Recently in Other Science Stuff Category

Soon they will harvest lettuce. Not long after, they will harvest your organs.

Watch Snippy the Grapevine Pruner prune grape vines. Watch Snippy 2.0 prune those arms, legs, and fingers that you really don’t need anyway.

From Popular Mechanics:

Agricultural robots are already among us: mowing grass, spraying pesticides and monitoring crops. For example, instead of regularly dousing an entire apple orchard with chemicals, towed sensors find diseases or parasites with infrared sensors and cameras, and spray only the affected trees. But could a robot wholly replace a migrant worker? The idea appeals to farmers, because temporary labor can arrive one season but go elsewhere the next, leaving tons of fruits and vegetables to wither. Relying on illegal immigrants can also be a legal liability. Harvesting is the most labor-intensive activity for many crops, but even advocates say that no one has built a machine that comes close to matching the sensory motor control of humans. That is poised to change as sensors and software become cheaper and more advanced. “In the next five years or so, we’ll see robots out in the field,” says Tony Stentz, associate director of Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center. “And they’ll lose their novelty. To the farmers, it’ll just be another tractor, with no one in the cab.”

Another victory for non-embryonic stem-cell research.

From The Telegraph

Scientists have been able to reverse the symptoms of multiple sclerosis using stem cells from patients’ own body fat.

Some have been left free from seizures and better able to walk after the treatment.

Researchers said that the results suggest that the “very simple” injection of their own cells can stimulate the regrowth of tissue damaged by the progression of the disease.

The preliminary findings add to the growing evidence that stem cells could be used to treat the crippling neurological disease, which affects about 85,000 people in Britain.

Last year experts suggested that stem cell therapy could be a “cure” for MS within the next 15 years.

Patients’ symptoms were still improving up to a year after the treatment, the new study shows.