Forbes | Should Humans Leave Space Exploration To Robots? Forbes Should humans avoid space and leave it to our robots? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Yousif Al-Dujaili, Head of Growth @ Boom ... |
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NASA announced its X-Hab challenges to attract university teams that can design solutions for the many issues that arise when planning future human space missions.
The contest is part of NASAs Advanced Exploration Systems division, with the intention of developing foundational technologies and high-priority capabilities that form the building blocks for future human space missions.
The winners of X-Hab will receive $20,000 to $30,000 in prize money as they produce studies or products that will expand our space exploration capabilities.
For more information on X-Habs bases, participants can visit the main website here.
The 2018 X-Hab Challenge takes into consideration 11 different topics that are of utmost importance for humans to expand their reach in space exploration.
First and foremost, NASA is looking towards developing a human habitat featuring shared functions on both surface and in-space applications. Having a Martian habitat that can work alongside a planetary probe residing in orbit will make get every process and task much easier their completion more efficient. The proposed habitat is expected to serve as a training facility on Earth to allow the crew to become familiar with it, increasing the chance of survivability during the real mission.
The habitat should be large enough for 4 to 6 astronauts and able to sustain from 0 up to 1/3g of artificial gravity
NASA is also looking for a way to recover carbon dioxide and water for use during space travel and the Martian environment as one of the greatest challenges for deep space exploration is storing oxygen and water for extended periods of time.
Without water, a person would die in approximately three days. The reason why this is a problem in Mars is that there are no plants in Mars, and we take for granted how flora helps produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide in Earths atmosphere. There are methods used in space exploration to obtain water and oxygen from carbon dioxide, but it requires combining or breaking down by-products of other processes. The process of recycling water and air is known among astronauts as closing the loop, but the extraction of carbon dioxide, which is lethal in high concentrations, is also a must for sealed environments.
For example, aboard the International Space Station astronauts are now using electrolysis to reclaim hydrogen and oxygen by electrifying water, but the problem is that hydrogen is highly flammable, which it is vented to the exterior. This process is expected to be improved by combining the hydrogen with the carbon dioxide exhaled by the crew to obtain water, a process known as Sabatier. Sabatier also produces methane, which would be expelled into space; but NASA would also like to use methane for propulsion fuel in the future. The water obtained from the process is filtered into drinking water or used to get more oxygen.
The current method aboard the ISS has been labeled as sensitive to contaminantsand mechanical failures NASA intends for students to design a project that can characterize a water removal and re-humidification system to be based on cryocapture to recover CO2.
X-hab applicants must be U.S. citizens and must teach an Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)-accredited engineering senior or graduate design-related curriculum course at a university associated with the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program or other organizations that encourage multi-institutional collaboration. NASA also encourages women and minorities to participate, alongside people with disabilities.
Participants cannot be citizens of controlled countries, which are labeled as so for national security purposes. The list includes Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Cambodia, Cuba, the Peoples Republic of China, Georgia, Iraq, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macau, Moldova, Mongolia, North Korea, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
The solicitation for entering the challenge is available here.
Teams can submit questions for technical interchange before April 3 to have them answered one week later. The teams proposal must be submitted no later than April 28, and the awards will be announced a month after that.
Living on Mars will be harder than any previous achievement by humans in space. Humans will have to deal with solar radiation, subzero temperatures, and scarce resources in a remote location. There are uncountable problems to solve before putting a human on Mars; just recently, NASA enacted the Space Poop Challenge, showing that even astronauts must go to the bathroom thousands of miles away from a good old-fashioned toilet. In general, designers were invited to develop mechanisms to deal with feces, urine, and menstruation in space suits. Astronauts have made extensive use of diapers, but the prolonged use of these garments can become hazardous to the crews health. Besides, its not nice to sit in your own waste for hours while performing delicate and possibly dangerous maneuvers in space.
Perhaps having several university-level teams brainstorming for solutions will bring forward some new ideas to make the task of colonizing another planet a reality.
Source: NASA
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NASA seeks university-level solutions for deep space human exploration challenges - Pulse Headlines
NASA officials confirmed Friday that they are exploring the feasibility of putting astronauts on the first flight of the Orion spacecraft, the agencys successor to the space shuttle program.If NASA does make the move, it wont come without risk, as Orion and its rocket system will need serious upgrades to make them capable of safely carrying astronauts and the agency may only have a year or two to make all the necessary changes.
This request appears to have come from the Trump administration, though NASA officialsin a Friday press call left unclear the White Houses motivationsandwhether itis seriously prepared to provide the funding necessary tomake Orions first flight a crewed mission.
NASA Watch, alongstanding agency watchdog news site, reported the details of what it described as a hastily-arranged 30 minute media briefing to discuss this potential change of plans. Agency officials Bill Gerstenmaier and Bill Hill stressed this was purely an exploratory study, and they had no opinion yet on whether this was a goodor plausible idea the basic tenor of the call appears to have been that NASA is just asking questions, and concrete answers about the missions future wont be possible until the study is completed later in the spring.
That the call was barely announced andheld on a Friday afternoon suggests NASA may not have wanted the announcement to get much attention, particularly when just two days before the agency captured the public imagination with a major exoplanet discovery.
The Orion spacecraftand its accompanying rocket, the Space Launch System, are designed to let NASA pursue human space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo program. The current plan calls for the first uncrewed mission in September 2018, with a three-week circuit around the moon. The next flight would carry astronauts for a similar lunar flyby sometime between 2021 and 2023, potentially marking the first such journey sinceApollo 17 in 1972. While an uncrewed dress rehearsal isnt always necessary the first orbitalspace shuttle flight, for instance, carried two astronauts such a major pivot in plans so soon before the planned launch date would leave NASA with precious little time to ensure the crews safety.
The potential plan under discussion would send two astronauts on an eight- or nine-day mission. The addition oflife support, emergency abort systems, and other significant upgrades to the SLS rocketneeded to make the mission capable of carrying humans would likely be both extensive and costly. The officials said the White House had at least indicated a willingness to push back the launch date if the results of the feasibility study were positive.
While this news initially appears to track with the Trump administrations previously reported preference to scrap NASAs scientific research in favor of a greater emphasis on space exploration and human space exploration in particular an earlier analysisby NASA Watch founder and former agency scientist Keith Cowing calls that into question. In his view,the priority of Trumps top space advisers like former congressmen Newt Gingrich and Robert Walker is actually on commercial space exploration.
Orion and SLS are a top priority not for them, but for a group centeredat the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, where the spacecraft are being built, who favor the more traditional, government-backed approach that Orion represents. As Cowing suggests, bumping up the timeline for the first crewed mission could be an effort by the Marshall contingent to make Orion more appealing to the new administration, increasing the odds of its survival.
NASAs acting administrator Robert Lightfoot, who announced the feasibility study, is himself a former director of Marshall. Trump has yet to nominate a permanent NASA administrator. Until then, the future of space exploration under Trump remains uncertain. At least with Orion, more clarity should come with the release of the study later this spring.
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Why Does NASA Suddenly Want Humans On New Spacecraft's First Flight? - Vocativ
Public health officials are calling the opioid crisis the worst drug epidemic in American history.
Overdoses claimed more than 33,000 lives in 2015, and these numbers are steadily on the rise. Its estimated that over 2 million people in the U.S. are addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, with many more using the drugs illegally.
Potential solutions to the rapidly escalating opioid crisis have been few and far between. But a long-demonized class of illegal drugs may provide one unlikely approach to tackling widespread opiate abuse and addiction.
A new study, published last week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, found that experience with psychedelics was linked with decreased opioid abuse and addiction an effect that appears to be unique to hallucinogens and marijuana. Conversely, use of other illegal drugs such as cocaine was associated with an increased risk of opioid abuse and dependence.
The findings underscore the positive psychological effects increasingly known to be associated with psychedelic experiences. Previous findings have linked psychedelic use with reduced psychological distress and a decreased risk of suicide, while a 2011 Johns Hopkins study showed a single trip on psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms) resulted in lasting positive personality changes such as increases in openness to experience, a trait associated with creativity and open-mindedness.
Studies have shown drugs like LSD and psilocybin as well as ayahuasca and ibogaine, plant medicines with a long history of use in indigenous cultures to be effective as therapeutic agents for addiction recovery. This new study is the first, however, to show a link between psychedelic use and decreased abuse of other illegal drugs in the general population.
For the study, the researchers analyzed data on 44,000 illicit opioid users who completed the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2008 and 2013, controlling for socio-economic factors like education and income level.
Among people with a history of illegal opiate use, those with some psychedelic experience were 40 percent less likely to report abusing opiates the past year, and 27 percent less likely to report opioid dependency in the past year. Marijuana use was associated with a 55 percent reduced risk of opiate abuse.
No other illegal drugs were associated with a lowered risk of opioid abuse and addiction, and some even carried an increased risk.
While the findings dont prove a causal effect, the strong correlation between psychedelic experience and reduced opioid use and abuse seems to warrant further investigation.
Of course, its important to note that psychedelics also carry a risk for abuse. But researchers have found that when used under careful conditions, in the proper set and setting,the risk for adverse effects is relatively low. (Set refers to the users mindset and expectations at the time of ingesting the drug, while setting suggests a good physical environment.) And contrary to popular myths, use of LSD and similar drugs is not associated with an increased risk of developing mental illness.
These findings are only the latest to suggest that public opinion and policy around psychedelics lags woefully behind the science. Demonized in the wake of Timothy Leary-era excesses and made into public enemies by the former Richard Nixon administration, drugs like LSD and psilocybin were made out to be dangerous and addictive.
With the passing of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, theDrug Enforcement Agencyhas listed LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs as Schedule I substances, meaning that they were deemed to have no medical value and high risk for abuse. They are the most dangerous class of drugs with a high potential for abuse and potentially severe psychological and/or physical dependence, as the United Patients Groups explains. Drugs of this class are generally illegal.
Aside from heroin, most other opiates are listed in the less restrictive Schedule II and Schedule III, alongside other drugs considered less dangerous and more medically valuable than those in Schedule I.
Now, 50 years later, the war on drugs is widely regarded as a public policy failure. The lingering stigma against psychedelic drugs is slowly fading as rigorous scientific studies continue to demonstrate the compounds to have real medical value. An exciting and rapidly growing field of research is revealing psychedelic compounds to carry striking potential as a therapeutic agent for treating ailments ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to cancer-related anxiety and depression to cigarette addiction.
Marijuana, which is also listed as a Schedule I drug, has also proved to be an extremely promising tool for tackling the opioid epidemic. Many patients have turned to cannabis to relieve pain and to curb their reliance on prescription painkillers and, in states where marijuana is legal, there are fewer deaths from opioid overdose. Last year, Maine became the first state to petition to include opioid addiction in the list of ailments that can be treated by medical marijuana, although the health department denied the request.
With the specter of Obamacare repeal now threatening to cut treatment access for hundreds of thousands of people with opioid use disorders, more health experts could start to embrace these promising yet unconventional treatment options in the coming years.
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Psychedelics Could Play A Role In Tackling The Opioid Epidemic - Huffington Post
The Scrying Orb is an interesting title for an even more interesting album. While many albums fall under the genres of R&B, hip-hop and country, The Scrying Orb is considered to be Psychedelic Trance, a roughly new genre that some (especially those who listen to more mainstream music) might not know.
Ross McGuire, the albums producer, gave a brief background and insight on what the psychedelic trance actually is.
Psychedelic Trance, then, is simply trance musicmusic with the intent of placing the listener in a state of trance (the framework) and psychedelia [music]music that aims to carefully provide the listener with as many cool raw materials as is needed to create a rich, living, musical world (the content of the framework), McGuire said in an email.
When discussing his latest album The Scrying Orb, McGuire shared what inspired him to make an album in this profound genre.
The true inspiration for this album was what I heard and felt during my time becoming exposed to the genre, McGuire said in an email. I really loved what the music did both to me and for me and felt this overwhelming urge to contribute to that.
When initially listening to The Scrying Orb, one might expect soothing sounds similar to ocean waves or light wind in a spring day. Instead, the result is something similar to the soundtrack of Mario Kart.
However, the more one knows about Psychedelic Trance, the better the album becomes. The album provokes an opportunity to understand the complex genre. This album is for people who like to listen to music that strays away from the mainstream genres.
However, several of the songs found in The Scrying Orb can appeal to people who might not enjoy the genre as a whole, such as the song Portals. Portals is not a completely upbeat song that would make whoever is listening to it want to dance. However, it is not a depressing song that can would put the listener in a melodramatic mood, either. Instead, the song is a good balance of both and is great to listen to while completing work for your job or classes.
Overall, The Scrying Orb was seemingly lackluster, especially if you are not a fan of genres that stray away from the mainstream. That said, Psychedelic Trance is an interesting and complex genre, and it deserved be checked out. The album is available via SoundCloud, and will officially release in April.
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Try 'Orb' to experience Psychedelic Trance genre - The Ionian
Out now via THNK TNK Records, Will Vance's Single Days Go By is a mesmerizing musical masterpiece filled with smooth progressive trance vibes. The single is extremely relaxing and takes listeners on a gentle journey through a melodic medium.
Will Vance is an extremely new face in the industry with just one other release credited on his soundcloud. Although by the sounds he is producing it is already very clear that there is a bright future a head of this new comer.
William Vance, Will to his friends, is a classically trained pianist who, after being expelled from piano lesson at age 12, began venturing into the music market place as a well rounded musician. The young musician began creating music picking guitar and synth programming along the way to help facilitate his vision. Today, you can hear his classical training being put to great use in his newest music. Look for big things from Will Vance in the coming months as he releases his Debut Days Go By EP.Check out the single below and follow him on soundcloud for the latest updates on his sounds.
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Under 2500: Will Vance Puts Listeners In A Trance With New Tune Days Go By - EDM Sauce
TMW Systems announced that Ray West, a 28-year veteran of the North American transportation industry, has been appointed senior vice president and general manager of itsportfolio of transportation management platforms that include TMW Suite, Innovative IES, TL2000and TruckMate.
The platforms support the daily operations of thousands of for-hire and private fleets, brokers, 3PLs and other transportation businesses.
This is a period of significant innovation at TMW, and Rays deep experience and proven leadership will help us deliver exciting new capabilities and value to our customers, said Timothy Leonard, executive vice president, operations and technology, TMW. Anyone who has met Ray has experienced his passion for this industry and his commitment to the success of our customers.
A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, West early in his career founded a number of privately held companies, including Thoroughbred Systems, which developed mobile communications and dispatch software. He later served as vice president of information technology for Atlas Van Lines where he was an active member of the TMWSuite Advisory Board and director of product development for Qualcomm Inc.
West joined TMW Systems in 2007, initially leading the companys TL2000 business in Indianapolis, Ind.West received a masters degree in manufacturing management from Kettering University.
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TMW Systems appoints Ray West to lead TMS products - Commercial Carrier Journal
Fort Worth Star Telegram | TMS' repave, re-profile project should be done by end of next week Fort Worth Star Telegram Drivers typically aren't fans of new asphalt, but TMS will now attempt to age it as much as possible before the April race. They'll use what they call the Texas Tire Monster and a similar device the Tire Dragon from its sister track, Kentucky ... |
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TMS' repave, re-profile project should be done by end of next week - Fort Worth Star Telegram
LONDON -- The founder of a U.K. Christian TV network has found a unique way to share famous quotes from Jesus -- by displaying them on buses throughout London.
Revelation TV's Howard Conder explains how God gave him the vision for this campaign, called QuoteJesus.com.
"The Lord spoke to me very clearly about starting to put the words of Jesus on the buses in London," he told CBN News. "We have a website. We have the buses booked. We're now on our second campaign."
Conder, who started his career as a musician, says he now believes God is using his previous self-promoting skills to now promote Jesus.
"I experienced first hand how bands and performers were marketed ruthlessly," he explains in a video posted on the Quote Jesus website "In time, I became a Christian and saw things in a new light. I channeled that same energy and drive into which I had to working in a purpose greater than myself."
Conder says he's overcome many challenges to launch this campaign, which he believes will impact many thousands of lives.
"There's 17.5 million people who visit London," he said. "There's between 8-9 million who live here. So we've got so many people who will, subliminally, will at least be looking at those scriptures, and here we have one here: 'You will be with me in paradise.'"
So what does the future hold for this unique evangelist project?
"I believe that the future of Quote Jesus is something that's not just for here in London," Condor told CBN News. "It's across our nation. But it's also I believe could go global. Why with all the millions of Christians that are around today, all they need to do is just get on board literally with us. But to help us to bring the quotes of Jesus to this generation."
With so much political correctness in the U.K. seeking to silence the Christian voice, the hope is that these public displays of quoting Jesus will play a significant part in people going on their own personal journey towards faith in Christ.
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The Bus Campaign That's Giving UK Political Correctness a Run for ... - CBN News
By Joe Henao | 8 hours ago | Updated 8 hours ago
I wasnt quite sure if it was a universal maxim, but I had heard friends of mine recite the humourous adage, hes just saying what were all thinking, fictitiously assuming the role of the cucked Trump supporter proclaiming their admiration for our new Commander-in-Chief and his knack for stating the obscene, perverse and politically incorrect.
Although the phrase was generally used as a low jab towards Trump and his groupies, it reveals much of what is inefficient, and theoretically damning, regarding liberals and their use of political correctness as a means, end and political action.
As a disclaimer, Id like to point out that the act of censoring our speech for the sake of inclusivity and general respect should be commonsensical. It is in no way harmful in and of itself, and we should press our peers to consider utilizing language that does not carry with it preconceived sexist, racist, ableist, etc. values that devalue people and their identities.
This should be of no debate. (Hint: punch those who do debate it.) It is when political correctness is simultaneously employed as both an act of resistance and as a means to true liberation when it falls short. I urge liberals to reconsider what they understand as revolutionary and legitimately useful. The struggle does not end here.
Popular aphorisms Trumpisms such as, He just tells it like it is, or Hes just saying what were all thinking, should exact to us the nature of the isms politically correct liberals desperately attempt to combat. Discrimination, injustice and violence are not structured within language; they are structured within the base of the reality we inhabit.
Language, the medium poltical correctness aims to alter, operates in the most symbolic of realms, existing not as a categorical truth, but as a way of understanding, relaying and reflecting the social landscape were subjected to navigate.
Postmodern deconstructionists such as Foucault and Derrida, whom left-liberals love to misconstrue, correctly conveyed to us how power, hierarchy and violence is transcribed and sustained through language. Are we so ridiculous to assume that their solution was to simply not speak? Of course not, and for precisely this reason these thinkers were not liberals, but critical leftists.
Our goal should, therefore, not be to constantly censor our speech, but to rewire the zero-level relations of society so that the linguistic lexicon available to us does not contain within it discrimination/violence. Simply put, political correctness aims to alter the superstructure of society, while the true root of the violence that exists within our language is reflective of the relations in the base of society. If we are to truly uproot injustice and attack it at its source, we must attack the base, not language.
He tells it like it is: In this sense, racism very literally, is. Hes just saying what were all thinking. Regardless of whether or not racism is communicated or expressed through language, it still exists, and is still being thought and experienced.
Political correctness does nothing but obscure a forever lurking issue, acting as the proverbial band aid struggling to suppress an open wound. Within our subjective reality, violence exists structurally whether we speak about it or not.
So then, what is to be done? Ultimately and this will no doubt elicit opinions from all ends of our political constellation we must radically reorganize the ways in which we relate to one another. What I am proposing is far too utopian for todays standards, especially considering the state of affairs following the election, but nonetheless, we should still aim for the eventuality of an alterity rationally built upon entirely different relations, and keep certain options on the intellectual backburner for future use. By all means, let us all be inclusive with our language and utilize every tool available to us in mitigating injustice, but know that the struggle does not end here.
Joe Henao is a junior in the School of International Service.
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More than seven months earlier, on July 5, 1996, they had aided a Scottish Blackface sheep in giving birth to a Finn Dorset lamb codenamed 6LL3.
Using a breakthrough technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, scientists at Roslin took a nucleus -- the part of the cell that contains most of its genetic information -- from cells within the mammary gland of an adult sheep and stuck it inside an unfertilized egg from which the nucleus had been removed.
They stimulated the egg to develop into an embryo and planted the embryo into a surrogate mother. The lamb was dubbed Dolly, a nod to country music legend Dolly Parton and her famously ample bosom.
Years later, that same cell cluster was used to make four other sheep just like Dolly.
The lab had kept her birth secret for seven months to make the announcement coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing the experiments that produced her, they said.
Much of the news reports had focused not on cloning sheep but on its potential for humans, said Alan Colman, who is now a visiting scholar in the Harvard University Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.
"We'd underestimated the impact the announcement would make," he said. "It was something we had prepared for, but we had been totally overwhelmed by the response."
Previously, cloning had been done using only embryonic cells, and now researchers had showed that it was possible in cells from another part of the body -- and adult body.
"At the time she was born, I was ecstatic, because no one had previously been able to use nuclear transfer to make an adult vertebrate from an adult cell," Colman said.
Despite the headlines, cloning a mammal wasn't the team's main goal. They were out to develop a more efficient way to produce genetically modified livestock.
In fact, Dolly wasn't even the first to ever be cloned. She was the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.
But scientists have learned a lot since developing the technique, and somatic cell nuclear transfer has been used in more than 20 species to make clones.
But by and large, scientists don't see a need to clone humans.
Dolly herself lived out her days at the Roslin Institute and was able to produce six lambs.
But she was euthanized at age 6 after being diagnosed with progressive lung disease and after a long battle with arthritis.
Finn Dorset sheep usually live 10 to 11 years, and her health problems seemed to confirm fears that cloned animals would age faster and die prematurely compared with animals born naturally.
This was further exemplified by Dolly's four cloned "sisters," who were recently euthanized because they too began to show symptoms of osteoarthritis.
"OA, as you may know, is a progressive disease, and we took appropriate measures to manage the condition at the time under veterinary guidance," said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham who led research on the sheep.
"These animals were in their 10th year and so coming towards the end of their natural lifespan."
To investigate this further, the team at Nottingham will now conduct postmortem examinations to truly understand what's going on inside the animals.
"The final phase of our study ... involves detailed postmortem analyses of different tissues and organs in order to gain a better insight into the aging process in these animals," Sinclair said.
The Roslin Institute donated Dolly's body to the National Museum of Scotland, where she stands to this day.
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20 years after Dolly the sheep, potential of cloning remains unclear - CNN
Image: Amazing Spider-Man #24 cover art by Alex Ross.
This weeks issue of Amazing Spider-Man started to wrap up the long, clone-tacular events of Spideys latest event series, The Clone Conspiracywhich has already given us the return of Ben Reilly as the Scarlet Spider. But now weve got confirmation of at least one major thorn in Peter Parkers side perishing... and another making a grand return.
Amazing Spider-Man #24, by Dan Slott, Christos Gage, Giuseppe Camuncoli, Cam Smith, Jason Keith, and Joe Caramagna, pretty much picks up during the final issue of the Clone Conspiracy miniseries, as the cloning virus unleashed by the Jackalne new cloned version of Ben Reillythreatens to wreak havoc across the world. As Peter Parker races to stop that from happening in that issue, we get to see the fallout of events from Bens perspective this week.
As all the other clones around him start disintegrating around him, Ben finds himself brawling with Doctor Octaviusas the two attempt to transfer their minds in the the ultimate clone template Ben and Octavius developed after a lengthy series of horrendous cloning experiments on Ben by Miles Warren, the original Jackal. Considering we knew Ben would make it out of the series alive to return to his role as the Scarlet Spider, many assumed that he would get the body... but he doesnt.
Doc Ock does, meaning that one of Peter Parkers oldest foes is back for good. This is particularly the end of a long road for Octaviuswhos technically been dead since 2012, when he swapped his mind with Peter Parkers in his dying breath in the infamous Spider-Man #700. Long story short: Otto spent several months in Peters body pretending to be a harsher Spider-Man, eventually got kicked out of Peters body by the lingering remnants of Peters subconscious, secretly transferred his mind into the body of Peters former robot assistant the Living Brain (yes, that Living Brain!), and then was eventually re-born in a clone body during Clone Conspiracy at the Jackals hands. Comic books, am I right?
Sure, Otto has swapped one clone body for anotherbut the ultimate template, unlike any other clone Warren has created over his years as a supervillain, has no defects. Unlike Bens original body, or the clones created throughout Clone Conspiracy, it does not slowly but surely degrade. For all intents and purposes, Otto Octavius has been reborn: his original mind, in a brand new (and permanent) body.
After suffering that setback, Ben actually rather conveniently manages to stabilize his own decaying clone body, thanks to the magic plot device soundwave Peter helped release in Clone Conspiracy #5 to stop all the cloned individuals around the world from turning into piles of dust and/or flesh-craving zombie clones. This whole storyline has been crazy. Thats not Bens only problem, however; the death of most of the Clones he createdamong them a whole army of clones of Warrenas the new Jackal leaves the original Miles Warren alive and well.
Infuriated by the torture Ben put him through, he promptly dons his original Jackal uniform and goes after his prized clone for vengeance... and then promptly gets killed by Ben, who lets the burning debris of his former safehouse collapse on Warren, seemingly killing off his creator for good.
I say seemingly because a) this is a comic book and no one ever dies for good, really, and b) we dont actually see Miles perish, its just heavily implied. But while Ben Reilly is now back, hes not the only major twist to Spider-Man that Clone Conspiracy has ultimately given us. One of Spider-Mans oldest villains now has a new leash on life, and another has seemingly fallen.
That is, until a Spider-Man creative team decides that a cloning storyline is a great idea again. Where clone stories go, Miles Warren follows, so its likely weve not seen the last of him yet, despite Bens best efforts.
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As Clone Conspiracy Ends, the Fates of Two Major Spider-Man Villains Are Revealed - Gizmodo
Forbes | Only One In A Thousand PokStop Drops Are Pokmon GO's New Gen 2 Evolution Items Forbes While your local area might be flooded with new Gen 2 Pokmon in the wake of Pokmon GO's latest update, you might be finding that you're missing a few key ingredients in pursuit of some specific evolutions. That would be a set of evolution items ... |
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Only One In A Thousand PokStop Drops Are Pokmon GO's New Gen 2 Evolution Items - Forbes
February 24, 2017 Credit: CC0 Public Domain
These days, it's a territory mostly dominated by the likes of Raffi and the Wiggles, but there's new evidence that lullabies, play songs, and other music for babies and toddlers may have some deep evolutionary roots.
A new theory paper, co-authored by Graduate School of Education doctoral student Samuel Mehr and Assistant Professor of Psychology Max Krasnow, proposes that infant-directed song evolved as a way for parents to signal to children that their needs are being met, while still freeing up parents to perform other tasks, like foraging for food, or caring for other offspring. Infant-directed song might later have evolved into the more complex forms of music we hear in our modern world. The theory is described in an open-access paper in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Music is a tricky topic for evolutionary science: it turns up in many cultures around the world in many different contexts, but no one knows why humans are the only musical species. Noting that it has no known connection to reproductive success, Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, described it as "auditory cheesecake" in his book How the Mind Works.
"There has been a lot of attention paid to the question of where music came from, but none of the theories have been very successful in predicting the features of music or musical behavior," Krasnow said. "What we are trying to do with this paper is develop a theory of music that is grounded in evolutionary biology, human life history and the basic features of mammalian ecology."
At the core of their theory, Krasnow said, is the notion that parents and infants are engaged in an "arms race" over an invaluable resourceattention.
"Particularly in an ancestral world, where there are predators and other people that pose a risk, and infants don't know which foods are poisonous and what activities are hazardous, an infant can be kept safe by an attentive parent," he said. "But attention is a limited resource."
While there is some cooperation in the battle for that resourceparents want to satisfy infants appetite for attention because their cries might attract predators, while children need to ensure parents have time for other activities like foraging for foodthat mutual interest only goes so far.
Attention, however, isn't the only resource to cause such disagreements.
The theory of parent-offspring conflict was first put forth over forty years ago by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, then an Assistant Professor at Harvard. Trivers predicted that infants and parents aren't on the same page when it comes to the distribution of resources.
"His theory covers everything that can be classified as parental investment," Krasnow said. "It's anything that a parent could give to an offspring to help them, or that they may want to hold back for themselves and other offspring."
Sexual reproduction means that every person gets half of their genes from each parent, but which genes in particular can differ even across full siblings.
Krasnow explains, "A gene in baby has only a fifty percent chance of being found in siblings by virtue of sharing two parents. That means that from the baby's genetic perspective, she'll want a more self-favoring division of resources, for example, than her mom or her sister wants, from their genetic perspectives."
Mehr and Krasnow took the idea of parent-offspring conflict and applied it attention. They predict that children should 'want' a greater share of their parents' attention than their parents 'want' to give them. But how does the child know it is has her parent's attention? The solution, Krasnow said, is that parents were forced to develop some method of signaling to their offspring that their desire for attention was being met.
"I could simply look at my children, and they might have some assurance that I'm attending to them," Krasnow said. "But I could be looking at them and thinking of something else, or looking at them and focusing on my cell phone, and not really attending to them at all. They should want a better signal than that."
Why should that signal take the form of a song?
What makes such signals more honest, Mehr and Krasnow think, is the cost associated with them - meaning that by sending a signal to an infant, a parent cannot be sending it to someone else, sending it but lying about it, etc. "Infant directed song has a lot of these costs built in. I can't be singing to you and be talking to someone else," Krasnow said. "It's unlikely I'm running away, because I need to control my voice to sing. You can tell the orientation of my head, even without looking at me, you can tell how far away I am, even without looking."
Mehr notes that infant-directed song provides lots of opportunities for parents to signal their attention to infants: "Parents adjust their singing in real time, by altering the melody, rhythm, tempo, timbre, of their singing, adding hand motions, bouncing, touching, and facial expressions, and so on. All of these features can be finely tuned to the baby's affective stateor not. The match or mismatch between baby behavior and parent singing could be informative for whether or not the parent is paying attention to the infant."
Indeed, it would be pretty odd to sing a happy, bubbly song to a wailing, sleep-deprived infant.
Krasnow agrees. "All these things make something like an infant directed vocalization a good cue of attention," he continued. "And when you put that into this co-evolutionary arms race, you might end up getting something like infant-directed song. It could begin with something like primitive vocalizations, which gradually become more infant directed, and are elaborated into melodies."
"If a mutation develops in parents that allows them to do that quicker and better, then they have more residual budget to spend on something else, and that would spread," he said. "Infants would then be able to get even choosier, forcing parents to get better, and so on. This is the same kind of process that starts with drab birds and results in extravagant peacocks and choosy peahens." And as signals go, Krasnow said, those melodies can prove to be enormously powerful.
"The idea we lay out with this paper is that infant-directed song and things that share its characteristics should be very good at calming a fussy infantand there is some evidence of that," he said. "We're not talking about going from this type of selection to Rock-a-Bye Baby; this theory says nothing about the words to songs or the specific melodies, it's saying that the acoustic properties of infant directed song should make it better at calming an infant than other music."
But, could music really be in our genes?
"A good comparison to make is to language," Krasnow said. "We would say there's a strong genetic component to languagewe have a capability for language built into our genesand we think the same thing is going to be true for music."
What about other kinds of music? Mehr is optimistic that this work could be informative for this question down the road.
"Let's assume for a moment that the theory is right. How, then, did we get from lullabies to Duke Ellington?" he asked. "The evolution of music must be a complex, multi-step process, with different features developing for different reasons. Our theory raises the possibility that infant-directed song is the starting point for all that, with other musical behaviors either developing directly via natural selection, as byproducts of infant-directed song, or as byproducts of other adaptations."
For Pinker, the paper differs in one important way from other theories of how music evolves in that it makes evolutionary sense.
"In the past, people have been so eager to come up with an adaptive explanation for music that they have advanced glib and circular theories, such as that music evolved to bond the group," he said. "This is the first explanation that at least makes evolutionary sense - it shows how the features of music could cause an advantage in fitness. That by itself doesn't prove that it's true, but at least it makes sense!"
Explore further: Mothers and infants connect through song
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In a new study from the University of Montreal, infants remained calm twice as long when listening to a song, which they didn't even know, as they did when listening to speech. "Many studies have looked at how singing and ...
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Study proposes new theory for evolution of infant-directed song - Medical Xpress
Vin Scully has hung up his microphone after 67 years as the Dodgers play-by-play man nearly half the entire history of Major League Baseball.
Still, there was plenty that came before him in the evolution of fans efforts to follow the action in real time when not sitting in the ballpark.
Here, in recognition of the first Scully-less season since 1949 and the return this weekend of the Yankees and Mets to TV and radio for spring games from Florida is a brief stroll through the timeline that led to live streaming on mobile phones, something that would have seemed like science fiction in 1876 . . . or 1976.
Commercial telegraphy is even older than the National League, and a good thing it was for early fans interested in what was going on in games they did not attend. By the late 1870s, businesses realized customers might enjoy updates on games being played around the country, and contracted with Western Union to obtain results every half inning. One early adopter was Massey's billiard hall in St. Louis, where fans presumably could play pool, drink adult beverages and follow games at the same time. (Shout-out to Peter Morris' 2006 book, "A Game of Inches.") Newspapers, which already were receiving updates via telegraph, caught onto the trend and started posting scores outside their offices.
Raw data was better than nothing, but even better was something with visual aids. Creative minds in places such as Nashville and Atlanta soon were conjuring boards illustrated with baseball diamonds and pegs that moved from base to base to represent players. The gimmick spread to New York in the late 1880s, including outside the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's "The World." In 1886, the opera house in Atlanta tried something wackier: actual, uniformed people moving around a faux diamond on the stage, based on results coming in via telegraph. (Shown: M.D. Compton's Baseball Illustrating Apparatus, U.S. patent 540, 089 issued May 28, 1895.)
By the 1890s, electricity began to add more information - and more pizzazz - to the updates fans had come to rely on, in the form of machines that recounted many aspects of game action, including lights that followed the path of players and/or the ball. Such displays got increasingly elaborate, including mechanized, miniature "players" who mimicked the actions of the actual athletes in the distant stadium. (Shown: Nokes ElectraScore from Popular Electricity Magazine, v.5, October 1912: 584.)
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The electronic bulletin boards outside newspaper offices not only kept fans informed into the early 20th century, but served as a communal experience that replicated the in-stadium vibe. World Series in the early 1910s attracted huge, raucous crowds in Manhattan and other major cities. Before, during and after Game 3 of the 1912 World Series between the Giants and Red Sox - played in Fenway Park - throngs clogged the streets in and around Times Square, often shouting complaints and/or encouragement at players who were more than 200 miles away. "There could have been no more interest shown in the game," The New York Times wrote, "had the scene been the ball grounds at Boston instead of Times Square."
Commercial radio was in its infancy when baseball first came to the new medium, on Aug. 5, 1921, when the Pirates defeated the Phillies, 8-5, in a game played at Forbes Field. Initially some radio announcers merely read scores via telegraph updates from another location, but soon they were sitting in the stadiums themselves and enhancing the drama rather than dryly reciting results. By the 1923 World Series between the Yankees and Giants, radio use was widespread, and Graham McNamee became the first true baseball broadcasting star. Radio has endured as a staple of baseball fandom, sometimes even for those in the ballpark. Dodgers fans used to bring transistor radios to listen to Scully at the massive Coliseum in the Dodgers' early L.A. years. The three New York teams were radio holdouts -- they did not allow games to be broadcast live until 1939.
Commercial TV still was largely experimental on Aug. 26, 1939, when Red Barber called the first televised major league game from Ebbets Field, in which the Reds and Dodgers split a doubleheader on station W2XBS (later WNBC.) There were only two cameras in use and not many people watching, but it marked the first time anyone outside a ballpark had observed major league players in action live. World War II slowed the spread of television drastically, but it grew rapidly in the post-war years, and the first World Series aired in 1947. More and more games began to be televised - locally and nationally - through the 1950s and 1960s, exposing the game at its highest level to a far vaster audience than ever before.
Cable television transformed baseball in the late 1970s and 1980s, starting with superstations that allowed fans all over the country to see teams such as the Braves, Cubs and Mets. ESPN furthered the expansion of nationally televised games, finally rendering the old notion of a national "Game of the Week" on Saturday afternoon as a quaint relic. Soon games on cable outlets far outnumbered those available on local broadcast channels. Later, the rise of regional sports networks - especially team-owned ones such as the Yankees' YES Network, which launched in 2002 - further consolidated the power and profitability of baseball's pay TV model.
The World Wide Web came along in the early 1990s, sparking the most recent evolution/revolution in live major league coverage, one that continues apace in 2017. Initially, the Internet primarily was a way to discuss the game with fellow fans and check up on news and results in real time, something that continues on 21st century social media. Then it became a vehicle, through Major League Baseball Advanced Media, to see video highlights. Now, increasingly, it is a way to watch live games streamed to PCs, laptops, tablets or smartphones. The Yankees were pioneers in the area, first offering live streaming (for a price) in 2010. SNY announced just this winter that it would begin streaming Mets games in 2017.
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Oh, one more thing: Newspapers have covered baseball pretty much from the time the game was invented, well before the major leagues came along, and with more depth than any medium mentioned above. And we still do today. Just sayin'.
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Edsa will always be best remembered for the historic, peaceful uprising that unseated a dictator.
Along the stretch of Edsa happened the People Power Revolution in 1986, during which Filipinos from all walks of life linked arms to topple the dictator, former President Ferdinand Marcos and to reclaim true democracy.
Over the past 31 years, Edsa then bore witness to a series of major transformations, as the rapid urbanization of the metropolis saw massive infrastructure and property development projects rising along this 24-kilometer stretch.
Today, Edsa remains a major thoroughfare in the metro but one that exudes a highly different character and vibe compared to more than three decades ago. Here are some of the property and infrastructure projects that have changed the landscape of this historic avenue.
Edsa Shrine
It was formally known as the Shrine of Mary, Queen of Peace, and sits at the crossroads of Edsa and Ortigas Avenue in Quezon City.
Established in December 1989 with Fr. Socrates Villegas as its first rector, the shrine was a brainchild of the late Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, who convinced the families of Paquito Ortigas and John Gokongwei to donate the lot.
Arch. Francisco Maosa designed the church with preparatory work from National Artist Leandro Locsin and Architect William Coscolluela.
National Artist Napoleon Abueva meanwhile designed the 14 Stations of the Cross and the main altar table cast in bronze; sculptor Ramon Orlina created the glass and stainless steel sculpture of the Risen Christ and other artworks; and Virginia Ty-Navarro sculpted the bronze statue of the Virgin Mary.
People Power Monument
Located at the corner of White Plains and Esda, the bronze tableau is comprised of 37 figures depicting the various sectors of the Philippine society that joined the People Power Revolution in 1986, surrounding Inang Bayan as the dominant figure.
Created by award-winning sculptor Ed Castrillo, it was installed in 1993 and had cost P100 million. It has since served as among the main venues for the governments commemorative activities.
LRT-1 North Extension
Dubbed the closing the loop project to connect Light Rail Transit 1 (LRT-1) to Metro Rail Transit (MRT-3) system, it involved construction of a 5.4-km elevated line from LRT-1s Monumento Station in Caloocan to MRTs North Avenue Station in Quezon City.
It was completed in 2010 with additional two stations, Balintawak and Roosevelt, both in Quezon City. The LRT-MRT common station has yet to be constructed.
Metro Rail Transit 3 (MRT-3)
Its full operation began in 2000 with a 17-km track comprising of 13 stations starting from North Avenue in Quezon City to Taft Avenue in Pasay. The rail project has a fleet of 73 Czech-made modern and air-conditioned rail cars, of which up to 60, in three-car trains, operate daily.
Manhattan Garden City
It is a residential development project expected to consist of 20 residential towers on a 5.7-hectare property at the Araneta Center in Quezon City.
Gateway Mall
Opened in 2004, the flagship mall of Araneta Center has five levels and directly linked to Araneta Coliseum and LRT-2. It has a total floor area of 100,000 square meters. Lakbay para sa Kapayapaan sa Edsa
The street mural project was launched in 2013, adorning the walls of Camp Aguinaldo, the general headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, in Quezon City.
It spans about 3.8 km, of which 1.7 km stretches along Boni Serrano Avenue; 1.3 km along Edsa; and 1 km along White Plainsmaking it the worlds largest peace mural.
C-5 Ortigas Avenue extension interchange
More known as Ortigas Flyover, it was completed in 2004 to decongest traffic volume on Edsa. It has two flyovers: a three-level, four-lane flyover along C-5 and two-lane left-turn flyover.
Robinsons Galleria Complex
It is the countrys first mixed-use facility that combined a mall, hotels, offices and condominium residences within one development.
On its site is the Robinsons Galleria Ortigas, the flagship mall of Robinsons Land Corp. established in 1990. The five-level shopping mall houses over 500 highly recognized local and international shops, dining outlets and service centers.
Other establishments in the complex are the two high-rise office towers, Galleria Corporate Center and the Robinsons-Equitable Tower, deluxe hotels Holiday Inn Galleria Manila and Crowne Galleria Manila, and the Galleria Regency.
SM Megamall
Considered one of the countrys biggest malls, the SM Megamall is among the pioneer shopping malls established by Henry Sy Sr. in 1991 when he started the malling phenomenon in the 90s.
From its initial total floor area of 311,898 sqm, SM Megamall has undergone several renovations since then to reach its current floor area of 474,225 sqm when the Mega Fashion Hallwhich houses some flagship international retail brandswas unveiled in 2014.
To celebrate its 25th year, the construction of a 50-story, curvy S-shape office tower has begun last year and is expected to open in 2019.
Edsa Shangri-La
Opened in August 1992 at Ortigas Center in Mandaluyong, it is the first of the five Shangri-La hotels and resorts in the country. It has a total of 632 rooms which consist of 607 guestrooms and 25 suites.
It also has four international restaurants, two lounges, cafe and bakeshop, two ballrooms and 19 meeting rooms, among other amenities and features.
Starmall Edsa-Shaw
Situated at the corner of Metro Manilas busiest avenues, it is directly linked to the MRT Shaw Station and hosts a busy transit terminal, drawing a huge cross-section of daily commuters and shoppers.
SMDC Light Residences
A three-tower project, it is strategically located at Madison Street corner Edsa in Mandaluyong and conveniently linked to MRT Boni Station. It boasts of five-star amenities, its own mall and is deemed perfect for people on the go.
Avida Towers Centera
The four-tower development in Mandaluyong provides a unique in-city living experience divided into five different zones.
(Sources: edsashrine.org, quezoncity.gov.ph, robinsonsproperties.com, robinsonsmalls.com, sminvestments.com, shangri-la.com, dotcmrt3.gov.ph, jica.go.jp, starmalls.com.ph, megaworldcorp.com, gatewaymall.com.ph, avidaland.com, smdc.com and Inquirer Archives)
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News from the University of Zurich is notable both for how underwhelming it is and for a "rare" admission. Researchers documented that as winter came earlier, snow voles got smaller. That seemed counterintuitive since, as the title of the publication in PLOS Biology asks rhetorically, "Bigger Is Fitter?"
Well, isn't it? Not so in this case, apparently. Why?
In principle, larger snow voles are fitter: They have better capabilities to survive and reproduce. Despite this positive correlation at the phenotypic level, however, a converse causal relationship was evident on the genotypic level. "The voles whose genetic make-up led to a lower body weight were the fittest, especially in years when the first winter snow fell earlier than usual," explains the biologist. This may be because lighter young are more likely to reach their final size before the weather deteriorates and winter comes.
Fine. Maybe so. But notice the welcome candor in announcing this result. Observing this cute mouse-like rodent getting a bit smaller seems to be pulled straight from the voluminous files of unimpressive evidence for Darwinian evolution's grand claims. Evolution is supposed to explain how fantastic novelties arise, not merely why a little animal gets a bit smaller (or bigger). Even such an instance, though, they say repeatedly, is "extremely rare."
Researchers from the University of Zurich have succeeded in documenting an extremely rare case of evolutionary adaptation "in action" among wild snow voles near Chur.
...
Although this process is well understood in breeding conditions and in the lab, it is still largely unclear how often and how rapidly it takes place under natural conditions. Examples of contemporary adaptive evolution remain extremely rare.
...
If the scientists had restricted their observations solely to phenotypic traits, such as body size and weight, this rare example of "evolution in action" in the wild would have remained hidden. [Emphasis added.]
And again, from the Abstract:
In natural populations, quantitative trait dynamics often do not appear to follow evolutionary predictions. Despite abundant examples of natural selection acting on heritable traits, conclusive evidence for contemporary adaptive evolution remains rare for wild vertebrate populations, and phenotypic stasis seems to be the norm.
So stasis is the "norm," and seeing "evolution in action" in the wild is "extremely rare." And where found, as it was here, one might add that it is pretty trivial. Perhaps they thought we weren't listening.
Photo: Snow vole, by Timothe Bonnet via University of Zurich.
I'm on Twitter. Follow me @d_klinghoffer.
Read more from the original source:
Smaller Voles: "Evolution in Action" Is Rare, Trivial - Discovery Institute
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Tech firms keep expanding 'Robotics Row,' Pittsburgh's mini Silicon ... - Tribune-Review
Badger Robotics team drivers Kaeden Hietala and Kennedy Truscinski look out at the model arena as they drive their team robot in a practice session with the Greenbush-Middle River Robotics team at DRB Fabrication in Greenbush on February 19. At its February 13 meeting, the Badger School Board approved designating no more than $4000 to build a 60-foot long wall to create a more conducive space in the Badger Bus Garage for the Badger Robotics team to call home.
At its February 13 meeting, the Badger School Board approved granting the district permission to designate no more than $4000 to build a 60-foot long wall to create a more conducive space in the Badger Bus Garage for the Badger Robotics team to call home.
Making this motion, board member Carol Rhen added that she thinks its prudent to post this project on the school website and to count on board members word of mouth, both coming at no cost to the district, to call out for bids on this project. Superintendent Tom Jerome agreed to post this info on the district website, including a deadline for response.
This request came after the robotics team moved from working in the Badger Industrial Arts Room and into what Jerome termed dead space, used for odds and ends, in front of three fleet vehicles located in the Badger Bus Garage. The team would like this space converted to provide a secure area and conducive atmosphere for them to work in the winter months.
To improve the insulation of this space, Jerome asked the board if the district could pursue this project, totaling, according to Allen Monsrud Construction, $3300. The district at that time hadnt yet asked for any bids outside this one. Speaking with Badger Transportation Director Tim Berger, Jerome said Berger told him he was fine with repurposing this space if the students were going to use it.
Speaking of students, board member Hauger asked if industrial arts students could build this wall. He at first made an initial motion to appropriate $3000 towards the project, have the district meet with Badger Industrial Arts teacher Mike Coltom to see if his students could do the project, and if not, to still go through with the project.
Board Chairperson Jamie Isane questioned whether having students build this wall could be more trouble than its worth, being the district has to deal with building codes. Badger Dean of Students Stacey Warne added that the district isnt offering a construction class until next fall. This initial motion made by Hauger didnt move forward.
Jerome then added that if the board wanted this wall built relatively soon, it could move forward with the project, or, if not, could wait until the fall. He did add that the build season is coming to an end soon February 21 to be exact.
Board member Jeramy Swenson, a Badger Robotics team mentor, told the board that if it approved Allen Monsrud to do the project, Monsrud could have the project done that Wednesday (February 15).
Hauger responded by saying he would like to be fair and ask for bids from others, realizing it could set the project back. Jerome then brought up the idea of calling out for bids on the school website.
Isane understood the idea of being fair to all, but didnt think they would see many differences in bids on a project of this size. Hauger then asked Swenson his opinion in terms of how imperative it was to have the project done now.
Swenson said he would like to see the project done now to provide the robotics team a home. As of February 21, the project hadnt yet began.
To see more from this meeting, read the February 22 issue of The Tribune. To find out more about the Badger Robotics and the Greenbush-Middle River Robotics teams, read an upcoming issue of The Tribune.
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Badger board approves wall for robotics team space - East Grand Forks Exponent
February 24, 2017 at 3:35 pm by Max Chen
As technology growth continues to pick up speed, robotics and automation could usher in the next industrial revolution. Investors can also tap into the potential explosive growth in the robotics space through a targeted exchange traded fund strategy.
Robotics is a global mega trend that most investors are not positioned for, William E. Studebaker, President, CIO, and Managing Partner of ROBO Global, told ETF Trends in an email.
The robotics and automation sub-sector is still in its nascent stages, which leaves a lot more room to run. For instance, there are 17,000 logistics warehouse in U.S. and less than 1% are automated, Studebaker told Nasdaq.
We think the investment opportunity is enormous, Studebaker told Nasdaq. We think we are actually in the first inning of the baseball game where the players arent even on the field yet.
Unlike most other products and services, robotics can have its hands in multiple sectors and areas around the world, opening up an even larger opportunity for growth
The important thing to recognize about robotics is the foundational technology that is being applied to all markets, all geographies, all industries, and it is all happening now, Studebaker told CNBC. Some may buy it as a niche, but we think it is much broader than that.
To tap into this rising integration and demand of robotics in various industries, investors can take a look at the ROBOGlobal Robotics & Automation Index ETF (NasdaqGM: ROBO), which provides exposure to global companies engaged in the business of robotics-related or automation-related industries. Robotics- or automation-related products and services include any technology, service or device that supports, aids or contributes to any type of robot, robotic action or automation system process, software or management.
ROBO follows a two-tiered, equal-weighted system that ensures the strategy provides diversified exposure to a broad global ecosystem of new and enabling technologies as well as established automation/robotic providers. Specifically, the ETF includes a 60% tilt toward non-bellwether robotics with growing revenue contributions and a 40% tilt toward bellwether robotics companies that are well-established in the space.
The robotics ETFs portfolio may also provide exposure to companies with sustainable growth opportunities, as the underlying ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index has exhibited attractive sales growth, EBITDA growth and earnings-per-share growth. The underlying index has even outperformed the broader technology and S&P 500 index since the 2008 financial downturn.
If youre looking at the underlying characteristics of the portfolio, these companies have materially higher earnings growth, Studebaker said.
For more information on the tech sector, visit our technology category.
Continue reading here:
A Robotics ETF to Tap into a Growing Global Trend - ETF Trends