life inspired

"Some 2 billion years ago, primitive cells took in free-living microbial guests that gave rise to the organelles called mitochondria and chloroplasts. Those momentous events, investigators are realizing, were not one-of-a-kind. Endosymbiosis, as a mutually beneficial relationship between an organism and a guest living inside its cells is called, is alive and well today, and has lessons to offer for how the process played out early in life history. At a meeting, biologists described how they are exploring those parallels. Cicada endosymbiont genomes have expanded and fragmented, creating genomic insanity, much like some plant mitochondrial genomes. And the complexity of the evolution of the chloroplast was highlighted with a discussion of single-cell aquatic protists called dinoflagellates that have taken in an alga called a diatom." Full paper @Science

"By teaming up with researchers studying how live snakes move, [Choset] and his colleagues have determined what it takes to make snake robots go uphill, even on slippery, sandy slopes." News article @ Science

"Technological innovations are penetrating all areas of science, making predominantly human activities a principal bottleneck in scientific progress while also making scientific advancement more subject to error and harder to reproduce. This is an area where a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems can radically transform the practice of scientific discovery. Such systems are showing an increasing ability to automate scientific data analysis and discovery processes, can search systematically and correctly through hypothesis spaces to ensure best results, can autonomously discover complex patterns in data, and can reliably apply small-scale scientific processes consistently and transparently so that they can be easily reproduced. We discuss these advances and the steps that could help promote their development and deployment." Full article @ Science

"The goals of biorobotics are to take inspiration from biological principles to design robots that match the agility of animals, and to use robots as scientific tools to investigate animal adaptive behavior. Used as physical models, biorobots contribute to hypothesis testing in fields such as hydrodynamics, biomechanics, neuroscience, and prosthetics. Their use may contribute to the design of prosthetic devices that more closely take human locomotion principles into account." Full article @ Science

"Autonomous machines have gripped our imagination ever since the first robot flickered on the silver screen, Maria (left) in the 1927 film Metropolis. Most of the robots we know today—unglamorous devices like robotic welders on car assembly lines and the Roomba vacuum cleaner—fall short of those in science fiction. But our relationship with robots is about to become far more intimate. Would you be comfortable with a robot butler, or a self-driving car? How about a robo-scientist toiling away next to you at the bench, not only pipetting but also formulating hypotheses and designing experiments?" Special Issue @ Science