"Plant Neurobiology" : Smart vegetables

I've recently watched prof. Stefano Mancuso, from LINV, on TED.
He studies plant neurobiology, not sure if it's cosidered a "field",formaly speaking, but it sure deserves to be. He shows evidence of a collective intelligence in plants by analyzing electric signals an plant reactions, actions, networks etc.

Social Behavior on bacteria

A nice TED talk about bacterial communication by Bonnie Bassler. She studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for new, more potent medicine.

Modular robotics now for sale

A very cool project from Cornell with modular articulated joints self-organizing robot now have a commercial similar version!
Check the video:


The commercial version is called Cubelets!

The Big Fail

Ow no!

Miabots are out of stock and Merlin robotics ceased it production.

Now I'm out of robots, I will have to build my own swarm...

Wish me luck, I will need it!

MIT swarm of oil cleaners

Guys from the M.I.T. Senseable City Lab developed a swarm of oil cleaners based on solar energy. Very cool! (sorry the rush, I'm preparing the great news to put on the blog!)

Presentation

Wow! Just finished my presentation for my project, I'll try to add it here to share.
Sadly it's in Portuguese by now:

Complexity

Sorry for the long delay on posting, I'm kinda busy right now with several parallel projects and demands reaching deadlines (I hate those)...
Well, I'm really into complexity lately, found a nice book about complex systems (complex in a "standard" way, not the "mathematical" way with complex variables) talks about complexity on various kinds of dynamical systems: from thermal to demographics and economics, going through statistical physics!
My interest on complex systems is how the simple elements are organized (or self-organize) to give birth to their complex behavior, or how to develop agents with simple behaviors capable of control (or simple interact on a controlled way) with those systems.

Also, found a nice animation about our future and trillions of computers that has a proto-idea of "layered complexity", not very deep on this subject but I liked it:

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.