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Engineers create ‘lifelike’ material with artificial metabolism
- joebubna 8y agoThis article had me thinking about self-repairing clothing or ships with living hulls.
- bitwize 8y agoI thought of synthetic fur that looks like real fur and is just as soft and warm, but doesn't involve killing animals. That and T800 skin.
- cr0sh 8y agoRather than just synthetic fur - imagine a coat (furry or not) that is "alive" and generates it's own heat to keep you warm. Maybe it "feeds" on your sweat and dead skin cells? Or you feed it at night in some manner? Every time I see one of these articles on "bio-robotics" or whatever you want to call them, I always think back to sci-fi like Dune (Axlotl "technology") and/or Blade Runner (replicants, artificial eyes, etc); a future where the line between the artificial and the natural is very, very blurry.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoSweat happens when your body needs to remove excess heat, so using it to heat your body back (even if thermodynamics allowed for it) would be... kind of counterproductive. But being able to feed it with something overnight and have it slowly radiate out the heat would be a nice thing for winter months. Beats electric heating.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAs long as this new synthetic fur is cheaper than the real thing... If I'm to believe a random outrage post I've seen on Facebook, apparently real fur is cheaper at scale than synthetic, so some companies ended up selling clothes from real fur but advertised them as synthetic, to cash in on the extra money you can get from people caring about animal suffering.
- scottie_m 8y agoI would imagine it really depends on the fur. No doubt a squirrel fur product can be very cheap, while lion fire is going to be on the pricey side.
- ZeroFries 8y agoSelf-repairing roads would be amazing.
- swasheck 8y agoI wonder what the economic impact to local economies would be if we could be rid of the bribes, cronyism, and nepotism that goes into civil maintenance.
- jermaustin1 8y agoI know my local tire shop would be out of business. I go through an average of 1 tire each month from potholes, and a bent rim at least twice per year.
- mac01021 8y agoThat's insane. What state are you in?
- jermaustin1 8y agoI live in Rockland County, NY. Known for 2 things, potholes from the endless road work, and now measles!
- wavefunction 8y agoDepending on home the road is deriving the matter needed to repair itself.
- Romanulus 8y agoFleshlight comes to mind, too!
- robotrout 8y agoMade me think of the movie eXistenZ.
- jermaustin1 8y agoI guess if the robots don't overthrow us, maybe the life-like bio-bots, might?
- garmaine 8y agoWhy worry about that when actually living bio-bots haven’t?
- jacobush 8y agoOh but they largely did throughout history. It's only in recent times we have been able to (barely) counter that with democracy.
- pazimzadeh 8y agoDemocracy slowed bacterial growth? Sounds cool.
- jacobush 8y agoI took the biobots to refer to us humans...
- LifeLiverTransp 8y agoWhy does nobody fear grey goo? Runaway highly efficient self-repairing materials are the stuff of nightmares?
- SilasX 8y agoDo they have a culture of "know how to disrupt the metabolism before you leave it to grow on its own"?
- joe_the_user 8y agoBecause self-organization/self-reproduction is a hard problem that living things have been imperfectly trying to solve for millions of years without the creation "grey goo"? I mean, for a self-reproducing entity, energy is still going to be a limit on motion and energy isn't easily available in the natural environment. All the potential sources of energy require a particular chemical path to be transformed into usable energy and just constructing an entity capable of reproducing itself given specific materials and energy doesn't give you this.
- ALittleLight 8y agoFlight is a hard problem that living organisms have been working on for millions of years, yet human engineered systems fly higher, faster, and further. How do you know that human engineered systems can't also be much better at self replication and hence create grey goo?
- joe_the_user 8y agoI don't necessarily think that human-engineered gray goo is impossible. But the context is whether gray goo is going to be created accidentally and that seems unlikely. Just self-reproduction is a different problem than breaking down X energy source and moreover, the breakdown of each given source of chemical energy is a different and hard problem (the breakdown of cellulose by bacteria took a long time to evolve, for example). So creating a "breaks down anything" micro-organism (or nanite or whatever) merely by doing a bit of haphazard DNA manipulation doesn't seem like a big danger. If you had human who grasped the broader principles behind micro-engineering and wanted gray-goo, well, then you'd have reason to worry. There's little evidence of this, however.
- spullara 8y agoMy current presumption is that if we encounter alien "life" it will actually be some self-replicating system that just spread itself everywhere, the original creators long forgotten.
- ngvrnd 8y ago(looks around) Nods.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- warent 8y agoSo basically us
- m463 8y agoor zebra mussels, or jellyfish, or the hawaiian mongoose, or dandilions, or ...
- YaxelPerez 8y agoYeah, that's basically what life is.
- jasonl99 8y agoYour comment totally reminds me of an article Tim Urban wrote in 2015 about the dangers of AI (Mr. Urban, if you are around these parts I absolutely love your writing!!). Within that article he describes "a 15-person startup company called Robotica has the stated mission of “Developing innovative Artificial Intelligence tools that allow humans to live more and work less.” It does not end well. https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
- Knufen 8y agoDo you remember the actual article? I can't find it and I love a good short story.
- mp3k 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
- tremors_123 8y agoThese are real engineers, not folks who create webpages and call themselves engineers...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ArtDev 8y agoSuper cool!
- bellerose 8y agoOh maybe that's how we started.
- poormystic 8y agoHow is this not scary?
- Treblemaker 8y ago"That's the first lesson in basic nanotechnology. First, program the off switch. Everybody knows that." https://qntm.org/gorge https://qntm.org/gorge