“The state government should consider managing the invasive population of spotted-thighed frogs at Streaky Bay. This should include education programs to inform people about what to do if they find a frog, as well as the feasibility of exterminating the population in South Australia.
“Importantly, if you do see one of these critters in your travels – leave it be. We don’t want it hitchhiking any further.”
Reference: ” Indiscriminate feeding by an alien population of the spotted-thighed frog (Litoria cyclorhyncha) in southern Australia and potential impacts on native biodiversity” by Christine M. Taylor, Gunnar Keppel, Shaun O’Sullivan, Stefan Peters, Gregory D. Kerr and Craig R. Williams, 9 April 2020, Australian Journal of Zoology. DOI: 10.1071/ZO19042
Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!
In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.
EPISODE LINKS: Bruce web: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/#47e297264d03 Distant Wanderers Book: https://www.amazon.es/Distant-Wanderers-Search-Planets-Beyond/dp/1441928723 Renewable Energy World: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/author/bruce-dorminey/#gref Bruce’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/bdorminey
INFO: Podcast website: https://volandino.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3O74ctu6Hv5zZdHYT9Ox3Z Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond/id1509949724 RSS: https://volandino.com/feed/podcast Full episodes playlist:
OUTLINE: 01:21 — Magellan’s journey to the indies; first circumnavigation of the earth — Risk: today vs previous centuries. 02:15 — On route to the Spice Islands — Moluccas — Treaty of Tordesillas. 03:07 — Spain and Portugal on top of the world. 03:41 — Reaching philippines and the wrong side of things. 05:20 — Killed in the Philippines. 06:08 — The reasons behind the expedition: trade and religion. 07:23 — Casualties — Magellan’s expedition vs today. 07:58 — Early astronauts, challenging missions — minimal computing power. 08:40 — Mission to Mars and tolerance to risk today. 10:03 — First Mars mission attempt — the odds. 10:37 — Watching the Apollo launches live. 11:23 — The uniqueness of the moment — Apollo 8. 12:12 — Putting risk in perspective: astronauts of the Apollo program vs today. 13:05 — Psychological risks of space missions — Harrison Hagan “Jack” Schmitt (last person that walked on the moon) — the impact of being on the moon. 15:54 — Psychological factors on a trip to Mars — can we predict them? — Experiences on the International Space Station. 17:03 — Shortening the trip to Mars. 19:02 — The drive to do these missions today vs the Apollo times. 20:00 — The lost time in the moon — natural resources, astronomy, practicing for future missions to mars. 20:37 — Terraforming Mars 22:33 — Second homes, platforms in space (example: at Lagrange points). 23:43 — Exoplanets — detecting signs of life. 26:18 — Methods of detection & verification vs going there (detecting microbial life through analysis of color, surface reflectivity and other means) 27:50 — Enceladus: plumes of gas and liquid — potential insitu analysis by probes. 28:43 — microfossils on Mars. 29:00 — Impact of finding life in another planet of our solar system, even if microbial. 29:54 — Intelligent life — David Kipping, Columbia University — 3:2 odds that intelligence is rare. 30:31 — Probability of finding life — 400 billion stars in our galaxy. 33:24 — Facing the discovery of new forms of intelligent life. 35:50 — People’s resilience and attention spans / Inter-species communication. 38:26 — Could we miss new kinds of lifeforms due to them having different structures, chemical arrangements, etc? 40:30 — What is life — lack of agreement. 41:48 — Scratching the surface on any topic — a neverending search for an ultimate truth. 43:50 — ALH 84001 Allan Hills meteorite 47:26 — Asteroid mining — natural resources — Planetary Resources startup (acquired by ConsenSys). 48:52 — Commercializing space travel — trips to go around the moon — translunar flights. 51:22 — Progress since the Apollo era and next steps. 52:55 — Spending a weekend on the moon. 54:00 — Next decade in Space — putting a crew on mars, robotic sample return missions, permanent or semi-permanet settlements on the lunar surface, optical and radio-based astronomy on the far side of the moon, space tourism, space based interferometers, etc 56:22 — will other intelligent life forms want to communicate? gregarious vs non-gregarious civilizations. 57:35 — Consequences of the pandemic. 59:06 — conclusion — “Distant Wanderers — search for planets beyond the solar system”
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A CNN crew was arrested while giving a live television report Friday morning in Minneapolis — and then released about an hour later — as the crew covered ongoing protests over the death in police custody of George Floyd.
State police detained CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, his producer and his photojournalist shortly after 5 a.m. CT (6 a.m. ET) as Jimenez was reporting live from a street south of downtown, near where a police precinct buildingwas earlier set ablaze.
More portable, fully wireless smart home setups. Lower power wearables. Batteryless smart devices. These could all be made possible thanks to a new ultra-low power Wi-Fi radio developed by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego.
The device, which is housed in a chip smaller than a grain of rice, enables Internet of Things (IoT) devices to communicate with existing Wi-Fi networks using 5,000 times less power than today’s Wi-Fi radios. It consumes just 28 microwatts of power. And it does so while transmitting data at a rate of 2 megabits per second (a connection fast enough to stream music and most YouTube videos) over a range of up to 21 meters.
The team will present their work at the ISSCC 2020 conference Feb. 16 to 20 in San Francisco.
Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization.
For decades, Mars colonization advocates have been promising potential settlers that the time for leaving Earth is nearing. In fact, in terms of producing the actual space hardware—the capability to transport large numbers of passengers into space and the engines and life support to ferry them safely to Mars—we’re not much closer to a Mars colony than we were in 1972, when the last Apollo lunar mission returned to Earth, so don’t sell your house on Earth just yet. On the other hand, we’ve had one mind-blowing discovery after another about Mars as a result of unmanned exploration conducted over the last decades by NASA.
The evidence that the planet is home to microscopic lifeforms—something akin to Earth’s bacteria—has been accumulating slowly, but consistently. While few astrobiologists are ready say that, yes, there’s life there, until we have a photo of microorganisms swimming in the microscope field, that moment is really approaching. And we’ll probably get to it long before the first astronaut boots cast their prints into the Martian surface dust.
At 500 square feet, ICON’s stylish new structure was 3D-printed over the course of several days—but it only took 27 hours of labor to construct. The building will serve as a welcome center at Austin’s new Community First! Village—a 51-acre development that will provide affordable housing to men and women coming out of chronic homelessness. Six new 3D-printed homes will be added to the village by the end of this year—and ICON says that they can be built at significantly less cost than conventional homes.
A year ago, ICON proved it could 3D print a home you’d actually want to live in. Now, it’s building a cluster of 3D-printed homes for the homeless.
GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Many students celebrate completing their Ph.D. with a party. I, ever the space nerd, climbed into a spacesuit instead.
I spent seven years studying remotely at the University of North Dakota (UND) here, which is home to a variety of space-related facilities. I studied crews at the Inflatable Lunar/Mars Habitat — a facility where groups of three or four people live as astronauts for a week or two, including venturing outside in pressurized spacesuits.
When we think of the interaction between mankind and any type of artificial intelligence in mythology, literature, and pop culture, the outcomes are always negative for humanity, if not apocalyptic. In Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus created automatons who served as his attendants, and one of them, Pandora, unleashed all the evils into the world. Mary Shelley wrote the character named the Monster in her 1818 novel Frankenstein, as the product of the delusions of grandeur of a scientist named Victor Frankenstein. In pop culture, the most notable cases of a once-benign piece of technology running amok is the supercomputer Hal in 2001 Space Odyssey and intelligent machines overthrowing mankind in The Matrix. Traditionally, our stories regarding the god-like creative impulse of man bring about something that will overthrow the creators themselves.
The artificial intelligence-powered art exhibition Forging the Gods, curated by Julia Kaganskiy currently on view at Transfer Gallery attempts to portray the interaction between humans and machines in a more nuanced manner, showcasing how this relationship already permeates our everyday lives. The exhibition also shows how this relation is, indeed, fully reflective of the human experience — meaning that machines are no more or less evil than we actually are.
Lauren McCarthy, with her works “LAUREN” (2017) and its follow-up “SOMEONE” (2019) riffs on the trends of smart homes: in the former, she installs and controls remote-controlled networked devices in the homes of some volunteers and plays a human version of Alexa, reasoning that she will be better than Amazon’s virtual assistant because, being a human, she can anticipate people’s needs. The follow-up SOMEONE was originally a live media performance consisting of a four-channel video installation (made to look like a booth one can find at The Wing) where gallery-goers would play human versions of Alexa themselves in the homes of some volunteers, who would have to call for “SOMEONE” in case they needed something from their smart-controlled devices. Unfortunately, what we see at Forging The Gods is the recorded footage of the original run of the performance, so we have to forgo playing God by, say, making someone’s lighting system annoyingly flicker on and off.
It is an engineer’s dream to build a robot as competent as an insect at locomotion, directed action, navigation, and survival in complex conditions. But as well as studying insects to improve robotics, in parallel, robot implementations have played a useful role in evaluating mechanistic explanations of insect behavior, testing hypotheses by embedding them in real-world machines. The wealth and depth of data coming from insect neuroscience hold the tantalizing possibility of building complete insect brain models. Robotics has a role to play in maintaining a focus on functional understanding—what do the neural circuits need to compute to support successful behavior?
Insect brains have been described as “minute structures controlling complex behaviors” (1): Compare the number of neurons in the fruit fly brain (∼135,000) to that in the mouse (70 million) or human (86 billion). Insect brain structures and circuits evolved independently to solve many of the same problems faced by vertebrate brains (or a robot’s control program). Despite the vast range of insect body types, behaviors, habitats, and lifestyles, there are many surprising consistencies across species in brain organization, suggesting that these might be effective, efficient, and general-purpose solutions.
Unraveling these circuits combines many disciplines, including painstaking neuroanatomical and neurophysiological analysis of the components and their connectivity. An important recent advance is the development of neurogenetic methods that provide precise control over the activity of individual neurons in freely behaving animals. However, the ultimate test of mechanistic understanding is the ability to build a machine that replicates the function. Computer models let researchers copy the brain’s processes, and robots allow these models to be tested in real bodies interacting with real environments (2). The following examples illustrate how this approach is being used to explore increasingly sophisticated control problems, including predictive tracking, body coordination, navigation, and learning.
