No creeps ... just another sentient being is born.
Gassho, J
STLah
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Yeah... that little "breath" it did gave me the creeps.
Gassho,
Koushi
STLaHLeave a comment:
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World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say
The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce -- and in a way not seen in plants and animals.
Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.
Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.
"I was astounded by it," said Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University who was co-lead author of the new research.
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Robot or organism?
Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have the ability to develop into different cell types. To make the xenobots, the researchers scraped living stem cells from frog embryos and left them to incubate. There's no manipulation of genes involved.
"Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it's not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people," said Josh Bongard, a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study.
"In that way it's a robot but it's also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell."
Bongard said they found that the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms, Bongard said.
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The xenobots are very early technology -- think of a 1940s computer -- and don't yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and the environment, according to the researchers. This may include things like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems and regenerative medicine.
While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology could spark concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable and regulated by ethics experts.
Gassho, J
STLahLeave a comment:
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The earth, seas and land, used to be quite unlike now ... (although maybe a boat dropped it over the side??)
... or maybe a mammoth out for a swim?? ... or maybe tusks float???? ...
Tsukuba Japan, where I live, was under the ocean not so long ago, with our local Tsukuba Mountain an island like Hawaii ... although 3 million years ago ...Mammoth tusk recovered from an unlikely place: the bottom of the ocean
Mammoths are long to be known as ancient land dwellers, so scientists were shocked to find remains from the animal at the bottom of the ocean.
Pilot Randy Prickett and scientist Steven Haddock, researchers with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), discovered a Columbian mammoth tusk 185 miles offshore and 10,000 feet deep in the ocean in 2019, the institution said in a news release.
At the time they were only able to collect a small piece of the tusk, so they returned in July 2021 to get the complete sample.
... University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher, who specializes in the study of mammoths and mastodons, said it is unlike anything he has ever seen.
"Other mammoths have been retrieved from the ocean, but generally not from depths of more than a few tens of meters," Fisher said.
... The scientists believe it could be the oldest well-preserved mammoth tusk recovered from this region of North America, and the UCSC Geochronology Lab estimates it is more than 100,000 years old after analyzing the radioisotopes.
https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/23/us/mam...rnd/index.html
Gassho, J
STLah
Follow-up to the above ... Modern elephants can swim, although 125 miles would be quite a trip! ...
This poor fellow was rescued just in time ...Elephants can swim – they use their trunk to breathe like a snorkel in deep water.
https://elephantconservation.org/ele...out-elephants/
I don't think a trunk would float ...
The head end of the tusk has a hollow cavity that runs for some distance along its interior, but the tusk gradually becomes entirely solid, with only a narrow nerve channel running through its centre to the tip of the tusk.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ivoryLast edited by Jundo; 11-24-2021, 02:27 AM.Leave a comment:
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My first love was astronomy and by age four my knowledge was being referred to as encyclopedic - although perhaps today the phrase is Wikipedic... I first read this last month and marveled at the timing of this lover of astronomy's birth. The very first planet outside of our own solar system was discovered less than thirty years ago. Since then, and prior to this discovery, we had found 4,864 exoplanets. The most exciting aspect of this find - one not mentioned in the article, is that there is also strong evidence of water on the planet.
Angel - satLeave a comment:
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Be grateful for the land we walk on ... otherwise, we would have to be much better swimmers!
Gassho, JEarth's first continents, known as the cratons, emerged from the ocean between 3.3 billion and 3.2 billion years ago, a new study hints.
This pushes back previous estimates of when the cratons first rose from the water, as various studies suggested that large-scale craton emergence took place roughly 2.5 billion years ago.
"There was no uncertainty that continents were partly sticking out of water as early as 3.4 billion years ago," said Ilya Bindeman, a professor of geology at the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the new study. That's because scientists have found sedimentary rocks — which form from the broken-up bits of other rocks that have undergone erosion and weathering — that date back to that era. Such sedimentary rocks could only form once land broke through the surface of early Earth's oceans.
https://www.livescience.com/earth-fi...-cratons-study
STLahLeave a comment:
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A scene from the past, may we be better in the future ...
Gassho, J
STLahLeave a comment:
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At first, I thought ... how strange the NASA is now launching sideways!
Then I recalled that, from space, that angle is about right ... as would be any angle in fact ...
Among my most cherished experiences is witnessing 3 or 4 (they blend together) Space Shuttle launches, daytime and nighttime, when we were in Florida. Now, living in Tsukuba, home to the Japanese Space Program, we know lots of space people. Our friends at our house this last weekend were a couple, rocket and satellite engineers, who live here. She believes that UFOs really may be from other planets (because of their excellent engineers!)
Gassho, J
STLahLeave a comment:
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Satellite launch from Cape Canaveral recorded on my iPhone 2:22 length
Sat/lahLeave a comment:
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Well, sometimes finding out that there is something we have wrong is as important as being right ...
Gassho, JThe problem with the Big Bang theory
However, in 1980, physicist Alan Guth proposed an extension to the theory that could reconcile some of the inconsistencies between theory and observation, including the unexpected uniformity. His extension is called cosmic inflation theory and it claims that in the first moments of the birth of the universe it expanded faster than the speed of light. In a tiny fraction of a second, the visible universe grew from the size of an atom to a sphere roughly a light year across.
Subsequent astronomers invented variations of inflation, of varying degrees of complexity, but they all predict that the early universe expanded at unfathomable speeds.
The principle of inflation has long been considered an important component of the modern scientific theory of how the universe began, but it has never been experimentally confirmed -- so it remains a speculative idea.
... Inflation theory predicts that the microwaves of the CMB should be polarized. Just like ordinary light, microwaves are just wiggling electric and magnetic fields and if the wiggles are oriented in specific directions, the result is polarization. The CMB can be polarized in two ways: B-modes, which are swirly patterns, and E-modes, which are more of a straight-line pattern. And, if inflation theory is correct, we'd expect to see some mix of B-modes and E-modes, while if it isn't correct -- in other words, if the expansion of the universe did not happen as quickly as the theory suggests -- researchers should only see E-modes. This is because B-modes are caused by gravitational waves that would have shaken the early universe and would have been locked into our universe by inflation. Without inflation, we'd not see those primordial gravitational waves -- the evidence for them would have dissipated away.
Astronomers used a telescope facility called BICEP-3 (short for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) to study the CMB and its polarization. The telescope's South Pole location, with its altitude of nearly two miles above sea level and incredibly dry air, is an ideal place to conduct this kind of research. BICEP-3 scientists combined their data with measurements at other facilities and found no indication of B-modes originating from the CMB. If B-modes are present in the CMB, they are very small.
So, does that mean that the theory of inflation must be thrown out? No, although the data has disproved some of the simpler theories of inflation, it isn't sensitive enough to rule out the more complex versions. Still, the failure to observe CMB B-modes is unsettling, causing some scientists to go back to the drawing board.
There are those who are discomfited when a scientific measurement draws into question a theory that is popular among researchers, but they shouldn't be. The self-correcting nature of science is actually its strongest asset.
Scientists are constantly double-checking their own ideas and, even if they don't, other scientists do it for them. The goal is to get at the truth. Indeed, a good scientist should never hold firmly to their ideas and should be open to changing their viewpoint as more data comes in. Slowly, but surely, scientific ideas are refined by this process, getting closer and closer to the truth.
https://us.cnn.com/2021/11/04/opinio...oln/index.html
STLahLeave a comment:
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Interesting...yes what would Buddhism be without humans? And would our planet perhaps be better off without these problematic homo sapiens? Of course the Mahayana literature is full of what could be considered extraterrestrial, superpowered beings. Maybe they were on to something
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