The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

A couple of other, well, less earthshaking robot revelations from this week's CES show ...

One of the surprise stars at the 2020 CES consumer electronics show this week was a cute, tiny robot with an electronic teddy bear face that brings toilet paper rolls to bathroom users on command.

The "RollBot" is designed to solve a common household problem: When you're in the middle of a bathroom break and you realize you're out of toilet tissue. The miniature, two-wheeled droid can be controlled using a smartphone app.
The unusual gadget is part of GoLab, one of the latest marketing innovations commissioned by Charmin, the P&G-owned toilet paper and tissue brand known for its creative -- and often humorous -- marketing exploits.
"This builds on our mission to always bring better bathroom experiences to unexpected places and showcases our relentless obsession with helping people 'Enjoy the Go,'" a Charmin spokesperson running the GoLab booth at CES for Charmin, told CNN Business.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRpNYoCLKxM

And then this ... I guess you have to pay extra for a head ...

And then there were the robo-cats. A startup called Elephant Robotics developed a robotic pet cat called MarsCat. The bionic feline can walk, stretch, play with toys, avoid obstacles and bite its nails. It can also recognize human faces and knows 20 commands and phrases, including "sit" and "come here." It may be the only time a cat will listen to you.

Not to be outdone, Yukai Engineering unveiled a headless robot kitten intended for people who want to own a pet but can't because of allergies or restrictions where they live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afEQxlBtQBo

For those who want Alexa to spy on you in the shower ...

Good news for people who enjoy singing in the shower: Kohler announced a new showerhead with a smart speaker and Amazon's Alexa voice assistant built in.
...
Kohler is debuting other bathroom tech this year, too. Besides the Moxie showerhead, the company is also featuring its latest Numi intelligent toilet and a digital shower system that lets you remotely start a shower or bath from an app.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Meian]

i'll pass on Alexa, thanks (my husband relies on Alexa for waaayyyy too much, including arguing with it?) .....

now a toilet paper robot? we could really use one of them!

teenagers hang out and have their friends over, but no one replaces anything ..... that's all i'll say.

gassho
Meian
st lh

[Jundo]

l did not know whether to put this incredible story here or in the thread on robots ...

Meet the xenobot: world's first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells

Scientists have created the world's first living, self-healing robots using stem cells from frogs.

Named xenobots after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which they take their stem cells, the machines are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide -- small enough to travel inside human bodies. They can walk and swim, survive for weeks without food, and work together in groups.
These are "entirely new life-forms," said the University of Vermont, which conducted the research with Tufts University.

...

"These are novel living machines," said Joshua Bongard, one of the lead researchers at the University of Vermont, in the news release. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

...

The xenobots could potentially be used toward a host of tasks, according to the study, which was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a federal agency that oversees the development of technology for military use.
Xenobots could be used to clean up radioactive waste, collect microplastics in the oceans, carry medicine inside human bodies, or even travel into our arteries to scrape out plaque. The xenobots can survive in aqueous environments without additional nutrients for days or weeks -- making them suitable for internal drug delivery.
https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/13/us/liv...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

Paralyzed man breaks world record for finishing a marathon in an exoskeleton suit

A South Carolina man competing in the 2020 Charleston Marathon has beaten the world record for the fastest time to finish a marathon in an exoskeleton suit.

Adam Gorlitsky, who is paralyzed from the waist down, completed Saturday's 26.2-mile race with a time of 33 hours, 50 minutes and 23 seconds, Cory Michel, one of the organizers of the Charleston Marathon, told CNN.
The current record holder is British man Simon Kindleysides, who finished the 2018 London Marathon in 36 hours and 46 minutes, according to Guinness World Records.

... Gorlitsky started walking the race Thursday night and finished Saturday morning, without taking any breaks for sleep.

... In December 2005, Gorlitsky was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from a severe spinal cord injury. His doctors thought he would never be able to walk again. But after 10 years, Gorlitsky was able to stand up and walk using a ReWalk Robotic Exoskeleton.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/12/us/par...rnd/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shokai]

[Jundo]

Deep-sea microbe found off Japan sheds light on primordial evolutionary milestone
REUTERS

A microorganism scooped up in deep-sea mud off Japan’s coast has helped scientists unlock the mystery of one of the watershed evolutionary events for life on Earth: the transition from the simple cells that first colonized the planet to complex cellular life — fungi, plants and animals including people.

Researchers said on Wednesday they were able to study the biology of the microorganism, retrieved from depths of about 1.5 miles (2.5 km), after coaxing it to grow in the laboratory. They named it Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, referring to the Greek mythological figure Prometheus who created humankind from clay and stole fire from the gods.

Prometheoarchaeum’s spherical cell — with a diameter of roughly 500 nanometers, or one-20,000th of a centimeter — boasts long, often branching tentacle-like appendages on its outer surface.

It is part of a group called Archaea, relatively simple single-cell organisms lacking internal structures such as a nucleus. Scientists have long puzzled over the evolutionary shift from such simple bacteria-like cells to the first rudimentary fungi, plants and animals — a group called eukaryotes — perhaps 2 billion years ago.

Based on a painstaking laboratory study of Prometheoarchaeum and observations of its symbiotic — mutually beneficial — relationship with a companion bacterium, the researchers offered an explanation.

They proposed that appendages like those of Prometheoarchaeum entangled a passing bacterium, which was then engulfed and eventually evolved into an organelle — internal structure — called a mitochondrion that is the powerhouse of a cell and crucial for respiration and energy production.

The solar system including Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. The first life on Earth, simple marine microbes, appeared roughly 4 billion years ago. The later advent of eukaryotes set in motion evolutionary paths that led to a riotous assemblage of organisms over the eons like palm trees, blue whales, T. rex, hummingbirds, clownfish, shiitake mushrooms, lobsters, daisies, woolly mammoths and Marilyn Monroe.

...

“We were able to obtain the first complete genome of this group of archaea and conclusively show that these archaea possess many genes that had been thought to be only found in eukaryotes,” Nobu said.

Prometheoarchaeum was found to be reliant on its companion bacterium.

“The organism ‘eats’ amino acids through symbiosis with a partner,” Nobu said. “This is because the organism can neither fully digest amino acids by itself, gain energy if any byproducts have accumulated, nor build its own cell without external help.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20.../#.XiBJJtSLTX4

STLah

[drew]

Interesting article: Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?

They could be trying to describe Buddha Nature?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousness-pervade-the-universe/

EDIT

Gassho, Drew

Sat

[Jundo]

Interesting article: Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?

They could be trying to describe Buddha Nature?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-the-universe/

Hi Drew,

Personally, were l to wager, l feel the following is rather circling in on the mark ...

Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?
A new paper argues the condition now known as “dissociative identity disorder” might help us understand the fundamental nature of reality

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-explain-life-the-universe-and-everything/

Gassho, J

STLah

PS - Drew, would you mind to indicate that you "Sat Today" (meaning within the last day) before a post? Thank you. lt is how we keep focus on the "sit" around here.

[drew]

thanks, before coffee, forgot to sign it.

that article does describe panpsychism better.

Gassho, drew
Sat

[Jundo]

A little hard for my little head to follow, but ...

Scientists uncover new mode of evolution

Scientists have discovered a form of natural selection that doesn't rely on DNA.

Evolution and natural selection take place at the level of DNA, as genes mutate and genetic traits either stick around or are lost over time. But now, scientists think evolution may take place on a whole other scale — passed down not through genes, but through molecules stuck to their surfaces.

These molecules, known as methyl groups, alter the structure of DNA and can turn genes on and off. The alterations are known as "epigenetic modifications," meaning they appear "above" or "on top of" the genome. Many organisms, including humans, have DNA dotted with methyl groups ...

In vertebrates and plants, cells add methyl groups to DNA with the help of two enzymes. The first, called "de novo methyltransferase," sticks methyl groups onto unadorned genes. The enzyme peppers each half of the helix-shaped DNA strand with the same pattern of methyl groups, creating a symmetric design. During cell division, the double helix unfurls and builds two new DNA strands from the matching halves. At this point, an enzyme called "maintenance methyltransferase" swoops in to copy all the methyl groups from the original strand onto the newly built half.

https://www.livescience.com/yeast-re...evolution.html

and

Do Dreams Really Reveal Our Deepest Secrets?

No, your weird naked dream isn't a furtive signal about your love life.

... Dreams can provide useful insights on our lives, but despite what Hollywood or your favorite novel might have you believe, there aren't any studies showing that dreams can lay bare our inner workings.

"There's really no research that supports that point of view," said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist and dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. Dreams don't contain symbols. No dictionary or dream interpreter can tell you what a dream really "means," she said.

... But that doesn't mean dreams are meaningless. Research suggests that while we're dreaming, we're really just processing the same interests, memories and concerns that would normally occupy us during the day.

"We're having wishful fantasies, we're thinking about threats and fears, we're thinking about our social lives and loved ones," Barrett told Live Science.

Therefore, dreams have psychological meaning as extensions of our waking thoughts and concerns, explained G. William Domhoff, a dream researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a paper published in The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice. Studies suggest that dreams are more often plausible narratives of our day-to-day lives than trippy action movies. Except, that is, when something really strange happens, like your mom transforming into Oprah without an explanation.

Although dreams are more similar to waking thoughts than we might assume, our brain functions very differently while we're asleep.

"Our mind is just operating in a very different biochemical chemical state," Barrett said. That means that during sleep, the cocktail of chemicals in our brains change. Some portions of our brain become far less active; others become far more active. For example, the secondary visual cortex — the part of our brain that forms images — becomes far more active, helping us produce the vivid images we "see" during sleep. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex, which normally filters our thoughts, gets tamped down.

Some psychologists see that as a valuable tool. While psychologist and psychoanalyst Karl Stukenberg of Xavier University in Cincinnati is skeptical that dreams contain intrinsically meaningful symbols or channel repressed desires, he uses dream interpretation with both his students and his patients.

"A dialogue emerges between the parts of the mind that are functioning in a more symbolic sense and the parts of the mind that's functioning in a logical sense," he told Live Science.

There's no formula for interpreting dreams, Barrett said. Dreams aren't a cache of Easter eggs, waiting to be discovered. But they do offer insight into how we process the world during the third or so or our life that we spend asleep.

And for that, at least, Freud was right, Barrett said. "He introduced the idea that dreams are meaningful. That they can tell us about ourselves," she said.

https://www.livescience.com/do-dream...p-secrets.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[lotus-of-the-mtn]

I am a big fan of cyberpunk media. I've been thinking a lot about this intersection of Buddhism and technology. Clearly, Treeleaf is exploring that realm via an online Sangha, but I've also wondered about other applications. For instance, I've read in certain Virtual Reality games, there are Sanghas where members get their virtual avatars together to sit zazen with one another. That seems like a really interesting approach. Of course we also have more immediate cross sections with technology: using phones for meditation timers, music, chants, bells, etc. for those that either like to add to their shikantaza or meditate in other ways. This is what I'm sure Uchiyama meant about playing with toys, but I feel that done wisely, things like this could be increasingly adapted.

[Jundo]

Some from this week ...

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun's surface ever taken. In this picture, taken at 789 nanometers (nm), we can see features as small as 18 miles in size for the first time ever. The image shows a pattern of turbulent, "boiling" gas that covers the entire sun. ... Details in the newly released images show plasma, which covers the sun, that appears to boil. Giant, Texas-sized cells help create convection, where heat from inside the sun is drawn up to the surface while other cells cool and sink beneath it.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/29/world/...scn/index.html

and ...

The Spitzer Space Telescope mission ends today. Here are the incredible things it discovered

Spitzer is in NASA's Great Observatories family, a collection of telescopes that operate at different wavelengths. Together, they provide a detailed look at the universe. Spitzer detects infrared light, while Hubble captures visible and UV light; Compton was designed for gamma rays; and Chandra sees X-rays. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will be our new infrared eye in the sky when it launches next year. It will also be able to follow up on discoveries made by Spitzer. ...

Once it launched, Spitzer enabled scientists to make discoveries not only in our own backyard of the solar system but also stretching back into the distant universe.
Spitzer began by observing the composition of dust throughout space, the building blocks of planets and stars and even the chemical composition of comet dust. These observations revealed new findings about planet formation and the evolution of stars, including dead stars called white dwarfs and failed stars called brown dwarfs. Its sensitive detection was also able to identify distant black holes and how they form ...

The Spitzer team thought the telescope would enable them to peer about 10 billion years into the past, but the most distant galaxy observed using the combined efforts of Spitzer and the Hubble Telescope existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang, said Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. They were able to identify some of the oldest clusters of galaxies ever found, and even weigh them.

... But perhaps the greatest discoveries made possible by Spitzer and the scientists analyzing its data are exoplanets. The telescope wasn't designed for exoplanet detection, but it worked perfectly.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/30/world/...scn/index.html

And, finally, a look in the mirror ... apparently our ancestors got around ...

All modern humans have Neanderthal DNA, new research finds

We all likely have a bit of Neanderthal in our DNA -- including Africans who had been thought to have no genetic link to our extinct human relative, a new study finds.

Evidence that our early ancestors had babies with Neanderthals first emerged in 2010 when the first genome, extracted from the bones of the Stone Age hominims who populated Europe until around 40,000 years ago, was sequenced.
They found that modern Europeans, Asians and Americans -- but not Africans -- inherited about 2% of the genes from Neanderthals, with our ancestors apparently hooking up with their stocky cousins only after they moved out of Africa.

However, researchers from Princeton University now believe, based on a new computational method, that Africans do in fact have Neanderthal DNA and that very early human history was more complex than many might think.

Joshua Akey, a professor at LSI who led the study, suggested their findings cast doubt on the widely held "out of Africa" theory of human migration -- that modern humans originated in Africa and made a single dispersal to the rest of the world in a single wave between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago.
"Our results show this history was much more interesting and there were many waves of dispersal out of Africa, some of which led to admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals that we see in the genomes of all living individuals today." He said that their data indicated that a wave of modern humans left Africa approximately 200,000 years ago and this group interbred with Neanderthals. This ancient group of Europeans then migrated back into Africa, introducing Neanderthal ancestry to African populations.

The team also found that previous estimates suggesting that East Asians might have have approximately 20% more Neanderthal ancestry compared to Europeans, were wrong and humans on different continents had Neanderthal ancestry "surprisingly similar to each other."

https://us.cnn.com/2020/01/30/africa...scn/index.html

Oh, and here in Ibaraki Japan, about 30 minutes by car from Chiba Prefecture, some historic news ...

Earth has a new geologic age: The Chibanian ... It's all thanks to a cliff by a river in Japan

Earth has a new age: the Chibanian geologic time interval, which took place from 770,000 to 126,000 years ago, thanks to a layer of sediment found on a riverside cliff in southern Japan.

The Chibanian age was named after Chiba, the Japanese prefecture where the sediment was found, and was recently ratified by the International Union of Geological Sciences. That period is important because it included the most recent reversal of Earth's magnetic field, an article in Eos said. At various points in our planet's history, Earth's magnetic north and south poles have swapped locations. When that flip happens, it leaves a mark in rocks around the planet. The cliffside sediment in Chiba, Japan, may offer a richer record of that reversal than any other site on Earth.
https://www.livescience.com/new-geol...chibanian.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

I find this encouraging. My new book, "Zen of the Future," includes the proposition that altruistic tendencies exist naturally in the human brain, and in the future we will be able to "volume up" our altruism a bit through various means ...

Babies are willing to give up food, showing altruism begins in infancy, study says

Picture this: a 19-month-old hungry baby picks up a delicious snack, but instead of gobbling it up gives it to an adult who appears to want it, too.

Now imagine dozens of different babies of the same age doing the same. And that's exactly what happened during a study published Tuesday that tests the beginnings of altruism in humans.

The babies "looked longingly at the fruit, and then they gave it away!" said Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, in a statement. "We think this captures a kind of baby-sized version of altruistic helping."

Meltzoff and his team studied nearly 100 babies who were 19 months old, a time when many babies are starting to have temper tantrums, especially when told no, according to the American Academy of Pediatricians (PDF). This is also the
age that babies are likely to hit, bite or scratch others when denied what they want, a part of their developmentally appropriate experiments with new behaviors.

...

Food sharing among adult nonhuman primates, such as chimpanzees, is rare, studies show. When they do, it appears to be among close relatives, or when they think it will benefit them by strengthening relationships with other chimps outside their inner circle.

Yet humans often respond to hungry people, whether it's through food banks, fundraisers or sharing their snack or lunch.
"We adults help each other when we see another in need, and we do this even if there is a cost to the self. So we tested the roots of this in infants," said lead author Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, in a statement.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/04/health...ess/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

This is --NOT-- an endorsement in any way of Alexa by Amazon, which is technology which presents some serious privacy and other concerns of their own. However, l thought this very amusing commercial from this week's US football Super Bowl made a good point about our taking technology for granted ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF9t2rFmTVE

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

We're not done with the sun ... the first launches just a few hours from now ...

New Solar Orbiter mission will give an unprecedented look at our sun

the Solar Orbiter is expected to launch from Cape Canaveral and begin its journey to get a close, unprecedented look at our star.

The mission, which is a joint collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, is currently expected to launch shortly after 11 p.m. ET Sunday. This is the first mission that will provide images of the sun's north and south poles using a suite of six instruments on board that will capture the spacecraft's view. Having a visual understanding of the sun's poles is important because it can provide more insight about the sun's powerful magnetic field and how it affects Earth.
It will take Solar Orbiter about two years to reach its highly elliptical orbit around the sun. Gravity assists from Earth and Venus will help swing the spacecraft out of the ecliptic plane, or the space that aligns with the sun's equator, so it can study the sun's poles from above and below. ... "Up until Solar Orbiter, all solar imaging instruments have been within the ecliptic plane or very close to it," said Russell Howard, space scientist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. and principal investigator for one of Solar Orbiter's ten instruments. "Now, we'll be able to look down on the sun from above."
https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/07/world/...scn/index.html

... or the moon ...

Single moon dust grain collected during Apollo 17 'preserves millions of years of history'

For the first time, researchers used a technique to look at individual atoms in a single grain of moon dust from an Apollo 17 moon sample. ... The technique, known as atom probe tomography, provided a new way to study the moon's surface. It's typically used in materials science with nanowire production because it can analyze materials on a tiny scale. ... Elements like iron or water create small, complex structures in lunar soil. Studying the soil atom by atom can provide a detailed look at the moon's composition.
The technique involved using a beam of charged atoms to carve a sharp tip into the surface of the dust grain. The sharp tip was a few hundred atoms wide. For reference, one sheet of paper is hundreds of thousands of atoms in thickness. ... In the single grain, they found evidence of water, iron, helium and space weathering on the lunar surface. ... The moon has no atmosphere, and it's impacted by small meteorites, solar wind and cosmic rays streaming from the sun -- which is known as space weathering. So while the moon isn't geologically active, like Earth and its shifting tectonic plates, the surface soil of the moon does change. Underneath this top layer of soil, things look very different. Unexposed moon soil can tell us about the history of the moon. ...
https://us.cnn.com/2020/02/07/world/...scn/index.html

Gassho, J

stlah