While the robotic title character in WALL-E inhabited an Earth of the future, robots are here now, in our labs, factories, and even art galleries. At Aberystwyth University in Wales, a robot named Adam is designing and carrying out genetic tests on yeast, modifying the experiments on its own as it records and processes data. At the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, robots methodically analyze frozen slices of the brain to create a genetic map of the entire organ. And in art galleries across Europe and North America, artist Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca" machines mimic natural human waste disposal. Will robots be designing other robots next?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way. Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new…
Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous:
While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most profound long-term impact will come from its methodological…
What you see here is a sample of artificially produced feces. More specifically, it's material produced from an artistic feat of engineering. The creation of a machine that can step for step mimic the digestive process.
In other words: you put food in one end... and well, you get sh*t coming…
I've got a new feature in Wired Magazine on the Allen Brain Institute and their heroic attempts to construct a gene expression map of the human brain. I was most impressed by the way the Institute has "industrialized" the scientific process, as it transforms the artisan model of lab benchwork -…