The Ed's Up #47
A Swarm of a Thousand Cooperative, Self-Organising Robots
"In a lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the world’s largest swarm of cooperative robots is building a star… out of themselves. There are 1024 of these inch-wide Kilobots, and they can arrange themselves into different shapes, from a letter to a wrench. They are slow and comically jerky in their movements, but they are also autonomous. Once they’re given a shape, they can recreate it without any further instructions, simply by cooperating with their neighbours and organising themselves." (Image: Mike Rubenstein)
Early Antibiotics Change Gut Microbes, Fuel Obesity
There are tens of trillions of microbes in our guts, which are important for our digestion and our health. The antibiotics that we take to kill off disease-causing bacteria also indiscriminately nuke these beneficial bugs. Now, a new set of experiments in mice have shown that low, regular doses of antibiotics at an early age can disrupt these microbe communities, leading to weight gain later in life. The increase in body weight was small, but compounded by a high-fat diet. If the results apply to humans, they would add to the large body of evidence suggesting that antibiotics should be used more carefully in infants and children. (Image: Iqbal Osman)
Little Giant Whales Take 100 Gulps an Hour
"During that time, the two animals managed 2,831 lunges over 649 dives. While they were feeding, they lunged around 100 times every hour. That’s just over half a minute to accelerate a five ton body through water, swallow the equivalent of a king-size bed, filter out all the food within it, and be ready to go again. And again. And again." (Image: Ari Friedlander)
A Lost Way of Making Bodies From Before Skeletons and Shells
"The program running on Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill’s computer is deceptively simple. The results look like the leaves of ferns, but they’re much more. They look a lot like an ancient group of creatures called rangeomorphs, which existed in a time before skeletons, shells, legs, mouths, guts, and nervous systems. They were just a few inches long, but in a planet dominated mostly by single-celled creatures, they represented one of the first experiments in building relatively large and complex bodies." (Image: Ryan Somma)
More good reads
- In the wake of Robin Williams’ sad death, I’m going to highlight the best pieces I know about depression.
- This two-part cartoon by Allie Brosh is a perfect depiction of what depression is like (and also a primer for how NOT to help someone with it).
- It will be sunny one day: Stephen Fry’s perfect letter to someone with depression.
- A new entry. How depression fools you into thinking it’s normal, by Helen Rosner.
- The fight goes on: The Bloggess on recovering from depression and what that really means.
- The Beauty of Anatomy – Adam Rutherford's new doc on anatomy and art.
- Natalie Angier, waxing poetic about Africa’s most efficient predators: the African wild dogs
- Suicide contagion and social media: The dangers of sharing ‘Genie, you’re free’. Relatedly: Reporting suicide—how not to kill your readers
- This is excellent. News is "the modern expression of ancient myths”, by Jack Shafer.
- Carl Zimmer on 100 million years of evolving noses.
- A new study looks at the cognitive development of recursion by showing fractals to kids. By Virginia Hughes
- Great piece on DIY mind-controlled gadgets, inc. a tiny robotic "battle spider". By Eliza Strickland.
- While cracking the Enigma code, Alan Turing also cracked how the zebra got its stripes. Kat Arney investigates.
- "A biologist’s banquet and a marketer’s dream": superbly told piece on the data of pregnancy, by Nathalia Holt.
- A really good explainer on using experimental drugs in the Ebola outbreak. By Erika Check Hayden.
More good links will be released in tomorrow's linkfest on Not Exactly Rocket Science
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And that's it! Thanks for reading.