semi-daily journal of my thoughts and feelings(hopefully) On my life living in the Rocky Mountains...
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| rkymtnmusings semi-daily journal of my thoughts and feelings(hopefully) On my life living in the Rocky Mountains... .
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9/12/2004 I'm tempted to list this under "People with too much time on thier hands" but in reality maybe it's just that they have corporate money to play with, and who can blame them...but, as much as I love the sciences, and love to hear about new explorations, this information was catagorized appropriately as "weird" news: LONDON - British scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies. The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects' skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current. "Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday. Chris Melhuish and his team, who are developing the robot, have to manually feed the flies to EcoBot II because they are still designing some type of pump to suck the insects into it. "One of the great things about flies is that you can get them to come to you," he said. Hence the downside of the fully autonomous robot: it will have to use sewage or excrement to attract the flies and is bound to smell appalling. Now,the part that interests me is the " release and forget" aspect of this... Basically the funding and consequent research is being done under the thought process that robots are being developed to do the jobs that people don't want to do in places that people would rather not be under conditions that people would find less than desireable...Jeez...under certain conditions, that could be a shower to me !!! ...sometimes anything but going to bed !!! But, be that as it may, I have to wonder if the folks funding this are getting the most bang for thier buck as it were...and to the delight of sci-fi fans, are these not the perfect type of robots to come back and haunt us after they have been forgotten... And then ther is the robot that can walk on water... Actually not the same one as that water striding robot that some scientists at MIT created last year, there is actually another insectbot which is able to walk on water, this one courtesy of researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s NanoRobotics Lab. This one is just half an inch in size, with eight 2-inch steel-wire legs coated with a special water-repelling plastic. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5962418/ Now, hopefully, This will not agitate Cristians that feel that Science is trying to duplicate God's work, and some sort of good will come out of this...but come on, folks, isn't there a way to incorporate all this research, time, information, and talent to Lower gas prices !!! s'cuse me...I gotta go fill up !!!
posted by David | 9/12/2004 10:06:00 AM
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