Intriguingly, brain organoids preserved in MEDY showed similar growth and function patterns to those that had never been frozen. Incredibly, one batch was frozen in MEDY for as long as 18 months, and still showed similar protections against damage after thawing.
The team also froze samples of living brain tissue taken from a human epilepsy patient, and found that MEDY protected them from damage. The process didn’t disrupt the structure of the brain cells, and even preserved the pathologies of epilepsy – that’s important, because it means samples can be frozen for later study or analysis without damage from the freezing process confusing the results.
Very cool especially for research - hopefully this can allow for better research into how the brain functions as they're able to amass rare brain issues and study them together with this new found ability to preserve brain matter
I could imagine an autonomous, on-demand rural train service. Due to the low expected traffic, it seems like you could just build some additional sidings and use a more conventional design.
If someone was willing to invest into building and maintaining infrastructure there would be no need for this concept, but that's a political issue. The idea of this concept is do make the best of what you have.
I've always liked the concept of the gyro monorail, as it avoids the requirement to use elevated track that standard monorails have.
That said, I'm skeptical whenever rail is used for really short railcar configurations (ie a single car). Trains are not just wagons on low-friction tracks, but act as a streamlined unit, only incurring the burden of air resistance once.
This pod design is more-or-less just using the tracks as a traction surface and a guideway. But robotics students everywhere will know that we can build land vehicles which follow markers on the ground, avoiding LIDAR, RADAR, or any other such complexities that self-driving automobiles seem to keep butting up against.
They may have a point, if the goal is to reuse abandoned rail lines as-is, but the focus on reuse seems to miss the alternative solution: 4-wheel pods that steer along a rail-to-trail path. Compared to this self-balancing rail pod, I have to imagine developing or adapting an existing, narrow 4 wheel vehicle is going to be easier and cheaper to maintain. Any concerns about the vehicle steering itself off the path would be similar to concerns about a gyro pod failing to negotiate a curve: both scenarios would go off path. But at least 4 wheel pods would remain upright, while a balancing pod would topple or roll-over.
There's also the whole issue of head-of-line blocking, since without a passing track, every pod behind must wait for passengers to board the pod ahead. Unless they build out the rural "stations" with sidings. But again, at that point, just convert to a trail. No stations or sidings needed.
Two-way pod traffic could still leave enough room for a separated, single-lane of recreational pedestrian or bicycle traffic, which might make sense in rural areas. I'm weary of suggesting that pods and bicycles should share the same lanes though, because then we're back to whole anti-collision issue vis-a-vis self-driving automobile. Two lanes for pods and one lane for bikes/pedestrians is still an improvement over zero lanes and abandoned trackage.
I like where the conversation is going, reclaiming old rights-of-way to better accommodate public needs. But I have to imagine German rail corridors are sufficiently wide for more than a narrow, self-balancing "pod way" and should incorporate other linear transportation ideas while pursuing novel ideas.
Most importantly, the hard part of these projects is the right of way. I agree that it should be used to its greatest advantage. I suspect you could rip these rails up, lay down kiddie train rails and a bike path for the same price.
The biggest reason for standard monorails is grade separation.
The burden of air resistance is negligible at these speeds. The rolling resistance, lifespan, and pollution of rubber tires is a disadvantage, but at these speeds it is probably the best use of rubber tires.
You only need two lanes for pods at passing tracks. The need for continuous two way traffic probably means the capacity has outgrown this solution.
You also have good points. As it happens, near my metro area is a park which does indeed have a children's railroad that both crosses and then parallels a major bike trail. And it's absolutely adorable.
The point re: rubber rolling resistance and pollution is well taken. But I don't think the air resistance is negligible here. I realized now that the linked article doesn't describe the speed of this monorail, so I had assumed it was something like a sauntering 30 kph (18 mph), which if available 24/7/365 from rural areas into the urban core and had consistent on-time performance, that'd be excellent.
But this other article lists the speed for these pods as 60 kph (37 mph). That's kinda terrifying for a pod, where just the gyro components weigh 650 kg (1433 lbs), and definitely implicates air resistance. At that speed, the gyro had better be robust enough to counter sudden winds that would threaten to tilt one pod into the path of an oncoming pod.
Now that I think of it some more, on a horizontal curve, roads will widen the lanes so that vehicles won't side-swipe each other. And tracks are set farther apart than on straightaways, for the same reason. But the pair of rails? They're always 1435 mm (4 ft 8.5 in) apart, so will the pods be designed for a maximum curve speed and angle, or will passing be disallowed on curves?
Finally, I will concede that requiring two way pod lanes would definitely be a success story. But seeing as they're planning to use abandoned trackage, even a single-track railroad will already provide two "lanes" for their pods for free. If they had right-of-way that doesn't have existing track, it's not clear if their plan is to install a single rail.
I would say 30kph would be plenty especially for nonstop on-demand service. 60kph sounds unrealistic.
The reason I think you could lay new track is that kiddie train track is really cheap and used railroad rail is pretty valuable.
The value of a scrap railroad track varies by material and its condition. Depending on its dimensions and shape, a ton can range from $300 to $750. For example, an R50 track will fetch a price of between $200 and $750, while an R65 way will cost more than twice that.
It would be simple to make self driving golf carts that followed a magnetic or inductive guideway or even used a virtually guideway with gps. There are a few of these available off the shelf right now. One I remember is dutch and there was another produced in Great Britain.
The reason I think you could lay new track is that kiddie train track is really cheap and used railroad rail is pretty valuable.
Railroad track is certainly valuable, although its removal and rehabilitating the rail bed can add up. Here in the USA, a number of disused railroads are simply left in place, usually only removing the points which connect to the mainline. I'm informed that part of the reason is due to regulations that make it hard to re-establish a rail segment if the rails are fully dismantled. I also have to imagine that if the rails are too valuable, unscrupulous scrap dealers would have made off with them already.
I certainly agree that any track used in service of a self-balancing pod has better of good or excellent quality, since we absolutely do not want pods coming off due to a rail issue.
I do like that all these ideas are essentially recreating the lazy river experience, but with no inflatable donuts lol
P.S. I added the right link to my last post; I forgot to paste it earlier
Rail is hard to steal because it is hard and heavy. Look at the price of small sections used for anvils. It was a shock for me.
I participated in a exploration of PRT that was done by someone at University of Washington a few decades ago. One of the things discussed was the comparison of travel times between slow PRT and fast light rail. It doesn't take many 60-90 second stops to really slow your average speed.
It's kinda like that brain teaser:
If a race car does the first lap at 60 miles an hour how fast does he have to go on the second lap to average 120.
Something that stuck with me from at least a decade back was multimodal transit, aka cars that can become trains and vice versa. Imagine driving your low speed cargo pod car thing to the local train station and hitching together with a bunch of others before making the hour trip to a neighboring city on rails at high speed only to split up automatically at the other end and continue to your separate destinations. Its a combination of the efficiencies of transit and the freedoms of an individualized last mile solution. It reduces the need for freeways without hurting mobility at the origin/ destination.
It's a plausible idea, although admittedly it only solves one of the automobile-specific drawbacks and leaves the other issues unaddressed. Road trains show that coupling separate vehicles together yields efficiencies for the few, large prime movers, when compared to several small engines. Moving vehicles by rail is the most straightforward way to reduce friction to enable higher speeds.
But designing a road/rail pod that operates in two speed regimes would be difficult if neigh impossible. Consider crash-worthiness: a road-going pod doing 30 kph (18 mph) does not require substantial crumple zones (or at all) but the same pod on rails doing 120 kph (75 mph) will have to be at least tested to similar standards as passenger railcars. It's a strange beast to optimize for two very different conditions, like how airplanes are designed to be either sub-sonic or super-sonic, exclusively. Instead, something like the Amtrak Auto-Train which carries the pods at higher speeds would have all the benefits and nearly none of the downsides.
But going back to the benefits of this idea: platoons solve the issue of poor lane utilization due to spacing between vehicles fore and aft. Coupling is platooning with zero space in between, which also nearly solves the car-to-car communication issue, since they're now all physically connected. The same applies identically to rail, so the efficiency gains from lots of small pods to large platoons would be realized.
The problem that remain, though, are that these pods still need to traverse their destination: there must be pod roads, pod parking spaces and pod parking structures. Then pods will compete with active transportation and their lobby will seek to monopolize public spaces to the detriment of everyone that's not in a pod. Finally, zoning laws will enshrine the pod into ordinances requiring an obscene and arbitrary number of pod parking spaces by business type, inducing demand for pods when walking, bikes, buses, and trains would have also fit the bill.
All that has changed is that the pods can more efficiently flood the urban core and take up space. The 1960s American freeway building spree did exactly this with automobiles, and most cities have yet to recover.
It reduces the need for freeways without hurting mobility at the origin/ destination.
You are 100% correct, with the caveat that mobility is not hurt compared to automobiles. If the standard for public transport is to achieve automobile levels of mobility, we have already lost the game.
I'm surprised more people aren't aware of how rapidly robotics are currently developing. The same LLM AI that is capturing public attention with generative art and ChatGPT is equally revolutionizing robots.
Here's an illustration of it. This is the closest I've seen yet of a mass-market-priced and extremely capable robot that could sell in tens of millions around the world. This looks close to the type of robot you could bring to many workplaces and get to do a wide range of unskilled work. How long before we see fast food places fully staffed by robots like these? At the current rate of development that seems only 2 or 3 years away.
The strange thing about fast food places is that there's no "train of food" where you just have to order in a screen and a robotic line makes your food. I'd say it's one of the first places that could do that.
We've seen a few robot restaurants open in the past few years. I wonder how they're getting on. I remember at least one was a failure because it needed humans to supervise everything.
Food is just unpredictable. What shape is lettuce?
Word on the street is that robots that can chop and sautee carefully provided ingredients themselves are probably coming, but that's more evolution than revolution. The big space to watch is AIs taking your order in a more human way.
What's the use case, though? There really isn't much benefit to humanoid form robots outside of looking good to human aesthetics. Much of what robotics and automation would be good for don't actually require humanoid forms.
Navigating human environments. Imagine a team of these robots toting moving boxes down the stairs of a third floor apartment and loading them into a truck.
Yes? A triped robot would have just as much ease navigating human environments, while having much more stability. Same logic applies to arms and joints - there's no real reason to limit it to what humans have, it would likely perform much better in other configurations.
A total inability to fall over or navigate any terrain regardless of roughness isn't a benefit? Increased manipulators would also increase productivity / capability, probably much more than making up for increased cost.
Your argument is essentially that the human form is the best possible one imaginable, which I find highly doubtful.
My argument is that humans have built our cities to be navigated best by the human form, so that in that environment it is the best form. In most terrains a quadruped form is better.
Current prices are meaningless. It's not mass production or retail pricing. I doubt the components actually cost more than a few hundred dollars. It's an extremely limited niche market and prices are based on what will get them the most return on their R&D budget, not anything resembling production cost.
None of these robots can take my job. Until you get one that can do customer service, and then operate in a warehouse running a forklift then I get worried.
there is labor that can* be done with extremely little skill. Think vacuuming a large flat room with nothing valuable on it, that task could be done (more or less) with a robotic vacuum. Entire jobs might not be fully replaced but labor demands can be greatly reduced.
*not necessarily done well, but done to minimum standards
Because it takes a special kind of person to stand in one place for 8-12 hours repeating the same repetitive motion every day for years. I don't have the patience for that shit
Interesting response. I got my CompTIA A+ cert so I could have more options, and applied at over 150 jobs before I got an interview. I'm very aware of how fortunate I am, but it wasn't like I just walked away from factory work easily. I worked in five different factories before I got into tech, and I'm making less than I was before. But my skills are better in other fields for sure
Not sure where you draw the line here, 20 minutes of training, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year? What interval of training inherently makes someone’s labor magically “skilled” and therefore more valuable and worthy of better treatment?
We could just decide that all labor is valuable and treat people with dignity. The “skilled” and “unskilled” workers have significantly more in common than “skilled” workers do with their bosses.
LMAO, that's a MADE UP job. It literally doesn't exist. The amount of mandatory safety training from working in any factory environment excessedes that. That's before you can start learning how to use the production software and automation that the company uses to measure productivity. Finally you have to do the actual task and learn the processes and exceptions that have made it so that the job isn't cost effective to automate in the first place.
Now that's a big company environment. Big companies are the only ones with the economies of scale required so that your can even have employees that only do one thing. At a small company everyone has to wear many hats and there is no such thing as an person that does only one job "you could learn in 10min"
It's easy to imagine "unskilled labour" when you make it up in your head. What sucks is when you then use it to dehumanize and underpay real humans because of your made up fantasy of unskilled labour.
Obviously someone that hasn't spent much time in a factory and don't know what they are talking about.
Sure you got to go through all the safety requirements but that's not a skill.
I've seen job were people load material into a machine and people box finished good, or people destroying WIP, or people moving material, or picking up WIP.
You are just confidently incorrect. A skilled job is something where you are trained and/or have experience in and it takes a long time to teach and learn. Unskilled is were you can grab people from the street and get them working within a day.
Surely you can see why based on supply and demand and cost of training both for the person and the business that unskilled pays less. Why should they be paid the sane as skilled work? It doesn't make sense.
Yes, when you dismiss everything these jobs require as "not skills" then anything can be unskilled labour. Yeah of course working safely in an industrial environment isn't a skill, even babies can do it, that's why conservatives everywhere are trying to bring back child labour!
Well if you change the definitions of things then anything can mean anything.
I don't know what you expect. The fundamental reason unskilled labour is paid less is because basically anyone can do it. You can call it whatever you want but it won't pay the same amount as skilled labour, or whatever you want to call that.
If they could learn that quickly and perform the job that fast, that's a skill. Could everyone get up to speed and start producing things that quickly? I've worked plenty of factory jobs. Most of them aren't simply pressing a button mindlessly, and your speed is a factor. Work faster, produce more, you're employing a skill others may not possess.
Not everyone no, some people have severe mental and physical disabilities.
Everyone that showed up could do the job in that amount of time from what I understand. Some people left because they didn't like it and some people had issues with authority or we lazy and wasn't asked back. But there was a revolving door or temps coming through and no one seemed to struggle.
You know what it means, god dammit. There's jobs anyone can fake with a week of training and there's jobs that need six years of school to not kill people.
Is there any actual evidence of any of this? Why not show some of the "brains-in-a-jar" walking around?
It's just a bunch of huckster promotion, "infographics", and phony pictures of Krang. The only actual photos are a few tiny petri dishes. There are no "brains" controlling robots.
The grift is strong and travels far beyond any national border.
Some of this technology may sound a bit "over-ambitious," but keep in mind the project was inspired by a fully functional self-balancing monorail that mechanical engineer Louis Brennan designed and demonstrated back in the early 1900s.
And who can forget the classic, "Where is the waste from fossil fuels? Take a deep breath, it's in your lungs. Where is the waste from nuclear power? Where we store it."
Yes there have been disasters but the waste from those are tracked, in a specific location, and can be cleaned up. The default state of fossil fuels hits every living breathing thing on Earth.
And even factoring in the impact from disasters nuclear is still the safest. And we have even safer designs for reactors nowadays then the reactors that had those disasters.
Nuclear suffers from the airplane fallacy where when something goes wrong it tends to go really wrong and a lot of people die at once and it makes the news. But fact is, many orders of magnitude more people have died from fossil fuel plants, mining, byproducts, and combustion. They just die slower, in smaller groups, so it doesn't get reported on as easily.
I mean, I agree with your broader point that it gets a disproportionate amount of coverage and scares people, but I dunno about nuclear accidents killing people quickly and at once.
I mean, Chernobyl was the worst nuclear incident, ya? Like, there were definitely some people who were killed right there, but it was a pretty small group, even so.
There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer.[2][3][4] However, there is considerable debate concerning the accurate number of projected deaths that have yet to occur due to the disaster's long-term health effects; long-term death estimates range from up to 4,000 (per the 2005 and 2006 conclusions of a joint consortium of the United Nations) for the most exposed people of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, to 16,000 cases in total for all those exposed on the entire continent of Europe, with figures as high as 60,000 when including the relatively minor effects around the globe.
So, immediate deaths were about 30. I mean, that airline crash we had out in those Spanish islands, whatsit called....
The Tenerife airport disaster occurred on 27 March 1977, when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport[1] (now Tenerife North Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife.[2][3] The collision occurred when KLM Flight 4805 initiated its takeoff run during dense fog while Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. The impact and resulting fire killed all on board KLM Flight 4805 and most of the occupants of Pan Am Flight 1736, with only 61 survivors in the front section of the aircraft. With a total of 583 fatalities, the disaster is the deadliest accident in aviation history.[2][3]
I mean, that killed about 20 times the immediate number of deaths in Chernobyl. I guarantee you that that collision didn't get twenty times the media coverage or concern of Chernobyl.
Even if we use the highest estimated total death figure listed above for Chernobyl for the "increased death rate from minor effects around the world" -- 60,000 -- and I suspect that that's being awfully pessimistic -- it kind of gets dwarfed by how many similar deaths around the world we casually ignore from coal power and the like due to particulate emissions.
googles
If one's worried about death rates, nuclear's at about the bottom of the list.
And now we're in an age of nuclear fusion. My kid or grandkids may live in a world powered by even cleaner reactors. Which is great because they will probably have to live entirely indoors.
@IchNichtenLichten
It might have a higher initial upfront cost, but the return on investment over a plant's whole lifetime makes it one of the cheapest. And even then, they don't take long to break even.
Perhaps a bad example because most people undermine them, but China has still decided to move forward with 4 different nuclear facilities this year despite having an ABUNDANCE of solar manufacturing. If they found that decision worthwhile I would think the opposite, assuming most of the reasoning is current battery tech can't sustain dark periods at a massive scale, but I'm not an expert.
Also just saw you mentioned nuclear costs in another comment, I suggest you look at South Korea and China's cost per facility compared to the US, they're able to build and maintain facilities at about half the US does.
Literally every source I've come across has nuclear being massively more expensive than renewables + storage, at least in the West.
The market decides what to invest in in a capitalist economy and they will tend to go for the thing that makes them the most money in the shortest time possible and that's why new nuclear isn't happening much.
If you're advocating for public ownership of utilities so there's central planning and long term thinking instead of profit chasing, that's an interesting debate to have.
Anything that makes cycling more comfortable for me people is always a win in my books.
I've always felt that if a saddle needs the rider to wear padded short, it's not the right saddle.
I recently switched to a Selle SMP saddle, and suddenly my hand pains went away, and I'm more comfortable without padded shorts.
But the issue for me, isn't so much pain from sitting, but chaffing/rubbing by ordinary underwear and bottoms. Cycling shorts are just designed to exclude seams where you don't want them.
I wonder if this saddle addresses clothing rub.
Side note, it bothers me immensely that many of the riders in the demo video are rocking side to side. Their bike isn't nearly set up right if they are forced to do that. Like the saddle is too high.
I use it when wearing padded shorts, but I really shouldn't need to wear padded shorts. I may need to get different underwear, so the fabric doesn't bunch up or crease, but that's about it.
When I was riding with a Brooks C15, I pretty much had to wear padded shorts or it felt like I was sitting on a wooden plank. I endured it for thousands of KM until I realized that there are so many better options out there.
My big problem with all of that though is that now I have to do prep work before I can ride the bike. I just want to be able to get on the bike and go, I don't want to have to do stuff.
This is for just riding around on simple terrain and on the quieter roads. Obviously if you're going to go off-road then you need to make some preparations, but that's reasonable. I shouldn't have to put on special gear just to go to the shops.
Thank you for the response! I just started learning how to ride (short distances) and a coworker gave me that piece of advice and I didn't know if they were messing with me or not.
newatlas.com
Top