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A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has uncovered a way to manipulate objects using ultrasound waves, paving the way for contactless movement in industries like manufacturing and robotics without the need for an internal power source.

The findings have been published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

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The biggest obstacle is that each robotics lab has its own idea of what a conscious robot looks like. There are also moral implications to building robots that have consciousness. Will they have rights, like in Bicentennial Man?

Considerations about conscious robots have been the domain of science fiction for decades. Isaac Asimov wrote several novels, including I, Robot, that examined the implications from the perspectives of law, society, and family, raising a lot of moral questions. Experts in ethical technology have considered and expanded upon these questions as scientists like those in the Columbia University lab work toward building more intelligent machines.

Science fiction has also brought us killer machines like in The Terminator, and conscious robots sound like a good way to have some. Humans might learn bad ideas and act upon them, and there is no reason to believe that robots will not fall into the same trap. Some of science’s greatest minds have warned against getting carried away with artificial intelligence.

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In episode 220 of the Stem Cell Podcast, we chat with Dr. Michael Levin, the Director of the Allen Discovery Center and a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University. He talks about regenerating frog legs, using bioelectricity to direct development, and the potential applications of xenobots.

Roundup Papers:
1) https://go.nature.com/3NR8aaG
2) https://go.nature.com/3NFeGkT
3) https://bit.ly/39tYFiM
4) https://bit.ly/3HrKY0g.

0:00 Intro and Roundup.
38:41 Guest Interview.
#RegenerativeMedicine#MichaelLevin #Xenobots.

Listen on iTunes: https://apple.co/2T8BhPA

Continue reading “Developmental and Synthetic Biology featuring Dr. Michael Levin | The Stem Cell Podcast” | >

Gemenefherbak was a vizier. As such, he was responsible for justice, a function symbolized by the pendant picturing the goddess Maat on his collar.

The chest is protected by a winged scarab, a personification of the reborn morning sun. On the back of the Sarcophagus, the deceased is shown twice worshiping the Djed-Pillar, a symbol of Osiris, lord of the underworld.

In spite of the size of the object and the hardness of the stone, the sculptors express all their virtuosity in the polish of surfaces and in a sophistication of detail that is typical for the 26th Dynasty.

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That general question is still hard to answer, again in part because of those pesky errors. (Future quantum machines will compensate for their imperfections using a technique called quantum error correction, but that capability is still a ways off.) Is it possible to get the hoped-for runaway quantum advantage even with uncorrected errors?

Most researchers suspected the answer was no, but they couldn’t prove it for all cases. Now, in a paper posted to the preprint server arxiv.org, a team of computer scientists has taken a major step toward a comprehensive proof that error correction is necessary for a lasting quantum advantage in random circuit sampling — the bespoke problem that Google used to show quantum supremacy. They did so by developing a classical algorithm that can simulate random circuit sampling experiments when errors are present.

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Why the slide?

It is important to understand the reasons for the drastic changes, Walsh says. The trend might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, there are now many more researchers than in the 1940s, which has created a more competitive environment and raised the stakes to publish research and seek patents. That, in turn, has changed the incentives for how researchers go about their work. Large research teams, for example, have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found3 that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.

Finding an explanation for the decline won’t be easy, Walsh says. Although the proportion of disruptive research dropped significantly between 1945 and 2010, the number of highly disruptive studies has remained about the same. The rate of decline is also puzzling: CD indices fell steeply from 1945 to 1970, then more gradually from the late 1990s to 2010. “Whatever explanation you have for disruptiveness dropping off, you need to also make sense of it levelling off” in the 2000s, he says.

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