Tag: science

Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce

To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.

Now scientists at the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction—and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

The same team that built the first living robots (“Xenobots,” assembled from frog cells—reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble “baby” Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth”—that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Again and again.

“With the right design—they will spontaneously self-replicate,” says Joshua Bongard, Ph.D., a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.

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Island of Rhesus Monkeys in South Carolina Exposed as NIAID’s Source for ‘Excruciating Experiments’

A group that investigates taxpayer-funded experiments on animals has disclosed a document exposing the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) “excruciating experiments” on rhesus monkeys.

The monkeys, which are owned by NIAID, are acquired from Morgan Island off the coast of Beaufort, South Carolina.

Justin Goodman, vice president of advocacy and public policy for the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP), told The Epoch Times that the nonprofit taxpayer watchdog group obtained the document in October through the Freedom of Information Act, revealing that the NIAID has spent $13.5 million in taxpayer funding on experiments that involve injecting monkeys with various infectious diseases such as Ebola and the Lassa virus that result in hemorrhaging, pain, brain damage, loss of motor control, and organ failure.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of NIAID, a division of the National Institute of Health (NIH), itself a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“In many of these experiments, Fauci and staff intentionally withhold pain relief, even though these are some of the most excruciating experiments in the federal government,” Goodman said.

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Conspiracy Theorists Proved Right As Science Heads Into The Abyss

One undeniable outcome of the pandemic is that the public’s faith in scientific and medical authorities is perhaps at its lowest point in living memory, and no objective observer can truly be surprised.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US President’s Chief Medical Adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and US Surgeon General Dr Jerome Adams told us not to wear masks, until they instructed us to wear one everywhere we went.

The Covid vaccines were declared to be effective at preventing the spread of disease until breakthrough cases around the globe proved that wasn’t so, and that effectiveness was downgraded to ‘against hospitalization and death.’

Both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, two of the most prestigious medical journals in the world, have issued embarrassing retractions to widely publicised papers eventually found to have too little validity to be published.

Anyone who suggested that the pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory and not a Chinese wet market was labelled a conspiracy theorist by official sources who later had to admit they were possibly correct. The same proved true for everyone who accused Fauci and the National Institutes of Health of funding gain-of-function research at the lab: they were crazy until they were right.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists urged all pregnant women to be vaccinated, asserting that the new injections were completely safe. Now, a new review of that same data suggests that one in eight women spontaneously aborted her pregnancy after getting the jab.

Even medical terms, such as herd immunity, and the word ‘vaccine’ itself, have literally been redefined over the past few months. All this has shocked a great number of informed, educated people around the world. Should it, though?

In fact, a brief glance through the history of science demonstrates that scientists being completely and utterly wrong, in retrospect, often comically so, is the norm, not an aberration. It’s long past time for modern scientific researchers to discover a proper sense of humility and to step down from the pedestal of the secular priesthood they’ve ascended.

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Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate is about politics, not science

President Biden appears to view Americans not as free citizens but as disobedient subjects. In September, he informed the millions of Americans who remain unvaccinated that “our patience is wearing thin.”

So the president told administrative officials to issue a mandate. Under an order by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), private businesses and nonprofits with 100 or more employees must coerce their unvaccinated employees to get vaccinated, undergo weekly testing or lose their jobs. Penalties can be $14,000 per violation, and they go up from there.

The mandate covers more than 80 million Americans. And it violates the Constitution and other federal laws. That’s why Alliance Defending Freedom is challenging this order on behalf of several groups in courts around the country.

Within a day of the order being issued, a federal court stayed the rule, citing “grave statutory and constitutional issues.” But the fight is only beginning.

Congress empowered OSHA to protect employees from toxic substances or hazards in the workplace. But, here, the agency essentially defined employees themselves as the hazard. This greatly oversteps its authority. The Supreme Court has said that, if Congress wants to give bureaucrats authority over major questions of “vast economic or political significance,” it must do so clearly. 

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Why some scientists believe life may have started on Mars

On February 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover will parachute through thin Martian air, marking a new era in red planet exploration. Landing on the Jezero Crater, which is located north of the Martian equator, will be no easy feat. Only about 40 percent of the missions ever sent to Mars succeed, according to NASA. If it does, Perseverance could drastically change the way we think about extraterrestrial life. That’s because scientists believe Jezero, a 28 mile-wide impact crater that used to be a lake, is an ideal place to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.

Once it lands, Perseverance will collect and store Martian rock and soil samples, which will eventually be returned to Earth. This is known as a “sample-return mission,” an extremely rare type of space exploration mission due to its expense. (Indeed, there has never been a sample return mission from another planet.) And once Martian soil is returned to Earth in a decade, scientists will set about studying the material to figure out if there was ever ancient life on Mars. 

Yet some scientists believe that these samples could answer an even bigger question: Did life on Earth originate on Mars?

Though the idea that life started on Mars before migrating on Earth sounds like some far-fetched sci-fi premise, many renowned scientists take the theory seriously. The general idea of life starting elsewhere in space before migrating here has a name, too: Panspermia. It’s the hypothesis that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and is distributed by asteroids and other space debris.

To be clear, the notion of life on Earth originating on Mars isn’t a dominant theory in the scientific community, but it does appear to be catching on. And scientists like Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, say that it does sound “obvious, in a way.”

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98-Year-Old Who Donated Body to Science Ends Up Dissected in Front of Audience at Expensive ‘Freak Show’ in Portland

A 98-year-old man who donated his body to science ended up being dissected before a paying audience at a “freak show” event in Oregon.

The family of the man is outraged over how his body was desecrated without their consent.

The audience paid $500 per ticket to watch the body of David Saunders be dissected, live and in person.

“Event organizers sold tickets for up to $500 to the public to view in-person the autopsy and dissection of a human body. The event is part of the Oddities and Curiosities Expo, which travels across the country,” local station KING 5 reports.

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