With good form Cassie seems quite nimble for their current level of development. They hope that one day she'll be as nimble and quick as an adult human. This 'waist and legs' might one day be delivering your packages.
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Motherboard put together a great short piece on two-legged robots. Just over 12 minutes long it introduces you to a few bi-pedal robots, but in particular one made by Agility Robotics; "Cassie." With good form Cassie seems quite nimble for their current level of development. They hope that one day she'll be as nimble and quick as an adult human. This 'waist and legs' might one day be delivering your packages. If you're interested in where bio-inspired robots are heading here's a 20 minute Ted talk from Oregon State University researcher Jonathan Hurst: A study out of Vanderbilt University counted the number of cortical neurons in the brains of several animals, including cats and dogs. Turns out dogs possess significantly more neurons in their cerebral cortex then cats do. The cerebral cortex is generally associated with complex behaviors like thinking and planning. Things most people would related with intelligence. For reference cats have about 250 million cortical neurons, dogs have about 530 million, and humans contain about 16 billion. The study was published in the Frontiers in Neuroanatomy. Does this make you more of a dog person? Perhaps it makes you love your cat more? If you own both a cat and a dog have you ever noticed a difference in intelligence between your pets?
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The planet in the next 10-15 years on is going to see a lot of crazy change. From electric cars and other new modes of personal and communal travel, to huge swathes of the global population being made, in terms of usefulness to economic output, 'redundant.' Another step in that direction might have occurred recently with a new idea springing up in robotics from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. "Origami-inspired" artificial muscles are capable of giving soft robots enormous lifting potential, up to 1,000 times their own weight and making them much safer. Powered by simple pressure differences, they can be made for about $1. This should make a dent in the cost of building robots. Follow the link above for the full story, or check out the video below by the Wyss Institute and Harvard. Is the future going to happen quicker then we expect? Will it ever become cheap enough to 3D print your own affordable superman? What do you think life will look like in the next 10-20 years? Let me know in the comments! Astronomers for the first time have detected an interstellar object entering our solar system. It was found in late October by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. "Oumuamua," they call it. 1I/2017 (the I is for interstellar), if you are an astronomer. In Hawaiian it means "messenger from afar arriving first." It is unlike any kind of asteroid we have ever seen. It is 400 meters (.25 mile) long but narrow. It is only about 40 meters wide and has a reddish tint from the radiation it has been exposed to through its travels. It is thought to have been traveling through interstellar space for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. Below is a quick video, just over 3 minutes long with more detail if you are interested. It's going to make its way out of our system almost as fast as it came into it so it's going to be a short lived visit. Unless of course it's an alien... O_O How cool is it that we have space craft zooming through the universe peeling back it's secrets? The Juno team has released absolutely stunning images of Juno's latest flyby of Jupiter. You can view the rest on the mission website. Here are a handful along with some incredible images put together and enhanced. Once artists, such as Sean Doran, use these photos to stitch together larger, more rich version, you get something even more majestic: Here is National Geographic and Neil Tyson's Cosmos' take on what it might look like in the clouds of Jupiter
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It's been awhile since I've posted and I wanted to make sure you knew that I'm alive. I've been digging deep into new theories and ideas while attempting to keep up with the ever forward moving boundaries of science. Between life's general distractions and saving to get a house, it's been slow going. But things are still coming together and I'll be adding bits and pieces of information to the original paper. If you'd like to explore some of the things I've been learning, here is the list of books I've read since January: The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science - Marcus du Sautoy Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - Robert M. Sapolsky Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death - Robert Lanza , Bob Berman The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone - Steven Sloman , Philip Fernbach The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts - Richard Susskind , Daniel Susskind Frequency: The Power of Personal Vibration - Penney Peirce The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself - Sean Carroll The Industries of the Future - Alec Ross Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time - The Great Courses , Sean Carroll Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being - Rudolph E. Tanzi , Deepak Chopra Exploring Metaphysics - The Great Courses , David K. Johnson My Big TOE, Books 1, 2 & 3. - Thomas W. Campbell The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future - Kevin Kelly My Favorite Universe - The Great Courses, Neil deGrasse Tyson Juno's finally made it to Jupiter! It'll take years to go through all the data that spacecraft is going to beam back to earth. Personally, I hope they find out more about it's big red spot. But the first sets of pictures are coming back. Quite the camera Juno has for whizzing through our solar system at 130,000 mph! You may have heard Juno also broke a speed record! Juno is the record holder for top speed while orbiting a planet (geocentric orbit), the record for top speed through the solar system (heliocentric orbit) goes to Helios 1. Launched back in the 80's Helios 1 orbits the sun at 147,600 mph. Here's a fun science tid-bit! We stuck 6 people in a small 36 x 20 foot tall dome on a mountain volcano in Hawaii for science and told them to act like they were on mars. I love it. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) is the 3rd, and longest study of it's kind. The experiment lasted a year and was conducted to test the mental strain it would take on it's volunteers. All in hopes we learn something useful for NASA's eventual Mars missions, or even the Mars One colony.
So what did we learn? Here's a little something to expand the limits of your mind as a warmup. This sliver (1/20th) of the night sky contains over 48,000 dots and is 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. It's also a shot of the past as it was about 6 billion years ago. It is the result of a collaboration between Daniel Eisenstein, a Professor of Astronomy at Harvard, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Each dot is a galaxy. Each galaxy contains billions of stars with diverse solar systems and was used to create a record-breaking 3D map of just 1.2 million galaxies. Imagine. Quadruple star systems. Planets orbiting blackholes. Planets who can be only 12 miles across and made mostly of carbon, but 20 times more dense then Jupiter. Making the planet the densest of all diamonds. Even massive planets who orbit 3 stars at once. The possibilities are as vast as they are humbling. Now that we've stretched a little, what's been going on in the world? Scientists have had an enormous breakthrough in biology. They have found a gene that acts like a surgical knife on other genes. CRISPR has unlocked the ability to target and edit the genome of living cells. To it's advantage it is also the cheapest and is nearing human trials. Cancers, genetic defects and diseases could be a thing of the past. Science magazine gave it the "Breakthrough of the Year," over the Pluto flyby and even the discovery of a new human ancestor, Homo Naledi. Science is moving in leaps and bounds. We could eliminate the shortage of organs and increase our lifespans by decades. We must be aware and mindful of the changes that could occur by quickly adopting the technologies of the future. Would "designer babies" be a good thing? Could genetic mutations get out of hand? This method could be used to prevent mosquitoes from spreading malaria, but how would that effect the ecosystems containing them? I believe our future is truly bright, and it will be bright for everyone, not just a few. We have also discovered an extremely dim galaxy right on our front porch. One of the faintest galaxies ever spotted, Crater 2 is an ultra-dwarf galaxy. It has been given the nickname "the feeble giant," due to it being the 4th largest satellite of the Milky Way and still having such an extremely low surface brightness. On the not-so-bright-side in science news, a bug in the software used to create the images of your brain during an fMRI scan, has put at risk the past 15 years worth of brain research, covering up to 40,000 research studies. A study published in the journal of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) found that the software used to generate the fMRI images from 499 healthy patients, up to 70% of the time, were lighting up areas of the brain that should not have been lit up in the images. This could be a huge setback in brain research. Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing recently with the successful simulation of the energy surface of a hydrogen atom. The problem they overcame was one of "superposition," the natural quantum-state of an atom which puts it in all of its possible positions at one time. A traditional computer would have to run the simulation one quantum state at a time, linearly. But a quantum computer can look at every single state of the atom at one time. As the technology improves the simulations could allow us to one day simulate the entire bodies chemistry, allowing pharmaceuticals to be tested in virtual reality before being approved. Quantum computing technology is becoming more and more viable all the time. Additional Reading:
Thanks to a new production technique, a team from the University of Vienna have successfully produced a super strong material that was first theorized back in 1885. They have published their results in the scientific journal Nature.
Carbyne, a carbon-based structure, has tensile properties double that of graphene. It would take the force exerted by a large car to push a pencil through a sheet of graphene as thick as a sheet of grocery story plastic wrap and this stuff has double the amount of strength. The construction industry and all our gadgets will likely receive great benefits from this new technology down the road. Additional Reading: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/jul/17/graphene-has-record-breaking-strength http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/carbyne-scientists-create-holy-grail-strongest-material-world-thats-tougher-graphene-1554867 Planet 9 is cold. Really cold. Minus 226 degrees C cold, or minus 446.8 degrees F for the Americans. It's 700 times further from the sun then the earth, but is warmer then you'd expect. Astronomers know now that it will show up better in infrared telescopes then in the visual wavelengths. The search should hopefully proceed a little quicker.
It's also big. Its basically a smaller version of Uranus and Neptune -- a small ice giant with an envelope of hydrogen and helium. It's been calculated to be equal to 3.7 Earth radii. The Earth's radius, the distance from the core to the surface, is a little under 4000 miles. That means Planet 9 is almost 30,000 miles across. In other words if you were to drive nonstop, 24 hours a day at 70mph, it would take you nearly 40 days to get back to where you started while only taking about 15 days to circumnavigate the Earth. For more information: Sciencedaily Back in January it was proposed in The Astronomical Journal that a 9th planet had to exist for the data they had to make sense. Some Kuiper Belt Objects, small bodies like Pluto, beyond Neptune, were distributed in such a way that random chance could not account for it. A new planet, one of 10 Earth masses, had to exist. They could calculate it's orbit, but finding it along that path will require an immense effort. At the end of February some French astronomers using data collected from the Cassini spacecraft, launched in 1997, have been able to narrow the possibilities. They have developed the "INPOP planetary ephemerides" which can calculate the motion of planets in our solar system with the highest accuracy so far.
We will not know if the scientists are right until someone observes the planet directly, but the hunt is on! For more information: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160225085653.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160120114539.htm |
AuthorRandy Habfast Archives
December 2017
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