with a plastic skull, a metal skeleton and silicon skin – and is controlled by an external computer. It would be hard, at a glance, to tell the two apart. In fact, the Geminoid held an autonomous conversation in Japanese, on stage, in front of an audience of hundreds.
Geminoid is not Ishiguro’s first uncannily human robot. In 2005, he developed a female android named Repliee Q1Expo, telling the BBC, “I have developed many robots before, but I soon realised the importance of its appearance. A human-like appearance gives a robot a strong feeling of presence. Repliee Q1Expo can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It’s very satisfying.”
At SXSW on Sunday, Ishiguro discussed how he imagined these human-looking robots might become a part of the everyday sooner than we think; as receptionists, language tutors and museum-guides. In fact, he discussed how he and his team have tried and tested the robots in everyday situations. “Japanese males hate to talk to the shopkeeper because it signals they want to buy something,” he explained. “But they don’t hesitate to talk to the android.” He then jokingly added that it helps that “[a] robot never tells a lie, and that is why the android can sell lots of clothes.” Which begs a couple of questions including why do Japanese males have problems interacting with shopkeepers, and what happens to the shopkeeper in this scenario?
It lasted only 20 minutes and took place 1.2 billion light years away, but NASA managed to catch it on camera: a star exploding.
The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave — or “shock breakout” — has been captured for the first time in visible light by the Kepler space telescope.
The black holes that kicked off the first detection of gravitational waves seem to be the right size and frequency to be long-sought primordial black holes.
Aims: Mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) have recently attracted interest as a potential basis for a cell based therapy of AD. We investigated the putative immune-modulatory effects in…
This could have some truly profound implications for the treatment of all viruses, including HIV!
Researchers from Temple University have used the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool to clear out the entire HIV-1 genome from a patient’s infected immune cells. It’s a remarkable achievement that could have profound implications for the treatment of AIDS and other retroviruses.
Retroviruses, unlike regular run-of-the-mill viruses, insert copies of their genomes into host cells in order to replicate. Antiretroviral drugs have proven effective at controlling HIV after infection, but patients who stop taking these drugs suffer a quick relapse. Once treatment stops, the HIV reasserts itself, weakening the immune system, thus triggering the onset of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
