Computer simulations that teach themselves to walk.
Please cite the papers this is from, this is no better than posting stolen, unsourced art. This is someone’s results from their research: their PhD dissertation, ACM TOG, and SIGGRAPH/Eurographics.
DON’T JUST REPOST IT WITHOUT CITING THE PAPERS.
Mood: generation 80 emu.
ive seen these gifs for years and *finally* someone fucking sources them
Gen80 of the wibbley biped creature is beautiful and trying it’s best
Mood: Gen 17 humanoid.
Tag: science!
Holy SHIT
Antivenom
have you ever stop to think that we don’t just synthetize antivenom, but we fucking brew it from the venom itself? like, oh, you got bitten by a rattlesnake? fear not, here, inject a bit more venom which have been scienced to antagonize itself.
and it is not just that- we science venom for medicinal purposes. we take stuff that is uber toxic to us, science a bit with it (well, it takes years and a great effort from our scientists) and TA DAH, here is a brand new uber effective drug against blood clots.
heck, we BREED venomous snake to extract their venom to use for medicinal purpouse!!!
it is the same principles at the base of vaccines – take what’s dangerous and use it to make yourself stronger.
this is the most DeathWorlders thing I can think of. aliens don’t stand a chance.
And a lot of the people who work with these snakes (and it happens with people who work with bees as well I think) get bitten so many times that they become immune to it too. And their blood can help people who can’t take the anti-venom.
I mean, is there any other animal on Earth that if they keep eating/taking the bad thing in small doses that don’t kill ‘em even bigger doses eventually won’t kill them. And does it on purpose? (Like, now we’re starting to feed the young’uns who have Peanut allergies… well… peanuts to get them over it. Hard core. Super Hard Core.)
You leave out the fact that, for most, if not all antivenoms, “sciencing it a bit” involves injecting small amounts into animals (usually horses), building their immunity, and then taking their blood and purifying the antibodies out of it. We expose others animals to a toxin and then gain their powers by stealing their blood. That’s some dark magic right there.
I feel like you would enjoy this.
Okay, there IS an explanation for this chalk monstrosity. My science teacher is very hands-on, and we were doing a unit on moles. We abbreviate them mol. (Me, being trash, immediately thought of the terrible Darth Mol jokes and tried not to start snickering in the middle of a silent classroom.) But there’s a lab project for this unit where we measure the amount of mols we use to draw something on a paper.
But it gets better. If it’s science-related, he HANGS IT ON THE WALL. Mine is on a wall. But its also the worst pun I’ve made in my life ever. :)1
Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.
Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone – so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.
Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.
Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.
Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.
The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.
References
Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture
Like a Native Speaker?
Psychological Science27(5) 737–747.
Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish:
Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.
4 Ways Scientists Hope Nanobots Will Make You Healthier
“Designing miniaturized and versatile robots of a few micrometers or less would allow access throughout the whole human body, leading to new procedures down to the cellular level and offering localized diagnosis and treatment with greater precision and efficiency,” the authors write.
Where do I sign up to be experimented on? No, seriously.
Building a Virtual Cell
Our cells are made up of extremely intricate networks of genes, proteins and other molecules that move around, carry messages, respond to changes in the environment and perform functions, like producing insulin or beating in unison. Researchers who study these processes usually focus on just one thing, such as studying a single gene or protein.
To provide researchers with a more global view of cells and their networks, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers created Active Interaction Mapping, a program that organizes raw data into a model of the cell.
“This tool is meant to guide researchers interested in any aspect of cellular function, helping them select the next logical experiments to learn about that process,” said Michael Kramer, an MD/PhD student who helped develop the program in the lab of Trey Ideker, PhD, professor of genetics and bioengineering.
Not only do researchers benefit from Active Interaction Mapping, they also contribute. The model becomes more powerful as more researchers roll their data back into it.
To test Active Interaction Mapping, Ideker and team used autophagy in yeast cells as an example cellular process. Autophagy is the process by which cells recycle their components — a system that can go awry in cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and many other conditions. The model told them that genetic experiments were needed, so they went back to the lab to do them. In doing so, the team uncovered previously unknown autophagy roles for a number of genes — information they then fed back into the model.
The study published January 26 in Molecular Cell. Researchers can download the Active Interaction Mapping software at atgo.ucsd.edu
Ideker, Kramer and team have already started modeling human cells. In the future, they hope to offer not just healthy cell models, but models for diseased cells. The ultimate goal is to offer personalized cell modeling — a window not just into a cancer cell, but your unique cancer cell.
This is really quite a big deal. A tremendous amount of modern research ends up being sold to journals which require unreasonable payments to access it and only pay the original authors a pittance. It’s nice to see an agency like NASA deliberately widebanding its findings.
Not sure if people fully realize just how big of a deal this is.
THIS is how science is advanced. Not through biased corporate research, business secrets, marketing, paywalls and patent wars. But through open, uncensored and unrestricted public access to knowledge.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=%22nasa+funded%22[Filter]
^ There’s the direct link to all the studies.
NASA IS GOOD, NASA IS GREAT
NASA is the hero we don’t deserve.
This deserves every reblog.
thank you, @nasa!
There's a Mirror on the Wall 