Researchers at Cornell have come up with a novel way to control a walking robot: with a mushroom.
Cornell explained in a press release that these four-legged “biohybrid” robots were built by researchers who literally grew mycelia, the belowground connective threads that allow fungal communities to communicate, into the robot itself.
Psyche! There are no “mycelial network” in space, and the drive would only work if we could somehow find a fifth spatial dimension (this was discussed a few years ago).
Too bad the spore drive is “laughably ridiculous,” said one scientist, and if all Star Trek ships had one, over half its episodes wouldn’t have happened.
Footage making the rounds on social media shows what appear to be astonishingly lifelike humanoid robots posing at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.
But instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the “robots” turned out to be human women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots.
During the World Robot Conference 2024 in Beijing from Aug 21 – Aug 25, 🇨🇳 animatronics company EX-Robot (or EX Robots as reported by some news media) hired 2 women cosplayed as robots to spice up the exhibition.
“Normal means” for whom, exactly? I can’t imagine the average worker in Tokyo will be able to afford this thing. Even if they had a physical space to store in.
And, you know, I think I’ve seen a “flying vehicle” like this somewhere already… 🚁
How NOT to look at their smartphone while zombie walking on a train platform or stairs.
Smartphones should be programmed to send tiny electrical shocks into your hand when you walk while reading them. Put the thing in your pocket until you clear the field.
“We continue receiving valuable data,” the company said in a statement, “and providing spaceflight operations for components and software relating to our next lunar lander mission, Griffin.”
Well, yeah, great. But the Peregrine lander still is a failure. Propulsion leak. Solar panels that didn’t open in time.
And NASA is counting on these privately operated products to get people back to the Moon? And they’ve delayed the Artemis again by another year?
When I was in school, we were all talking about people on Mars, living in permanent communities in the 2020s. And we can’t even get a tiny Moon lander to work right.
Sigh. And after BBC posted “Vulcan rocket” I so had my hopes up. (“The Vulcan rocket,” not “Vulcan rocket,” Spock 🖖)
Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow with no resistance, a property that would revolutionize power grids where energy is lost in transmission as well as advance fields such as computing chips, where electrical resistance acts as a speed limit.
The hallmark of science is replicability. I.e., can two independent teams of researchers, using similar means, methods, and materials in completely different settings, replicate the findings of the original team?
So…
Researchers from at least three Chinese universities have in recent days said they produced versions of LK-99 with varying results. One team from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology posted a video purporting to show the material levitating over a magnet, which is important because true superconductors can float over a magnet in any orientation, without spinning like a compass.
But…
…another team, from Qufu Normal University, said they did not observe zero resistance, one of required characteristics of a superconductor. A third, from the Southeast University in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, said they measured zero resistance, but only at a temperature of 110 Kelvin (-163 degree Celsius).
And…
The possible bad news for LK-99 is that the superconducting field is full of materials that hold promise at first but fall apart under scrutiny. Researchers even have a handy name for them — unidentified superconducting objects.
A.k.a “USOs.” As the linked article points out, plenty of smart, hardworking researchers have claimed to have found a “superconductor,” but then their claims simply fall apart under scrutiny.
OK, I readily admit that I am once again waaaay behind on my scifi blogging.
At some point last week, I looked up from the mass amounts of work I had left to do and went, “Uh. August 21st? Was that really the last time I posted?”
Uh. Yup.
😣
I’ll do my best to get the rest of Riss’s story online on a biweekly basis, like I promised I would.
Youtubersmallstarshas proposed a concept that he calls theGravity Link Starship(GLS), a variation of SpaceX’sStarshipthat will be able to provide its own artificial gravity.
Hm, I guess we’re at the point where YouTubers have better ideas than NASA…
But who pays for this? is the several billion dollar question. Not just the construction of the “hub and truss” system, but the expense of getting it into space in the first place.
Seems like science fiction at this point. But still worth a read/look: