—This is an excerpt from a brand new e-book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus
Robots are an unimaginable approach to improve and prolong the attain of human capabilities. In 2009, I labored with the biologist Roger Payne to make use of camera-mounted drones to check whales and their life spans.
The similar drone was used to check uncontacted tribes within the Amazon, so that they may very well be noticed with out the chance of bringing germs to individuals who had not developed immunity.
We additionally constructed a drone that launched from a self-driving automobile, flying forward and round corners to relay its video again to the automobile’s navigation system.
We can already pilot our eyes round corners and ship them hovering off cliffs. But what if we might prolong all of our senses to beforehand unreachable locations, and throw our sight, listening to, contact, and even sense of odor to distant locales and expertise these locations in a extra visceral approach? The prospects are countless—and endlessly thrilling. Read the total extract right here.
Organoids comprised of amniotic fluid will inform us how fetuses develop
The information: As a fetus grows within the womb, it sheds cells into the amniotic fluid that surrounds it. Now researchers have demonstrated that they will use these cells to develop organoids, three-dimensional buildings which have a few of the properties of human organs—on this case kidneys, small intestines, and lungs. These cells might be extracted with out harming the fetus.