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BionicANTs

I swear this concept is based on the Rudy Rucker thought experiment turned into the novel The Hacker and the Ants, in which a programmer models virtual ants to work out a system of robotics driven by emergent behavior and mesh networking. That was in the early 1990s, when Rucker was a programmer at Autodesk, Inc., writing 3D CAD/CAM modeling software as his day job. With the state of the technology at that point, that story was officially science fiction; he could have copyrighted the concept, but there was no way to actually build any of it in the real world, therefore no patent. Pretty much the same way Aurthur C. Clarke lost a billion dollars in his spare time when he invented the geosynchronous satellite during WWII; it would be almost 20 years before anything could actually launch into terrestrial orbit, and more years after that before any of it could reach the geosynchronous sweet spot 23,400 miles up.

But now, decades later, the folks at Festo in Germany have done it; using a combination of 3D Printing, Piezoelectrics, Mesh Networking, Neural Networking, Heuristic Extrapolation, and just damn good programming, they have created Rucker’s Ants. And yes, it does look like they have hit on a system that supports Emergent Behavior as well. Mind, these ant-like androids are the size of your hand, but that is useful for a lot of tasks, and as they continue to develop the project, they will no doubt be able to miniaturize them more each year (scaling them up was never a problem). I have to wonder if Rucker’s new ant story, Attack Of The Giant Ants, was created once he learned of this project. Thanks to New Scientist for the heads up on this one!

Shelf Life Episode 5: How To Time Travel To a Star

In Shelf Life Episode 5 we get to learn how astronomers collect baseline data over time, and collate it into a meaningful picture about how stellar phenomena change in periods as short as generations. The common belief in scientific circles used to be that stellar events either happened overnight, like supernovas, or took tens of thousands to millions of years to evolve to the next stage. Recently some museums have been compiling the images of the night skies taken on photographic plates as far back as the 1890s into a huge database, and then processed the results to show small pieces of sky over that 130 year span. What they discovered was that lots of stars fluctuate over a decade or two much more than anyone suspected, rather than remaining unchanged for the lifetimes of civilizations. I can’t wait to find out what new insights we gain with this as a baseline supposition as we process still more collections of data that we were never able to put together before computers made it easy.

Dawn Makes It To Ceres

The NASA spacecraft Dawn became the first man made object to go into orbit around a dwarf planet this month. Ceres holds that distinction, along with Pluto, but Ceres is a lot closer and easier to get to. This wasn’t Dawn’s first visit to a celestial body; it stopped off at the giant asteroid Vesta on it’s way to Ceres, spending from 2011 to 2012 there and sending back a ton of data. The other thing I find exciting about this mission is that Dawn is flying using an Ion Engine, allowing it to do really long range sustained controlled flight. The Ion Engine technology is going to help open up the outer Solar System to the kinds of exploration you just can’t do when your flight is based on gravity assist orbital changes alone.

Dawn Mission: Multimedia >Ceres Awaits Dawn.  

Play to Cure: Genes in Space

Play a game to save lives; what an excellent approach. This was a solution put together by the Cancer Research UK team, after their exposure to GameJam, a project based on the concept of using games to translate/process data. Figuring out what kind of game would draw people in, to make them want to play, was not that difficult. Figuring out how to map that game space to the data set in a meaningful way, that would present the data to the players as game challenges, and collect their responses as statistically significant paths through the data to the best solutions, was noticeably more difficult. The brainstorming must have been intense, and the results are amazing; thanks to Scientific American for the heads up on this one!

Sagan, Hawking, and Clarke; the Conversation

This amazing video has a conversation between Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C. Clarke. I was alive when this was recorded, and I had actually spoken with Sagan before this point, so I am sorry I missed this historic chat in person. Luckily there were cameras rolling, so I get to enjoy the event all these decades later. Pay attention as three of the most brilliant people the human race have spawned take a few moments to lay out how the universe actually works for the rest of us.

From Above: Astronaut Photography

As anyone who has stood at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well and pointed their camera up can tell you, the kind of pictures an Astronaut can take from orbit will far surpass that. In this video, Astronaut Don Pettit gives you an idea of what is involved, and what you might be able to achieve. Knowing this, all you have to do now is achieve orbit, making sure to bring your camera with you.