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In case you are interested in Martin's past project, this article covers his master thesis. Potential for space? One of the biggest challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively simple, you're still dealing with a whole bunch of them, and every step in building the robots or letting them loose is multiplied over the entire number of bots in the swarm.

Scientists inch closer to building a drug-delivering nanorobot

New 3D printed macro structure exhibits selective buckling open the way for custom shape-memory materials found our neighbor scientists from the Lorentz Institut of the Leiden University. Wonder if it can be applied for self-assembled deployment of structures.

Cilia are hairs driven by molecular motors. They are found in monocellular organisms, etc. If we can build such things artificially, we have micro-pumps etc. Any space usability?

carlo's distributed actuator study originally considered cilia as well as peristaltic motion if i remember right. i suppose you might still think about debris transport for digging applications. Originally there was an idea for thermal transport aswell which, it turns out, was bollocks.

Sounds too super to be true, no?

> Sounds too super to be true, no? Yeah, how else may it sound, being a combination of hi-quality (I assume) research targeted at attracting funding, raised to the power of Science Daily's pop-pseudo-scientific journalists' bu****it? Original article starts with a cool sentence too: > The ultimate proof of our understanding of natural or technological systems is reflected in our ability to control them. ...a good starting point for a never-ending philosophers' debate... Now seriously, because of a big name behind the study, I'm very curious to read the original article. Although I expect the conclusion to be that in practical cases (i.e. the cases of "networks" you *would like to* "control"), you need to control all nodes or something equally impractical...

then I am looking forward to reading your conclusions here after you will have actually read the paper

Apparently, I becomes possible to create proteins from scratch already. Things become interesting...

swarm intelligence very impressive ...

yep ... fantastic ...

impressive, particularly the two last videos where u can see the structure growing !

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.

quasicrystalline superlattice that self-assembles from a single type of nanoparticle building blocks