When the cloud storage firm Dropbox decided to shut down its offices with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, co-founder and CEO Drew Houston ’05 h.
Architecture and construction have always been, rather quietly, at the bleeding edge of tech and materials trends. It’s no surprise, then, especially at a renowned technical university like ETH Zurich, to find a project utilizing AI and robotics in a new approach to these arts. The automated design and construction they are experimenting with show how homes and offices might be built a decade from now.
The project is a sort of huge sculptural planter, “hanging gardens” inspired by the legendary structures in the ancient city of Babylon. (Incidentally, it was my ancestor, Robert Koldewey, who excavated/looted the famous Ishtar Gate to the place.)
Begun in 2019, Semiramis (named after the queen of Babylon back then) is a collaboration between human and AI designers. The general idea of course came from the creative minds of its creators, architecture professors Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler. But the design was achieved by putting the basic requirements, such as size, the necessity of watering and the style of construction, through a set of computer models and machine learning algorithms.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX told Starlink customers they’d have internet service by mid-to late 2021, but some customers say it’s now been delayed to 2022.
Summary: Study identifies a significant way in which a disrupted circadian clock drives inflammation in the body’s immune cells.
Source: RCSI
New research from RCSI has demonstrated the significant role that an irregular body clock plays in driving inflammation in the body’s immune cells, with implications for the most serious and prevalent diseases in humans.
A new NASA video advertises a suite of its real-life missions as previewing an “Exoplanet Travel Bureau” of the future.
In this DNA factory, organism engineers are using robots and automation to build completely new forms of life.
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Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston company specializing in “engineering custom organisms,” aims to reinvent manufacturing, agriculture, biodesign, and more.
Continue reading “This Synthetic DNA Factory Is Building New Forms of Life” »
Breakthrough Initiatives held an exciting scientific meeting at the beginning of this week, from exoplanets to technosignatures and the future of life on Earth:
Earlier this week, the Breakthrough Initiatives held the scientific meeting Life in the Universe 2021: Our Past, Present, and Future Selves.
Mounded, luminous clouds of gas and dust glow in this Hubble image of a Herbig-Haro object known as HH 45.
Herbig-Haro objects are a rarely seen type of nebula that occurs when hot gas ejected by a newborn star collides with the gas and dust around it at hundreds of miles per second, creating bright shock waves. In this image, blue indicates ionized oxygen (O II) and purple shows ionized magnesium (Mg II). Researchers were particularly interested in these elements because they can be used to identify shocks and ionization fronts.
This object is located in the nebula NGC 1977, which itself is part of a complex of three nebulae called The Running Man. NGC 1977—like its companions NGC 1975 and NGC 1973—is a reflection nebula, which means that it doesn’t emit light on its own, but reflects light from nearby stars, like a streetlight illuminating fog.
Speaker: Swarup Bhunia.
http://www.eecs.case.edu/doku.php?id=eecs: home: seminar_series:upcoming_seminars.
