This Is What Happens When You Let an AI Design a Robot

Image: Matthews et al., PNAS (2023)

Researchers at Northwestern University asked an artificial intelligence (AI) to design a robot that could walk across land. The result is not exactly what you’d expect. The AI first came up with a spongy block that would deform when water was pumped into it. This robot could jiggle but not walk. In the next iteration, the AI found a shape that would make the sponge hop and shuffle. Nine iterations and twenty-six seconds later, the robot could hop effectively. While Spongebob 2.0 doesn’t look like any walking creature we’ve seen before, it does have features that resemble legs, so maybe evolution was up to something with those.You can watch a video of the robot in motion here, read the press release here, or read the full paper here.

3 new laws of nature in one week! This physicist is not impressed.

This week's episode of Science News covers three new laws of nature, intergalactic filaments, building roads on the moon, whether chatbots understand what they chat about, and more! You can take this quiz here.

Update on NASA's Asteroid Sample: Water and Building Blocks for Life

Image Credit: NASA  - A view of the Bennu sample

NASA announced last Wednesday that preliminary analysis of the 4.5 billion-year-old sample from the asteroid Bennu, brought to Earth by NASA’s Osiris-REx, contains water and carbon, two of the most basic ingredients for life. Initial findings were taken with a scanning electron microscope, X-ray diffraction and chemical analyses. Upcoming examination will reveal whether the sample contains amino acids, more complex materials necessary for biological evolution.Read NASA’s full press release here.

Science, for the sport of it

Nautilus is a newsletter for people for whom contemplation is entertainment. It does not present the newest studies and the methodologies behind them. It's about big, surprising ideas in science, because big surprising ideas are fun.

Sound Proof Your Home with Ping Pong Balls

Image: Sabat et al., J. Appl. Phys. 134, 144502 (2023)

Stressed out by city noise? Try ping pong balls – no, not in your ears, but as cheap and durable sound absorption. This idea comes from researchers from the University of Lille and the National Technical University of Athens. They started with computer simulations to figure out what makes for a good sound absorber. Based on their simulations, they then pierced ping pong balls to create a tiny hole that would allow air to escape and dampen resonances, and aligned them in a regular array in a box, so that they touched each other. The configuration resulted in excellent sound cancellation, almost perfectly absorbing incoming sound energy and preventing it from passing through the balls.Press release here, paper here.

In this week’s video, I explain what General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics tell us about the possibility of travelling in time. You can take the quiz here. 

Our podcast “Science with Sabine” is available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and Radio Public.