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Leaked documents and sources show Natural England will use its legal powers less and seek funding from the private companies it is meant to keep in check
England's nature watchdog is planning to use its legal powers less and risks becoming a weak regulator forced to raise funding from the private companies it is meant to keep in check, leaked documents and sources reveal.
Natural England is duty-bound to defend rare species and protected areas including national parks and England's 4,000 sites of special scientific interest from potentially environmentally damaging developments.
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China Law Blog (blog) | China, The World, Greed, Cognitive Dissonance, The Best and the Brightest, and Why People Seem to Encourage ... China Law Blog (blog) Now for the Best and the Brightest/ cognitive dissonance part. When I was in college, I read David Halberstram's The Best and the Brightest as part of an international politics course. Wikipedia does an excellent job at distilling the book in the ... |
IEEE Spectrum | SRI Spin-off Abundant Robotics Developing Autonomous Apple Vacuum IEEE Spectrum The first automated apple harvesting system that doesn't bruise or damage the produce will be a huge breakthrough in an industry that has been dependent on the challenges of seasonal labor.” Abundant Robotics' initial prototype is designed with ... |
411mania.com | Four Player Co-op: Is Final Fantasy XV's Season Pass Too Costly? 411mania.com Quizmaster Well, it looks like Telltale is going to keep the ball rolling with a Mr. Robot game in the future. I've played and completed Episode ... Niantic at first, took a while to say anything, which angered players of the beloved app. When ... and more » |
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Long before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, he vowed that the ammunition he had stocked for Hillary Clinton would include constant reminders of her husband's sexual misdeeds. Now, Trump appears to have won the support of the woman with perhaps the most disturbing allegations against Bill Clinton, Juanita Broaddrick, as Buzzfeed's Katie J.M. Baker reports in a nuanced profile.
Broaddrick, who claims that Clinton raped her in 1978 when he was Arkansas' attorney general, told Baker what she has always told reporters: that her animus toward the Clintons is personal, not political. But Baker found that as conservatives have embraced Broaddrick's cause, she seems to have increasingly returned the favor. Broaddrick, who voted for Obama in 2008, “insists she has no plans to join Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's campaign and says she's only voting for him because she doesn't want the man she claims raped her—and the woman she believes enabled him—back in the White House,” Baker writes. But her public profile tells a different story. “She used to tweet mostly about her own story and other sexual assaultrelated issues; these days, her feeds are filled with outlandish Clinton conspiracy theories and angry posts about Benghazi.”
Broaddrick also granted her—slightly ambivalent—approval after the Trump campaign, without her permission, used her voice and story in an anti-Hillary attack ad. Though Broaddrick told Buzzfeed that she was “really hurt” when the Trump team pulled audio of her describing the alleged rape, fighting tears, in a 1999 Dateline interview, she said in a radio interview in May that she thought her role in the ad was “important,” and that she wasn't “unhappy” that the clip was used.
For those who don't remember the details of Broaddrick's allegations against Clinton, here's a brief refresher: Broaddrick, who met Clinton when he made a campaign stop at the nursing home where she worked, claims that she'd arranged to meet the then-attorney general in a coffee shop in Little Rock, but at the last minute he instead invited himself to her hotel room, where he raped her “like it was an everyday occurrence.” Broaddrick says she told a few friends at the time, but might never have come forward if lawyers for Paula Jones, the Arkansas state employee who sued Clinton for sexual harassment, hadn't heard about her through word-of-mouth and subpoenaed her in 1998. At the time, Broaddrick signed an affidavit swearing that Clinton had not raped her—hoping, she says now, “to stay out of it.” When Clinton was impeached the next year, however, and federal prosecutor Ken Starr reached out to Broaddrick, she testified the opposite. Ultimately, she agreed to do the 1999 Dateline interview, hoping to lend her voice to the clamor for impeachment.
Starr deemed Broaddrick's claims “inconclusive,” and the Dateline interview didn't air until after the impeachment proceedings had ended. In the end, Broaddrick's testimony didn't stick to Bill Clinton's presidency—but it lingered in the air after his time in the White House had ended. As Lisa Myers, the Dateline reporter who interviewed Broadrrick for NBC News, told Baker: “No one can objectively look at Juanita's story and not be troubled.”
According to Trump—and to Broaddrick herself—voters should be especially troubled to see Hillary Clinton, wife of an accused rapist, running an openly feminist campaign. One New Hampshire voter asked her in December, “You say that all rape victims should be believed. But would you say that about Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and/or Paula Jones?” Clinton replied stiffly: “Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first, until they are disbelieved based on evidence.” Baker reports that, in the months following this incident, Clinton's campaign seemingly tinkered with its website focused on the issue of campus sexual assault. A block quote on the page once read: “I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don't let anyone silence your voice. You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed, and we're with you.” The final sentence has since disappeared.
There's a long history of wives being called to account for their husband's sins, as Rebecca Traister has written at New York magazine—and Hillary Clinton has more experience than anyone with that particular American instinct. As Michelle Goldberg wrote for Slate in December, “I don't think for a moment that the people who hope to use Broaddrick against Hillary care about victim blaming. And it would be a profound sexist irony if these accusations, having failed to derail Bill Clinton's political career, came back to haunt his wife.” Of course, irony doesn't begin to capture the glaring dissonance between Trump's enthusiastic support of Broaddrick and his own reportedly violent history with women: His ex-wife Ivana has accused him of rape, though she later disavowed the statement. It's telling that Trump has had so little trouble painting Clinton as a hypocrite while presenting himself as Broaddrick's long-awaited advocate. Often, what a powerful man can brush off, a woman must contend with for the rest of her life. Juanita Broaddrick may know that better than anyone.
This article originally appeared in the Conversation.
Think of a traditional robot and you probably imagine something made from metal and plastic. Such “nuts-and-bolts” robots are made of hard materials. As robots take on more roles beyond the lab, such rigid systems can present safety risks to the people they interact with. For example, if an industrial robot swings into a person, there is the risk of bruises or bone damage.
Researchers are increasingly looking for solutions to make robots softer or more compliant—less like rigid machines, more like animals. With traditional actuators—such as motors—this can mean using air muscles or adding springs in parallel with motors. For example, on a Whegs robot, having a spring between a motor and the wheel leg (Wheg) means that if the robot runs into something (like a person), the spring absorbs some of the energy so the person isn't hurt. The bumper on a Roomba vacuuming robot is another example; it's spring-loaded so the Roomba doesn't damage the things it bumps into.
But there's a growing area of research that's taking a different approach. By combining robotics with tissue engineering, we're starting to build robots powered by living muscle tissue or cells. These devices can be stimulated electrically or with light to make the cells contract to bend their skeletons, causing the robot to swim or crawl. The resulting biobots can move around and are soft like animals. They're safer around people and typically less harmful to the environment they work in than a traditional robot might be. And since, like animals, they need nutrients to power their muscles, not batteries, biohybrid robots tend to be lighter too.
Building a biobot
Researchers fabricate biobots by growing living cells, usually from heart or skeletal muscle of rats or chickens, on scaffolds that are nontoxic to the cells. If the substrate is a polymer, the device created is a biohybrid robot—a hybrid between natural and human-made materials.
If you just place cells on a molded skeleton without any guidance, they wind up in random orientations. That means when researchers apply electricity to make them move, the cells' contraction forces will be applied in all directions, making the device inefficient at best.
So to better harness the cells' power, researchers turn to micropatterning. We stamp or print microscale lines on the skeleton made of substances that the cells prefer to attach to. These lines guide the cells so that as they grow, they align along the printed pattern. With the cells all lined up, researchers can direct how their contraction force is applied to the substrate. So rather than just a mess of firing cells, they can all work in unison to move a leg or fin of the device.
Biohybrid robots inspired by animals
Beyond a wide array of biohybrid robots, researchers have even created some completely organic robots using natural materials, like the collagen in skin, rather than polymers for the body of the device. Some can crawl or swim when stimulated by an electric field. Some take inspiration from medical tissue engineering techniques and use long rectangular arms (or cantilevers) to pull themselves forward.
Others have taken their cues from nature, creating biologically inspired biohybrids. For example, a group led by researchers at California Institute of Technology developed a biohybrid robot inspired by jellyfish. This device, which they call a medusoid, has arms arranged in a circle. Each arm is micropatterned with protein lines so that cells grow in patterns similar to the muscles in a living jellyfish. When the cells contract, the arms bend inwards, propelling the biohybrid robot forward in nutrient-rich liquid.
More recently, researchers have demonstrated how to steer their biohybrid creations. A group at Harvard used genetically modified heart cells to make a biologically inspired manta ray-shaped robot swim. The heart cells were altered to contract in response to specific frequencies of light—one side of the ray had cells that would respond to one frequency, the other side's cells responded to another.
When the researchers shone light on the front of the robot, the cells there contracted and sent electrical signals to the cells further along the manta ray's body. The contraction would propagate down the robot's body, moving the device forward. The researchers could make the robot turn to the right or left by varying the frequency of the light they used. If they shone more light of the frequency the cells on one side would respond to, the contractions on that side of the manta ray would be stronger, allowing the researchers to steer the robot's movement.
Toughening up the biobots
While exciting developments have been made in the field of biohybrid robotics, there's still significant work to be done to get the devices out of the lab. Devices currently have limited lifespans and low force outputs, limiting their speed and ability to complete tasks. Robots made from mammalian or avian cells are very picky about their environmental conditions. For example, the ambient temperature must be near biological body temperature and the cells require regular feeding with nutrient-rich liquid. One possible remedy is to package the devices so that the muscle is protected from the external environment and constantly bathed in nutrients.
Another option is to use more robust cells as actuators. Here at Case Western Reserve University, we've recently begun to investigate this possibility by turning to the hardy marine sea slug Aplysia californica. Since A. californica lives in the intertidal region, it can experience big changes in temperature and environmental salinity over the course of a day. When the tide goes out, the sea slugs can get trapped in tide pools. As the sun beats down, water can evaporate and the temperature will rise. Conversely in the event of rain, the saltiness of the surrounding water can decrease. When the tide eventually comes in, the sea slugs are freed from the tidal pools. Sea slugs have evolved very hardy cells to endure this changeable habitat.
We've been able to use Aplysia tissue to actuate a biohybrid robot, suggesting that we can manufacture tougher biobots using these resilient tissues. The devices are large enough to carry a small payload—approximately 1.5 inches long and one inch wide.
A further challenge in developing biobots is that currently the devices lack any sort of on-board control system. Instead, engineers control them via external electrical fields or light. In order to develop completely autonomous biohybrid devices, we'll need controllers that interface directly with the muscle and provide sensory inputs to the biohybrid robot itself. One possibility is to use neurons or clusters of neurons called ganglia as organic controllers.
That's another reason we're excited about using Aplysia in our lab. This sea slug has been a model system for neurobiology research for decades. A great deal is already known about the relationships between its neural system and its muscles—opening the possibility that we could use its neurons as organic controllers that could tell the robot which way to move and help it perform tasks, such as finding toxins or following a light.
While the field is still in its infancy, researchers envision many intriguing applications for biohybrid robots. For example, our tiny devices using slug tissue could be released as swarms into water supplies or the ocean to seek out toxins or leaking pipes. Due to the biocompatibility of the devices, if they break down or are eaten by wildlife these environmental sensors theoretically wouldn't pose the same threat to the environment traditional nuts-and-bolts robots would.
One day, devices could be fabricated from human cells and used for medical applications. Biobots could provide targeted drug delivery, clean up clots or serve as compliant actuatable stents. By using organic substrates rather than polymers, such stents could be used to strengthen weak blood vessels to prevent aneurysms—and over time the device would be remodeled and integrated into the body. Beyond the small-scale biohybrid robots currently being developed, ongoing research in tissue engineering, such as attempts to grow vascular systems, may open the possibility of growing large-scale robots actuated by muscle.
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