Cientificamente falando...

[ZeroZeroPeras]

Não tenho conhecimentos sobre disso, mas face às limitações que o corpo humano tem, e às alternativas que a natureza nos oferece... Sinceramente basta remover o nosso ego da equação e então sim, a robótica e a Inteligência Artificial podem evoluir muito mais depressa. E quem sabe até apresentar soluções híbridas ou mesmo totalmente inovadoras.

 

Mas atenção que eu tenho uma visão parcial pois sou um crítico da ideologia que coloca o ser Humano acima de todos os outros seres.

[Che]

O robot devia chamar-se Matt Damon.

[Tugax.]

Não tenho conhecimentos sobre disso, mas face às limitações que o corpo humano tem, e às alternativas que a natureza nos oferece... Sinceramente basta remover o nosso ego da equação e então sim, a robótica e a Inteligência Artificial podem evoluir muito mais depressa. E quem sabe até apresentar soluções híbridas ou mesmo totalmente inovadoras.

 

Mas atenção que eu tenho uma visão parcial pois sou um crítico da ideologia que coloca o ser Humano acima de todos os outros seres.

 

Pensei que soubesses de alguma coisa nova :-|

 

Achas que outras formas anatómicas seriam melhores? Pelo que li o objectivo seriam estes robôs construírem a base a ser usada pelos Humanos no futuro. Será que existem formas alternativas igualmente multifacetadas?

[ZeroZeroPeras]

Só a nível de locomoção, o corpo humano tem bastantes limitações. Existem muitos animais de 4 patas que são mais rápidos e mais ágeis.

 

Penso que o ideal seria uma abordagem híbrida. 4 patas/pernas para se mover, 2 ou 4 (ou até mais) braços. Se calhar nem precisava de cabeça, mas ao ter, permitir a rotação 360º.

 

Sei lá, há tanto para onde se investigar... Mas continuamos "presos" ao nosso corpo.

[Tugax.]

Já percebi o que queres dizer, só não sei se dará para aplicar num humanóide porque em termos anatómicos seria complicado, não?

[ZeroZeroPeras]

Já percebi o que queres dizer, só não sei se dará para aplicar num humanóide porque em termos anatómicos seria complicado, não?

Pois, é isso. Para soluções melhores, teria-se de largar o conceito de humanóide, na minha opinião

[andriy pereplyotkin]

Hoje mediram-me a tensão da piç*. Acho que é este o tópico certo, porque foi pela #ciência.

[antifa]

Almost 1/6 Of Tardigrade DNA Is Foreign

 

Tardigrades are arguably some of the most awesome animals in the world. These microscopic organisms, sometimes called water bears or moss piglets, take living life on the edge to the extreme, capable of withstanding the harshest environments on the planet, and even outer space. Full of surprises, it turns out that a lot of their DNA – almost one-sixth – is not actually tardigrade in origin. Thus these organisms might owe some of their unparalleled survival skills to a bit of gene borrowing, according to a new study.

 

“On a broader scientific scale, this shows us the animal genome can be composed of a much higher proportion of foreign genes than was originally thought possible, or probable,” lead author Thomas Boothby from the University of North Carolina told IFLScience. “It also shows we should think of the ‘tree of life’ as a ‘web of life,’ where you have disparate organisms contributing genetic material to distantly related organisms, not just direct ancestors.”

 

The tardigrade in question is called Hypsibius dujardini, a freshwater species commonly found in ponds. Unfortunately, this is the only tardigrade whose sequenced genome has been published so far, so the scientists can only speculate at this stage whether this gene exchange is a widespread phenomenon in these animals. Still, what they found was pretty remarkable.

 

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research by the University of North Carolina discovered that this species has acquired about 6,000 foreign genes throughout its history. These have come from a variety of sources, predominantly bacteria but also plants and fungi, through a process known as horizontal gene transfer. That’s basically just a way to describe the movement of DNA from one organism to another that doesn’t involve traditional methods of reproduction. Bacteria do it regularly – it’s largely how they spread antibiotic resistance genes around – and many animals have also acquired genes this way, but something on this scale had never before been documented.

 

Looking at the foreign DNA sequences and comparing them to those found in the organisms from which they were taken, Boothby told IFLScience it looks like a lot of time has elapsed since they first started acquiring these genes.

 

“It probably wasn’t one single event where tardigrades got all these genes en masse,” Boothby suggests. “It likely went on for a long time, and is probably still going on today. Tardigrades have been around for at least 250 million years, so it doesn’t need to be a frequent event to build up 6,000 genes.”

 

The team also thinks that these foreign genes contribute to their famous hardiness, helping them withstand environments like extreme dryness, radiation, temperature, and pressure, to name a few. For example, many of the genes have known or expected functions in stress tolerance, such as the catalases which help mop up damaging, reactive particles that build up when the organism is exposed to stressors like extreme dryness or radiation. Normally, animas have their own catalase genes, but Boothby said this isn’t the case for the tardigrade studied, and it seems the entire gene family has been replaced by those from bacteria.

 

Not all instances of gene transfer were this extreme, though, as there were cases where there was gene supplementation, rather than complete replacement, as seemed to be the situation for the DNA repair enzymes. The tardigrade genome fragments when under extreme stress, such as during desiccation, and it’s thanks to their remarkable ability to stitch it back together that they can survive. The team also thinks this is how they acquired so much foreign DNA, as when the tardigrade cells begin to rehydrate, their membranes are transiently leaky, allowing big molecules such as DNA from the environment to get inside. So when it pieces together its own genome, these get inadvertently added in.

 

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mega-gene-theft-may-explain-why-water-bears-are-so-hardy-0

[bmfpcdm]

[bmfpcdm]

SpaceX Makes History With 'Insane' Launch, Proving Rockets Can Be Reused

The private company's rocket hauled 11 satellites into space, then landed back on Earth to huge congratulations.

[Peplin]

http://www.vidarural.pt/periodo-de-detecao-do-brett-reduzido-para-um-terco/

 

Um amigo meu, boa cena.

[Lip McBoatface]

De referir que essa bactéria em níveis mais pequenos ou controláveis é algo que dá mais alguma coisa no olfacto para os enólogos fingirem que sabem alguma coisa :mrgreen:

[bmfpcdm]

These Gorgeous Water Maps Are Helping Identify Fake Scotch and Murder Victims

[Almeno]

Gravitational waves: breakthrough discovery after a century of expectation

 

Scientists announce discovery of clear gravitational wave signal, ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein

 

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

 

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

 

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

 

The phenomenon detected was the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

 

At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond snatch of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and a dark, violent merger.

 

The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.

 

“This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. “We have observed the universe through light so far. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before,” he said.

 

“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”

 

The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.

 

And they did so within weeks of turning on their new, upgraded instrument: it took just 20 milliseconds to catch the merger of two black holes, at a distance of 1.3 billion light years, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere sky, but it then took months of meticulous checking of the signal against all the complex computer simulations of black hole collision to make sure the evidence matched the theoretical template.

 

The detector was switched off in January for a further upgrade: astronomers still have to decipher months of material collected in the interval. But – given half a century of frustration in the search for gravitational waves – what they found exceeded expectation: suddenly, in the mutual collapse of two black holes, they could eavesdrop on the violence of the universe.

 

Prof B S Sathyaprakash, from Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, said: “The shock would have released more energy than the light from all the stars in the universe for that brief instant. The fusion of two black holes which created this event had been predicted but never observed.”

 

The finding completed the scientific arc of prediction, discovery and confirmation: first they calculated what they should be able to detect, then decided what the evidence should look like, and then devised the experiment that clinched the matter. Which is why on Thursday scientists around the world were able to hail the announcement as yet another confirmation of their “standard model” of the cosmos, and the beginning of a new era of discovery.

 

Astronomers have already exploited visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma-rays in their attempt to understand the mechanics of stars, the evolution of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe from an initial big bang 13.8bn years ago.

Unequivocal

 

Thursday’s announcement was the unequivocal first detection ever of gravity waves. The hope is that gravity wave astronomy could start to answer questions not just about the life of stars but their deaths as well: death by collision, death in a black hole, death in some rare stellar catastrophe so fierce that, for a few thousandths of a second, the blast is the brightest thing in the universe.

 

Even before the Ligo detectors in two US states reopened for business late last year, researchers were confident that a detection would follow swiftly. The announcement came after months of speculation, and decades of theoretical and practical work by an international network of more than a thousand scientists and engineers in Britain, Europe, the US and around the world.

 

Professor Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, and one of the founding fathers of Ligo, said that until now, astronomers had looked at the universe as if on a calm sea. All of that had changed.

 

“The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way,” he said.

 

Prof Neil Turok, director the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo in Canada, and a former research colleague of Prof Stephen Hawking, called the discovery “the real deal, one of those breakthrough moments in science”.

 

Not only had the detector picked up the collision of two enormous black holes across a distance of almost a billion light years of space, it recorded the distinctive “chirp” as the two spiralled towards each other.

 

The discovery, he said, completes a scientific arc of wonder that began 200 years ago, when the great British scientist Michael Faraday began to puzzle about how action was transmitted across the distance of space; how the sun pulled the Earth around. If the sun moved 10 yards, very suddenly, would the Earth feel the difference?

 

He reasoned that something must cross space to transmit the force of gravity. Faraday’s reasoning inspired the great British mathematician James Clerk Maxwell to think about how an electric force travelled, and arrive at an understanding of light and a prediction of radio waves.

 

“Einstein, when he came to write down his theory of gravity, his two heroes were Faraday and Maxwell,” said Turok. “He tried to write down laws of the gravitational field and he wasn’t in the least surprised to discover that his predictions had waves, gravitational waves.”

 

The Ligo discovery signals a new era in astronomy, he said.

 

“Just think of radio waves, when radio waves were discovered we learned to communicate with them. Mobile communication is entirely reliant on radio waves. For astronomy, radio observations have probably told us more than anything else about the structure of the universe. Now we have gravitational waves we are going to have a whole new picture of the universe, of the stuff that doesn’t emit light – dark matter, black holes,” he said.

 

“For me the most exciting thing is we will literally be able to see the big bang. Using electromagnetic waves we cannot see further back than 400,000 years after the big bang. The early universe was opaque to light. It is not opaque to gravitational waves. It is completely transparent.

 

“So literally, by gathering gravitational waves we will be able to see exactly what happened at the initial singularity. The most weird and wonderful prediction of Einstein’s theory was that everything came out of a single event: the big bang singularity. And we will be able to see what happened.”

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/11/gravitational-waves-discovery-hailed-as-breakthrough-of-the-century?CMP=fb_gu

 

http://www.rtp.pt/noticias/ciencias/einstein-tinha-razao-ondas-gravitacionais-existem_n895620

[Che]

Resumindo: A Terra manda beidinhos de c*na.

[o Pai já vai]

Resumindo: A Terra manda beidinhos de c*na.

 

Não é só a Terra... tudo manda beidinhos de c*na, uns mais fortes que outros...

[Ghelthon]

[Almeno]

[ventura21]

 

 

Não sei se é o sitio certo (eu sei que já tem algum tempo), mas é bastante interessante e lembrei-me agora de postar isto aqui.

 

[Pan]

Meh. Cliché.

[Tugax.]

No reddit existe um AMA com cientistas sobre as alterações climáticas: Science AMA Series: We just published a study showing that ~97% of climate experts really do agree humans causing global warming.

 

Artigo: Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming

[Keyser]

Estou a adorar este simulador espacial: Space Engine, muito bom. Quem quiser experimentar é só fazer download do site: Space Engine versão 0.9.7.2

[Peplin]

 

Faculdade de Medicina e Hospital São João criam revista científica

É já esta sexta-feira que a Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto (FMUP) e o Centro Hospitalar de São João apresentam à comunidade científica a Porto Biomedical Journal, a nova revista médico-científica criada pelas duas instituições.

 

A apresentação terá lugar na Aula Magna da FMUP, pelas 11h desta sexta-feira, e contará com intervenções da diretora da FMUP, Maria Amélia Ferreira, e do presidente do Conselho de Administração do Centro Hospitalar de São João, António Oliveira e Silva.

 

A colaboração das duas instituições resultou na criação de uma nova publicação que pretende “afirmar-se no universo dos magazines científicos como uma revista de qualidade internacional sem custos para quem pretende publicar ou ler artigos”, garante nota da FMUP enviada esta quinta-feira às redações.

 

O médico do São João e docente universitário na FMUP André Moreira será o diretor editorial da Porto Biomedical Journal, com João Madureira como diretor executivo, ele que faz parte do grupo de estudantes de onde surgiu a ideia de lançamento da revista científica.

[Ghelthon]

 

Não consigo deixar de ficar perplexo com o quão longe chegámos e o quão inventivos somos.

[La Flame]

Descoberto planeta extrassolar semelhante à Terra

 

Astrónomos descobriram um planeta extrassolar, a orbitar a estrela mais próxima do Sol, com condições favoráveis para ter na sua superfície água líquida, elemento fundamental para a vida.

 

O exoplaneta (planeta fora do Sistema Solar) chama-se Próxima b e orbita a sua estrela, a Próxima de Centauro, uma anã vermelha, a cada 11 dias. A estrela, localizada na constelação de Centauro, a 4,22 anos-luz da Terra, é invisível a olho nu, por ser pequena e pouco brilhante, e é relativamente fria.

 

De acordo com um comunicado do OES, organização da qual Portugal faz parte, o Próxima b tem uma massa semelhante à da Terra, apenas 1,3 vezes superior à do 'planeta azul', sendo um possível candidato a albergar vida, uma vez que tem uma temperatura "adequada para a água líquida existir na sua superfície".

 

Os resultados da descoberta serão publicados, na quinta-feira, na revista científica Nature.

O planeta, que se encontra muito perto da sua estrela, a uma distância inferior à que separa a Terra do Sol, foi detetado a partir de vários telescópios, incluindo os do OES, no Chile.

 

A equipa internacional de astrónomos, liderada por Guillem Anglada-Escudé, da universidade britânica Queen Mary, em Londres, crê que, a existir água líquida no Próxima b, tal seria nas regiões mais quentes do planeta.

 

A rotação do Próxima b, a forte radiação emitida pela sua estrela e a história da formação do planeta tornam, segundo os cientistas, o seu clima muito diferente do da Terra, sendo pouco provável que o exoplaneta tenha estações.

Para os astrónomos, o planeta Próxima b poderá servir de alavanca para a procura de evidências de vida noutros sítios do Universo, para lá da Terra.

 

Um dos cientistas envolvidos na descoberta, James Jenkins, da Universidade do Chile, disse à Lusa que a equipa pretende "procurar evidências da atmosfera" de Próxima b e, a confirmar-se a sua existência, estudar a sua composição e "procurar traços de água ou outras moléculas, e finalmente vida".

 

 

http://www.jn.pt/mundo/interior/descoberto-planeta-extrassolar-semelhante-a-terra-5354572.html

 

Abram o link que tem lá um conjunto de imagens.