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Swarm Robotics

Amplify’d from www.walyou.com

So are we going to Mars? Not likely, but Robot swarms, ant size Robots, perhaps will be sent to build Ant Farms on Mars.

The amazing video below presents the i-swram, more like miniature robots which are smaller than a thumbnail. These Robotic ants will work together to build and assemble, like we previously heard about in the Shapeshifting Robots and the Real Transformers.

By being able to assemble into a larger sized Robots and break down into micro-bots, a greater possibility of exploration is apparent. If needed, they will come together as one larger robot, if obstacles appear, they can break down to pass and continue on their search for food, water, etc.

Working by a special algorithm and communicating by Infra-red, these miniature robots do not need much programming or storage. With that, manufacturing is cheaper than before and mass production is easier.

It seems like great progress towards the exploration of Mars.

See more at www.walyou.com
 
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Posted by Spaceweaver  1 year ago

World’s first wave farm now generating power for 1500 homes

Amplify’d from dvice.com
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There’s power in them thar waves! That’s why Portugal built Agucadoura, the world’s first wave farm off its coast, consisting of three Wave Energy Converters generating a total of 2.25MW.

The elongated metal contraptions bob up and down with the waves, while internal pistons, attached to the sea floor, remain stationary and pump hydraulic fluid. This drives electric generators, whose power is brought ashore by underwater electrical cables. The wave farm is now tapping into enough constant, renewable energy to power 1500 homes.

Who knew there was so much power in the ocean waves? If we laid these 459-foot orange caterpillars all over the world’s oceans, we could tap 2 terawatts of power, twice the consumption of the entire world. That’s not exactly practical, but a smaller-scale rollout of such generators might be a clean power alternative, ready to be snapped up by an energy-starved planet.

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Posted by Spaceweaver  1 year ago

The Wonders of Blood

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

You’re born with a little over a pint of it, by adulthood you’re up to four or five quarts, and if at any point you suddenly shed more than a third of your share, you must either get a transfusion or prepare to meet your mortician.

Human cultures have long recognized that blood is essential to life and have ascribed to it a vast array of magical powers and metaphorical subroutines.
scientists who study blood, even the most extravagant blood lore pales in comparison to the biochemical, evolutionary and engineering marvels of the genuine article
The fluid tissue we call blood not only feeds us and cleans us, delivering fresh oxygen and other nutrients to all 100 trillion cells of the body and flushing out carbon dioxide, ammonia and other metabolic trash. It not only houses the immune system that defends us against the world.
Our blood is the foundation of our very existence as multicellular animalsSee more at www.nytimes.com
 

Spaceweaver says:

Blood is the one tissue that comes into contact with every other tissue of the body, and it is through blood that our disparate parts communicate, through blood that our organs cooperate. Without a circulatory system, there would be no internal civilization, no means of ensuring orderly devotion to the common cause that is us.

“It’s an enormous communications network,” Dr. Schafer said ” the original cellphone system, if you will, 100 trillion users strong.

Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, “taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water,” Dr. Schafer said. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water.

Keep reading.

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Posted by Spaceweaver  1 year ago

‘Filament’ Of Dark Matter Strings 14 Galaxies

Amplify’d from www.sciencedaily.com
Despite thousands of years of research, astronomers know next to nothing about how the universe is structured.
One strong and accepted theory is that large galaxies are clustered together on structures similar to giant soap bubbles, with tinier galaxies sprinkled on the surface of this “soapy” layer.
A team led by Dr. Noah Brosch, Director of the Tel Aviv University-owned Wise Observatory, is the first in the world to uncover what they believe are visible traces of a “filament” of dark matter – an entity on which galaxies meet, cluster and form. A filament can originate at the junction of two “soap bubbles,” where the thin membrane is thicker.
studied an area of the sky opposite the constellation Virgo, where 14 galaxies were forming in a line. Pundits have called the line a “Bridge to Nowhere” because it seems to start and end in unknown locations. Strangely, 13 of these galaxies were simultaneously giving birth to new stars.See more at www.sciencedaily.com
 

Spaceweaver says:

The odds of this occurrence are very rare, leading the researchers to believe that the galaxies might somehow be forming on this elusive filament, made entirely from dark matter, which attracts regular matter that then turns into new stars. “There has long been a theoretical belief that this was the case,” says Dr. Brosch, “but this new finding represents experimental results that such a filament really exists, and that possibly it is an entity made from dark matter which is aligning these galaxies.”

Dr. Brosch compares the work of an astronomer to “looking for hairs of the beard of the Creator.”

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Posted by Spaceweaver  1 year ago

Shaking its tail feathers

Amplify’d from www.sciencenews.org
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There’s a new dinosaur at the base of the bird family tree.
It lived between 152 million and 168 million years ago in what is now northern China.
A previously unseen type of feather covered the body and limbs of this pigeon-sized creature, says Fucheng Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
Those structures were too short and of the wrong design to have functioned as flight feathers, he says. The creature also sported four long, ribbon-like feathers on its tail, Zhang and his colleagues report in the Oct. 23 Nature. Because those tail feathers probably wouldn’t have served as flight feathers or as insulation, these researchers dubbed the creature Epidexipteryx hui, whose genus name comes from the Greek words for “display feather.”
The newly described reptile lived at least 2 million years before Archaeopteryx, the first known bird. See more at www.sciencenews.org
 

Spaceweaver says:

Cute (sort of)

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Posted by Spaceweaver  1 year ago