Rupert Sheldrake Shudders in Harmonic Resonance

First you should know who Rubert Sheldrake is, and what morphic resonance is.

Second, if you think anything on this weblog is half as serious as it is a total joke, then you can continue. If not, perhaps read this post about accidental robot porn or this one about fake autographs, fake board games, or other conspiracy theories.

The growth of an organism rides on a pattern of waves
Mar 2020, phys.org

When an egg cell of almost any sexually reproducing species is fertilized, it sets off a series of waves that ripple across the egg's surface. These waves are produced by billions of activated proteins that surge through the egg's membrane like streams of tiny burrowing sentinels, signaling the egg to start dividing, folding, and dividing again, to form the first cellular seeds of an organism. 

When experimenting on starfish eggs, They observed that each wave emerged in a spiral pattern, and that multiple spirals whirled across an egg's surface at a time. Some spirals spontaneously appeared and swirled away in opposite directions, while others collided head-on and immediately disappeared. 

The behavior of these swirling waves, the researchers realized, is similar to the waves generated in other, seemingly unrelated systems, such as the vortices in quantum fluids, the circulations in the atmosphere and oceans, and the electrical signals that propagate through the heart and brain. 

It's a manifestation of this very universal wave pattern. 

The researchers are particularly interested in the waves' similarity to ideas in quantum computing. Just as the pattern of waves in an egg convey specific signals, in this case of cell division, quantum computing is a field that aims to manipulate atoms in a fluid, in precise patterns, in order to translate information and perform calculations. 

"Perhaps now we can borrow ideas from quantum fluids, to build minicomputers from biological cells," Fakhri says. "We expect some differences, but we will try to explore [biological signaling waves] further as a tool for computation." 

Topological turbulence in the membrane of a living cell, Nature Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-0841-9. https://nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0841-9

Keeping Track of the Development of Robots Rights

By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table
Mar 2020, phys.org

I know it's in quotes but they use the word belief in this article:

"Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous—and potentially contradictory—requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform.

Stratospheric Aerosol Geoengineering

The right dose of geoengineering could reduce climate change risks, study says
Mar 2020, phys.org

Don't act like you didn't know.

Stratospheric aerosol geoengineering is the idea that adding a layer of aerosol particles to the upper atmosphere can reduce climate changes caused by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. 

Previous research shows that solar geoengineering could be achieved using commercially available aircraft technologies to deliver the particles at a cost of a few billion dollars per year and would reduce global average temperatures. However, the question remains whether this approach could reduce important climate hazards at a regional level. 

Results from a new study by UCL and Harvard researchers suggest that even a crude method like injecting sulphur dioxide in the stratosphere could reduce many important climate hazards without making any region obviously worse off. 

"However, if instead only half the warming is offset, then we find that stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could still reduce climate change overall but would only exacerbate change over 1.3% of the land area."

Notes:
'Halving warming with stratospheric aerosol geoengineering moderates policy-relevant climate hazards' , Environmental Research Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ab76de

Keeping Track of the Development of Robots Rights

By observing humans, robots learn to perform complex tasks, such as setting a table
Mar 2020, phys.org

I know it's in quotes but they use the word belief in this article:

"Planning with Uncertain Specifications" (PUnS) system gives robots the humanlike planning ability to simultaneously weigh many ambiguous—and potentially contradictory—requirements to reach an end goal. In doing so, the system always chooses the most likely action to take, based on a "belief" about some probable specifications for the task it is supposed to perform.

Sending Mixed Signals

Deep-learning system detects human presence by harvesting RF signals
Feb 2020, phys.org

The presence of humans in a room or in other indoor environments can alter the propagation of RF signals in several ways. By pre-processing RF channel measurements, the researchers were able to create 'images' summarizing the signals, which could in turn be analyzed to detect the presence of humans in a given environment. 

They then trained a CNN on a large amount of data containing both magnitude and phase information, two key properties of RF signals. Over time, the deep learning algorithm learned to distinguish when an environment is populated by humans and when it is free from them by analyzing what is known as channel state information (CSI). 

"Exploiting the ubiquity of ambient RF signals such as WiFi, Bluetooth or cellular signals for situational awareness information provides added value to existing RF infrastructure," Chen said. "Occupancy detection, for example, is an application where RF sensing can be a low-cost and infrastructure-free alternative or complement to existing approaches."

When Biology Takes a Back Seat

Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
Feb 2020, The Guardian

The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds.
“In terms of antibiotic discovery, this is absolutely a first,” said Regina Barzilay, a senior researcher on the project and specialist in machine learning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 

“I think this is one of the more powerful antibiotics that has been discovered to date,” added James Collins, a bioengineer on the team at MIT. “It has remarkable activity against a broad range of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.” 

To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a “deep learning” algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli.
Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to. 

Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named “halicin” after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent.

Reprogramming of immune system cures child with often-fatal fungal infection
June 2020, phys.org

"Immune modulation isn't currently part of the strategy with any of these severe infections," said Dr. Manish Butte, the report's senior author, who holds the E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair in Pediatric Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Our case suggests that rather than hoping to get the upper hand with more and more antibiotics or antifungals, we can have some success by combining these established approaches with the new idea of programming the patient's immune response to better fight the infection."

Synthetic red blood cells mimic natural ones, and have new abilities
June 2020, phys.org

Bioengineers have made synthetic red blood cells that have all the same abilities of natural blood cells, and even a few more.

On a sidenote, I'm also thinking about the Impossible burger that uses synthetically produced hemoglobin. And on a supersidenote, that had me wondering what's worse, humans eating animals, or humans trying to avoid eating animals so they re-engineer a bacteria's genetic code so that it can make blood, and then take that blood and add it to a plant, so that we can eat plants that taste like meat. Like, bacteria didn't even bleed before we got involved, and now that they do, doesn't that mean we should stop eating them too?

Post Script on Biomimicry

A self-cleaning surface that repels even the deadliest superbugs
Dec 2019, phys.org

Researchers develop new method to remove dust on solar panels
Dec 2019, phys.org

Taking a cue from the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have shed new light on microscopic forces and mechanisms that can be optimized to remove dust from solar panels to maintain efficiency and light absorption. The new technique removed 98 percent of dust particles.
In a new study published in Langmuir, the researchers confirmed that modifying the surface properties of solar panels may greatly reduce the amount of dust remaining on the surface, and significantly increase the potential of solar energy harvesting applications in the desert.
Particle removal increased from 41 percent on hydrophilic smooth Si wafers to 98 percent on superhydrophobic Si-based nanotextured surfaces.
"We determined that the reason for the increased particle removal is not low friction between the droplets and the superhydrophobic surfaces," Heckenthaler says. "Rather, it is the increase in the forces that can detach particles from the surfaces. The experimental methods we used and the criterion for particle removal we derived can be implemented to engineer self-cleaning surfaces exhibiting different chemistries and/or textures."

-image source: I really hate it when websites don't credit their artwork (almost as much as I hate the threeway image clusterfu**ing olympics performed by Google-Getty-Pinterest triangle). This image came from the site at this link, but they list no artist credits.

Thank You Japan

Blowing bubbles - Soapy spheres pop pollen on fruit trees
June 2020, BBC News

Just when you think we are doomed by the insectapocalypse and mass bee death in particular, Japanese researchers have succeeded in fertilising pear trees using pollen carried on the thin film of a soap bubble.

Post Script
Once in a while I run an image search for something I think is totally random and will return equally random results, like "bumblebee porn". Well I'm here to remind you that anything-porn is not random. You can type [anything] porn and get a relevant result.

In this case, bumblebee is a transformer (although I don't recall this character from the originals circa early 1980's), and maybe he got a movie made recently, so he takes over the top results. And yes he's a robot, and yes robophilia is a thing. And on that note, I must recall the artist of sexy robot fame, Hajime Sorayama (also Japanese, thanks again).

-image source: David Prutchi, Ultraviolet Vision