Tag: video

Cell communication

Bacteria use quorum sensing via standardized molecules to communicate, both intra and inter species. New medicine could target this communication to shut down pathogenicity.

2012-06-24: The Social Lives of Microbes

It used to be assumed that bacteria lived relatively independent unicellular lives, without the cooperative behaviors that have provoked so much interest in mammals, birds, and insects. However, research has completely overturned this idea, showing that microbes indulge in a variety of social behaviors involving complex systems of cooperation, communication, and synchronization. Work in this area has already provided some elegant experimental tests of social evolutionary theory, demonstrating the importance of factors such as relatedness, kin discrimination, competition between relatives, and enforcement of cooperation.

2021-07-09: Social Mitochondria

Mitochondria divide up tasks, form groups, synchronize activities and respond to both their environment and each other. The sociability of mitochondria facilitates the cooperation of cells, which in turn allows the formation of organs that depend on one another and the creation of complex organisms. The social nature of animals is an extension of the sociality seen at lower rungs of the ladder. Network approaches could yield clues about new treatments, such as improving mitochondrial communication. Part of what makes exercise healthy is that it promotes communication between mitochondria. “It makes them more social”

Robot agriculture

The robots are able to locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants. In the long run, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse.

2012-09-14:  AutoMicroFarm

AutoMicroFarm is an automated farm system that enables gardeners to grow 90% of their food with a system that replaces time, effort, and agricultural expertise with design, technology, and software. It is an open-source aquaponics system with best-of-class design, monitoring and automation to make it easy to maintain.

2016-06-01: Automation has some not so obvious consequences that should make the Birkenstock mafia happy if they weren’t so preoccupied with being luddites.
2018-05-22: New AI-enabled tractors target weeds, using 90% less herbicide

Farming is undergoing a quiet but radical transformation as machine learning and automation innovations reduce waste. One especially promising new technology targets individual weeds. This is especially important as the world slowly moves to ban glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup and others that may be linked to cancer and loss of biodiversity. Some studies have linked the chemical to changes in bee behavior.

2021-06-07: Australia’s first automated farm

Robots and artificial intelligence will replace workers on Australia’s first fully automated farm created at a cost of $20m. Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga will create the “hands-free farm” on a 19km2 property to demonstrate what robots and artificial intelligence can do without workers in the paddock. The reality of “hands-free” farming’ is closer than many people realize: “Full automation is not a distant concept. We already have mines in the Pilbara operated entirely through automation.”

2022-02-23: Verdant Robotics

Verdant Robotics announced the delivery of the industry’s first multi-action, autonomous farm-robot capable of millimeter-accurate spraying, laser weeding, and AI-based digital crop modeling, and the expansion of their robot-as-a-service offering to farmers. Combining multiple technologies, the company’s 6-row and 12-row commercial implements can treat up to 4.2 acres per hour, achieving a higher weed-removal rate per acre than other technology or human ability, and reducing chemical usage by 95%. Simultaneously, its autonomous software system collects data and uses machine learning capabilities to optimize yield and growing outcomes, ultimately unlocking new revenues to help farmers reach profitability and sustainability goals.


2023-02-23: Dogtooth strawberry picker

2023-05-01: Drones to avoid soil compaction

Early one recent morning in Vidalia, Georgia, Greg Morgan launched a Hylio AG-230 drone carrying 30l of fungicide over a field of sweet onions. The chemical, which is essential to crop survival in this humid state fell in a fine mist from the spray jets of a 36 kg drone scudding 3 meters above his cash crop. It has cut his fuel costs and already reduced his agrochemical usage by 15%. The drone has also enabled him to work his fields after heavy rains — when the ground is often too sodden for heavy equipment — and has spared his crop from the routine damage caused by tractors. It has also saved his soil from the compaction, bogging and erosion caused by farm machinery.

Göbekli Tepe

Carbon dating shows that the complex is 12 ka old. Stonehenge was built around 2000–2500 BC. Gobekli Tepe hails from a part of human history that is unimaginably distant, right back in our hunter-gatherer past.

There is no doubt gobekli tepe is an enormously important archaeological discovery: at 12 ka, it is far far older than any other advanced manmade structure. together with evidence that the first grains are from the same area, this may well be the birth of civilization.

Göbekli Tepe suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization. It suggests that the human impulse to gather for sacred rituals arose as humans shifted from seeing themselves as part of the natural world to seeking mastery over it. When foragers began settling down in villages, they unavoidably created a divide between the human realm—a fixed huddle of homes with 100s of inhabitants—and the dangerous land beyond the campfire, populated by lethal beasts.

2022-05-20: The area might be even older and is far more widespread:

Archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilization, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for 10 ka. And it was all buried deliberately. Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far We have dug up maybe 1% of the site. That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably 1000s more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be 10s more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over 100s of kilometres.’