—That is an excerpt from a brand new guide, The Coronary heart and the Chip: Our Vivid Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus 

Robots are an unimaginable method to improve and prolong the attain of human capabilities. In 2009, I labored with the biologist Roger Payne to make use of camera-mounted drones to review whales and their life spans. 

The identical drone was used to review uncontacted tribes within the Amazon, so that they might be noticed with out the danger of bringing germs to individuals who had not developed immunity. 

We additionally constructed a drone that launched from a self-driving automotive, flying forward and round corners to relay its video again to the automotive’s navigation system.

We are able to already pilot our eyes round corners and ship them hovering off cliffs. However what if we might prolong all of our senses to beforehand unreachable locations, and throw our sight, listening to, contact, and even sense of scent to distant locales and expertise these locations in a extra visceral means? The probabilities are infinite—and endlessly thrilling. Learn the complete extract right here.

Organoids created from amniotic fluid will inform us how fetuses develop

The information: As a fetus grows within the womb, it sheds cells into the amniotic fluid that surrounds it. Now researchers have demonstrated that they’ll use these cells to develop organoids, three-dimensional buildings which have a few of the properties of human organs—on this case kidneys, small intestines, and lungs. These cells may be extracted with out harming the fetus.