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It is able to climb a tree

freeky

coool! Although I'm not sure real snakes do it that way...

smart guy!

Engineers launch a plan to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere within 10 to 20 years.

Anisotropic frictional properties for crawling locomotion.

"...the woodpecker does not experience any head injury at the high speed of 6-7 m/s with a deceleration of 1000 g when it drums a tree trunk. It is still not known how woodpeckers protect their brain from impact injury...."

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Interesting article about theoretical physics theories vs. experimental verification. Can we state that a theory can be so good that its existence supplants the need for data and testing ? If a theory is proved to be untestable experimentally, can we still say that it is a scientific theory ? (not in my opinion)

There is an interesting approach by Feynman that it does not make sense to describe something of which we cannot measure the consequences. So a theory that is so removed from experiment that it cannot be backed by it is pointless and of no consequence. It is a bit as with the statement "if a tree falls in the forrest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?". We would typically extrapolate to say that it does make a sound. But actually nobody knows - you would have to take some kind of measurement. But even more fundamentally it does not make any difference! For all intents and purposes there is no point in forcing a prediction that you cannot measure and that therefore has noto reflect an event in your world.

"Mathematics is the model of the universe, not the other way round" - M. R.

This is the biggest breakthrough in game AI (and one of the biggest in AI in general) since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess: For the first time, a human professional player was defeated in the game of Go. The approach was a combination of tree search and deep neural networks. Very proud of a former colleague on the team at Google Deepmind!

Funny enough, facebook also had a very similar paper around the same time.

Random branches are collected, scanned to 3D, and connected with servos. Then a neural network is trained to control this "robot".