I read about this the other day:

http://news.yahoo.com/gumby-flexible-robot-crawls-tight-spaces-200129817.html

excerpt:

Harvard scientists have built a new type of flexible robot that is limber enough to wiggle and worm through tight spaces.

It's the latest prototype in the growing field of soft-bodied robots. Researchers are increasingly drawing inspiration from nature to create machines that are more bendable and versatile than those made of metal.

The Harvard team, led by chemist George M. Whitesides, borrowed from squids, starfish and other animals without hard skeletons to fashion a small, four-legged rubber robot that calls to mind the clay animation character Gumby.

It's like a swan -- nothing seems to be happening on the surface, but those molecules must be busy as heck! Not that I am a chemist.

I think it has to do with it cooling, but I'm no chemist. Here's the full video just in case: http://youtu.be/y_HY_bUr4Os

>> ^JiggaJonson:

Were the black impurities at the end the lead recombining with the silver? Or could that be a by product of whatever they were using to melt it down?

Ha Ha - Right - Can't believe I said that - Hydrogen and Oxygen (H20) is what I mean to say - amazing no one else picked up on that

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^Sagemind:
I'm not from, nor do I live in the United States but this is about a scary as a Chemist saying "You mean water actually has Water AND Oxygen in it. Where is it because I only see liquid."
If you don't know even the most basic principals of something, you shouldn't be in that business.

Hmmm.. TECHNICALLY, water does not contain ANY water...

Indeed. They are not to scale.
>> ^MaxWilder:

>> ^Sagemind:
Oh Hell, Really?
How can they launch a rocket or another space mission with that much debris lingering out there blocking the way?

Imagine you had only 13,000 people on the planet Earth, evenly spaced all over. And you know the exact position of each person. Do you think it would still be safe to drive with all those people in the way?
Like the Guide says... "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."

>> ^Sagemind:

Oh Hell, Really?
How can they launch a rocket or another space mission with that much debris lingering out there blocking the way?


Imagine you had only 13,000 people on the planet Earth, evenly spaced all over. And you know the exact position of each person. Do you think it would still be safe to drive with all those people in the way?

Like the Guide says... "Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen..."

I read this the other day, not exactly on point -- science likes reproduciable experiments, and we have many discoveries yet to make:

All of this brings to mind a surprising turn I encountered near the end of Nick Lane's wonderful book Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution. The turn is not a hard turn made by a man with a background in the hard sciences (Lane is a biochemist), but a soft turn to the dreamy speculations of panpsychism. The turn was made to hint at the place one might possibly find an explanation for the nature of emotions and states of mind:

"Feelings are physical, yet the known laws of physics, which can supposedly give us a complete account of the world, have no place for them. For all its marvellous power, natural selection doesn't conjure up something from nothing: there has to be a germ of something for it to act upon, a germ of a feeling, you might say, that evolution can fashion into the majesty of mind. This is what Scottish physical chemist Graham Cairns-Smith calls `the bomb in the basement' of modern physics. Presumably, he says, if feelings don't correspond to any of the known properties of matter, then matter itself must have some additional features, `subjective features', that when organised by selection ultimately give rise to our inner feelings. Matter is conscious in some way, with `inner' properties, as well as the familiar external properties that physicists measure. Pan-psychism is taken seriously again."

When it was last taken seriously, at the end of the 19th century, the psychologist/philosopher William James called conscious matter some kind of "mind-dust."

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/06/19/bees-can-be-pessimistic-about-life

George M. Whitesides (b. August 3, 1939, Louisville, Kentucky) is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology.

Whitesides is also known for his "outline system" for writing scientific papers. As of November 2010, he has the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Whitesides

The h-index is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. The index can also be applied to the productivity and impact of a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UCSD, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality[1] and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_index

enough with the dramatic voices

But seriously, two chemists walk into a bar, the first says I'll have H2O, the second says I'll have H2O too. The second chemist dies shortly thereafter .

What fun I think some chemists are a little bit too keen on blowing stuff up.

that the nazis used fluoride is commonly heard, but completely undocumented. Anyhow i'm not a chemist so won't comment further

@Matthu

I am not a chemist. However, I think I have an approximation for you on fluoride. Prozac is composed of Fluoxetine. It's chemical formula is C17H18F3NO. The approximate mass of the fluoride is about 8% of the compound. If you take the recommended daily dose, it puts you at about 1.6mgs of fluoride a day. The Daily Max for ANY weight of human is 10mgs. The average daily consumption from water is around 1mgs as well. This is about 2mgs a day from just these 2 sources. This is a hazardous level for infants and small children. In addition to tap water and medicine, food is usually processed with tap water and therefore has trace levels of fluoride. In addition, so do some sodas, juices, teas, wines, ect. Also, some salts, and interestingly enough, cigarettes ( anaesthetic methoxyflurane, isoflurane). So once again, it isn't a once source problem. Water, specifically tap water, is used in nearly every facet of food production. It's the snowball problem. This wouldn't be a problem if we just opted for personalized tap fluoride dispensers, or some other local, "toggalable" option. And really, why ingest something that is supposed to be topical? Should I start eating deodorant next?

>> ^gargoyle:

Fluoridation is also suspected of being a contributing cause to hypothyroidism. Can't find anything rigorous on this yet. Still looking.


It is hard with all the conflicting and conflated data and opinions out there to accurately gauge it. I am not a chemist either, but I know it makes my soil toxic to plants over time. I believe the chemical classification for Sodium Fluoride is a Toxic, Irritant, but for some reason the CDC lists it an an inert...which is completely false. People who do organic farming are really critical with the CDC on this point because Sodium Fluoride is anything but inert and violates the organic farmers main goal; of removing all toxic elements from food production. With fluoride in toothpaste, I really don't see a purpose for water fluoridation anymore. Like someone mentioned earlier, why ingest something that is supposed to be a topical application. Now that toothpastes all come with it, that topical nature is realized and drinking water fluoridation should fall away. Sodium Fluoride has electrolytes, what plants crave!

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Ha! Brilliant idiot: "Homoeopathic remedies take longer than the 'quick fix' medicines but there's nothing bad in there for them"... you are actually spot on Ms.

They take longer because they do nothing, it's just your own defenses doing their job (which in a lot of cases IS actually a good thing to let happen, this over reliance on Antibiotics is a bad thing) . And there IS nothing bad in there because it's just sugar or lactose... well done...


Hey, wait! They're not shaking it the right way... oh man, they're going to create terrible homoeopathic medicine... don't they know anything? It has to be "vigorously shaken by ten hard strikes against an elastic body"... amateurs!


And it's a standard bullshit speak to stare bald faced at facts that say your product contains nothing of benefit at all and just wave it away with "well, science can't measure what's _really_ in these 'medicines'"

I didn't know that people were taking this crap over vaccines... that's horrible.

F*ck I hate homoeopathy, hate that SO MANY people are suckered in by it because the mainstream media (at least here in Australia) don't seem to say anything against it, and such large 'professional' companies sell it in chemists that it just gets lumped in with natural remedies. I'm all for natural remedies when they've been shown to actually do good, and am also all for letting the body fight off illnesses when it can compared to attacking it with drugs. But MAN, you just KNOW that 90% of the people who make this shit know that it's shit.


ARRRGH! Seething at the STUPID mother who says 'if people did a little more research'... FUCK! She has obviously done NONE... it really isn't hard AT ALL to find out what a steaming pile of crap homoeopathy is, and it's not like it's complicated to understand. THERE IS NOTHING IN THE 'MEDICINE' AT ALL