Sunday, December 12, 2021

IN the NEWS - Rise of the Xenobots

--One way to look at this is that God gave man a complex brain to use and figure out how to manipulate these building blocks He gave us. Apparently this can be used for good in things like transporting payloads to fight disease in the body.
--On the other hand who knows what might happen in the wrong hands......like creating a SUPER VIRUS BUG that escapes the Lab and is unstoppable......just ponder what would happen if it did just that---and someone came along and manipulated people's fear into the idea we need to do something like turn to God by honoring a day for Him?.....just thoughts to ponder in the pond of time.
There is no fear of God before their eyes. 
Romans 3:18

"....Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped

from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life-forms. These millimeter-wide "xenobots" can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload (like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.

"These are novel living machines," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics. "They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism."

The new creatures were designed on a supercomputer at UVM—and then assembled and tested by biologists at Tufts University. "We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do," says co-leader Michael Levin who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts, "like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination, gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries to scrape out plaque."

The results of the new research were published January 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And when they stop working—death—they usually fall apart harmlessly. "These xenobots are fully biodegradable," say Bongard, "when they're done with their job after seven days, they're just dead skin cells."

But try cutting it in half. Doesn't work so well. In the new

experiments, the scientists cut the xenobots and watched what happened. "We sliced the robot almost in half and it stitches itself back up and keeps going," says Bongard. "And this is something you can't do with typical machines."

To make an organism develop and function, there is a lot of information sharing and cooperation—organic computation—going on in and between cells all the time, not just within neurons. These emergent and geometric properties are shaped by bioelectric, biochemical, and biomechanical processes, "that run on DNA-specified hardware," Levin says, "and these processes are reconfigurable, enabling novel living forms."

Many people worry about the implications of rapid technological change and complex biological manipulations. "That fear is not unreasonable," Levin says. "When we start to mess around with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences." A lot of complex systems, like an ant colony, begin with a simple unit—an ant—from which it would be impossible to predict the shape of their colony or how they can build bridges over water with their interlinked bodies. 

Much of science is focused on "controlling the low-level rules. We also need to understand the high-level rules," he says. "If you wanted an anthill with two chimneys instead of one, how do you modify the ants? We'd have no idea." UVMtoday

Gay and bisexual young adolescents experience more problems with lifestyle and wellbeing than their heterosexual peers, according to a study by a government social and cultural think tank. The SCP, which analysed Dutch data from a 2017 international study on health behaviour, has found that young people from 11 to 16 who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual (LGB) were more likely to have sleep problems, overuse social media and were three times as likely to feel unhappy. Their family and school situation were likely to play a significant role in their feelings, the study found. Despite some decrease in reported bullying, these young people had far lower wellbeing than their heterosexual peers.

Read more at DutchNews.nl:
Gay and bisexual young adolescents experience more problems with lifestyle and wellbeing than their heterosexual peers, according to a study by a government social and cultural think tank. The SCP, which analysed Dutch data from a 2017 international study on health behaviour, has found that young people from 11 to 16 who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual (LGB) were more likely to have sleep problems, overuse social media and were three times as likely to feel unhappy. Their family and school situation were likely to play a significant role in their feelings, the study found. Despite some decrease in reported bullying, these young people had far lower wellbeing than their heterosexual peers.

Read more at DutchNews.nl:
Gay and bisexual young adolescents experience more problems with lifestyle and wellbeing than their heterosexual peers, according to a study by a government social and cultural think tank. The SCP, which analysed Dutch data from a 2017 international study on health behaviour, has found that young people from 11 to 16 who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual (LGB) were more likely to have sleep problems, overuse social media and were three times as likely to feel unhappy. Their family and school situation were likely to play a significant role in their feelings, the study found. Despite some decrease in reported bullying, these young people had far lower wellbeing than their heterosexual peers.

Read more at DutchNews.nl: