A reader kid

I started to read when I was 8 years old. Well, when I was 8 I had read some books, but nothing serious. When I say that I started to read at 8 is because when I started I didn't stop. The first books I read were the Harry Potter ones, then Idhun Memoirs, and then lots and lots of books more, it was a non-stop since I was 15. I read everyday in every chance I had, mainly fantasy books. I have to  admit that this is a bit insane, i read too many hours a day, but I don't regret. Well, since then I have thought a lot on how reading can affect a kid and it's development, and I think this gives lots of advantages to a kid:

1. Learning how language works.
2. If the reader gets inside the book deeply, he undertands diffferent ways of thinking and we sees different problems with their respective solutions.
3. It gives a strong imagination: when the reader visualises the images in his head, or when he just tryes to imagine a landscape he is not actually seeing, he is improving his visual memory and his spatial intelligence (what by the way is really useful).
4. Reading like this means that the reader will put less interest in some activities, like watching the TV or playing videogames, the most common activities in nowadays kids.
5. Reading means learning, history, phisics and even politics. I say even politics because usually people don't think on this, but in fact in every story where is shown how any living beign organises is telling something about politics. An extreme example is every book written by Ken Follet, but well, it's not really a good book for a kid.
6. One last advantage. Fantasy books related with magic often contain passages about learning how to control one's mind. A curious kid is going to try this kind of things, mental exercices that, I can not tell exactly how, but can be useful. For example, 'Eragon' learns to control his thought and just think on one thing during a period of time, not easy. Now imagine a kid trying stuff like this; I have the feeling that it helps somehow, maybe in concentration or abstraction. 

In conclusion, I think that reading is a good thing for a kid. I'm sure that all those thing together can help the kid in a lot of situations: having fun where there's nothing, a quick understanding on problems and solving them faster, empathy, more connections between thoughts... But the most important for me is the power of the imagination in a kid.

This image shows perfectly what I mean:

Books and writters, thank you all.

A new moon race?

NASA and SpaceX have both recently announced they will send humans to the moon. They aren't going to touch the moon but to orbit the moon and coming back to Earth. The objective of both corporations is to prove their technologies before sending manned missions to Mars.
Those missions are significant too because it will be the first time since Apollo 17 that a human leaves the Earth's lower-orbit, and because of the details of the orbit arround the moon both are going to send humans further than a human has ever gone.

The program of NASA is called Exploration Missions. The first one, EM-1(2018), is going to do all the process without carrying astronauts, and then EM-2 will do, one or more years later. They're going to use improved technologies that they used previously. This is the presentation of the mission:

The SpaceX mission is quite different. They are going to send humans on the first try, and they are going to be 2 tourists (they have paid some money already), not professional astronauts. SpaceX' plan is more daring and brave, just as often when it's about Elon Musk's plans. Apart of the experience that this mission will give to SpaceX, Elon sees the space tourism as a way of doing money, money that SpaceX needs. In this mission they're going to use a rocket that is going to be lauched for first time this year.

Elon said clearly that if NASA is interested on his mission, for example if they wanted to send their astronauts with the SpaceX program, he would give them preference. SpaceX guarantees that the tourists understand the danger of the mission.

Send humans to the moon by 2018 is a big challenge, but both corporations have shown that difficult things are possible.  So it seems that there is a kind of new moon race, but this time is the private corporation against the public organisation.

This video explains the situation:

I wish the best to both sides, but mainly to SpaceX, because if they achieve it they will show the world that  their innovation works. Well, I have to say that I can't be objective, 'cause I like all Elon's projects and I share his ideas. 

Dragon 2 capsule (SpaceX)

Orion capsule (NASA)

Why when I think on how small I am I want to do it all better?

Often I have the thought of how small we are. Every human has an insignificant size and time,we like it or not. It is not easy to imagine the size of the Earth, and I don't mean looking at a book with a comparison, I mean sitting somewhere and try to imagine how big is the planet. If you have never done it, look at the landscpe somewhere and try it, I warn it takes time. Well, this thought comes to me often when I look at the sea, when I am on somwhere with a lot of view or when I look at the stars. Then I try to compare myself with other sizes in he Universe... In conclusion, this thought makes me feel really small, and when I think on this, I feel good, relaxed. It may sound too poetic, but when I think on this I really feel peace. All these thoughts make me want to do everything better, to do well with my life... It gives energy, and when it's 11:00 PM, late, I have a lot of work to do, I am young and I just dream on doing things I really want to do but I have no energy to do ones I 'have' to do, it's important to have something like this that helps up to carry on doing all in the right way. 

One day I was just walking and I started to think on why thinking on how small I am I try to do all better. Logically, I think this should be the contrary: 'I am insignificant in the Universe, so it doesn't matter whether I do good or bad'. So how it's possible? Meybe it gets off the pressure of 'I have to be good', or maybe this leads to think that everyone of us is part of the human kind and as this pice of human kind I feel I have to do it all better for the rest of the humans, maybe then my worrys look so insignificant... I really don't know, but what I know is that it makes me feel good.

Robotic bee could help pollinate crops as real bees decline

Robotic pollen collector

Eijiro Miyako

By 

Alice Klein

A drone that can pollinate flowers may one day work side by side with bees to improve crop yields.

About three-quarters of global crop species, from apples to almonds, rely on pollination by bees and other insects. But pesticides, land clearing and climate change have caused declines in many of these creatures, creating problems for farmers.

Pollination is needed for reproduction in flowering plants. Male flower parts, or stamens, produce pollen that fertilises female parts, known as pistils, to make seeds. In self-pollinating flowers, the stamen sheds pollen directly onto the pistil.

Cross-pollination, however, requires the transfer of pollen from one plant to another. This mostly relies on pollen becoming stuck to the bodies of bees and other insects when they feed on flowers, and then being deposited on the next plant they visit. It has advantages over self-pollination, in that it increases genetic diversity and improves the quantity and quality of crops.

Eijiro Miyako at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and his colleagues have used the principle of cross-pollination in bees to make a drone that transports pollen between flowers.

The manually controlled drone is 4 centimetres wide and weighs 15 grams. The bottom is covered in horsehair coated in a special sticky gel. When the drone flies onto a flower, pollen grains stick lightly to the gel, then rub off on the next flower visited.

In experiments, the drone was able to cross-pollinate Japanese lilies (Lilium japonicum). Moreover, the soft, flexible animal hairs did not damage the stamens or pistils when the drone landed on the flowers.

Flying free

Miyako says the team is now working on developing autonomous drones that could help farmers to pollinate their crops. GPS, high-resolution cameras and artificial intelligence will be required for the drones to independently track their way between flowers and land on them correctly, though it will be some time before all that is in place.

“We hope this will help to counter the problem of bee declines,” says Miyako. “But importantly, bees and drones should be used together.”

Making it stick

Eijiro Miyako

Saul Cunningham at the Australian National University in Canberra says that using drones to pollinate flowers is an intriguing idea but may not be economically feasible. “If you think about the almond industry, for example, you have orchards that stretch for kilometres and each individual tree can support 50,000 flowers,” he says. “So the scale on which you would have to operate your robotic pollinators is mind-boggling.”

Several more financially viable strategies for tackling the bee decline are currently being pursued, says Cunningham. These include better management of bees through the use of fewer pesticides, breeding crop varieties that can self-pollinate instead of relying on cross-pollination, and the use of machines to spray pollen over crops.

Journal reference: Chem, DOI: 10.1016/j.chempr.2017.01.008

Summary

This is a new published on the online magazine 'New Scientist' the past 9th February. It introduces a new kind of robot (new because of its function): a drone that can pollinate like a bee. The development of this robot started because bees are decreasing in number and it's well known that without bees flowers aren't pollinate enough, so if bees continue decreasing in number most of the plants aren't going to reproduce as they should do. As a consecuence, most of the terrestrial ecosystems could be in danger.

To avoid this big problem, it has been developed a robot that could do the work of the bees if necessary. Those robots still can't work perfectly, but when it's software improves they will, and the objective of those robots is to be autonomous.

On the new they insist on the compatibility of the bees and the robots: theorically they could work together.

My opinion

My first impression: what a scary new!

I think this is depressing. Are we really doing all so bad that we need to replace bees, incredible living beings from whom we can learn some things? Of course those drones can help us survive, but I don't think it's the right way to start tomorrow's present. We're lucky this new hasn't become popular, if bees were disapearing even when everybody knew that they were essential for our survival...

I think we should focus more on protecting real bees but anyway those robots are best than having nothing.

News in levels: Robotic Animals

Link to the new

08-03-2017

The Horniman Museum in London is hosting an exhibition that allows children to understand how the natural world works through robotic models of animals.

The robotic platypus, for example, has large flashing red lights on its bill which represent the animal’s electroreceptors, which pick up electrical pulses given off by anything alive. Visitors can also catch bugs, use bat sonar and interact with creatures normally only seen in textbooks. Velcro is used to demonstrate how a housefly can stay on the wall, and it sucks up its food like a vacuum cleaner.

Summary:

A museum in London has hosted an exhibition to show the visitors how works the nature and how animals do some things, and they've used robotic animals to give examples. There were demostrations of how houseflyes can stand on walls, of how platypuses notice of other living beigns...

I think they are using a good tool to show the kids how animals do the things they do. I'm sure that a kid will pay all his attention to a robot like this, and he won't forget it. This is a good experience to the people who ccreate those robots too, they see that they are doing something useful in the present, not just for the future.

Trappist-1

Everybody has heard about the new descovery in astronomy, it's been announced in all the media. Just because of this, I'm going to focus on some facts that media has "avoided" or that most people don't know. I'm talking about the discovery of a planet system with one star, TRAPPIST-1, and 7 planets arround it, and all just 41 light years away from the Earth.

First of all, this system was discovered on 2015, and this year astronomers have found 4 earth-sized planets more arround the star (on 2015 they thought there were just 3).

Then, most people think that this discovery was done by NASA, and this is wrong. Actually, the discovery of the planets belongs to astronomers of different groups, but mainly it belongs to a belgian group that used a telescope of NASA. Lot of people thinks that it was NASA to discover the new planets because NASA has a lot of access to the media (22,3 M followers on twitter) and when they published the new they didn't specify who had done the discovery.

Then, i'ts well known that five of the seven planets have the size of the Earth. This could be true, but actually we know just more or less their size, and the same happens with the mass. For example, the plane TRAPPIST-1 c has a mass of 1.38 the mass of the Earth, but with a margin of error of 0.61. This kind of imprecisions will disappear when the James Webb Space Telescope starts its work on 2018.

NO LOGO: Cool Hunters

I have to write about a chapter of the book No Logo by Naomi Klein: Cool Hunters - The Legal Stalkers if Youth Culture. It's just  a 4 paragraph writing ( but what 4 paragraphs...). I'll tell my opinion about what I've understood.

It talks about the "Cool Hunters" that catch up the style of some poor people just to sell it  then to the ones who pretend to look rich... (Yes, I don't think those who really have a high social level are paying for the work of the cool hunters). Actually, "cool hunter"is a profession inside the world of fashion, and their objective is to take the poor people style to reply it in new-designed clothes. Meanwhile, the trends will make the people impatient to wear the new clothes with all their soures, like advertising. The result is next: broked jeans and jumpers.



(I tryed to find really broked jeans on google, but all I found were jeans with prefabricated holes)

Well, on the text it just talks about cool hunters looking for the poor-style, but they also look for new ideas on the best neighborhoods.

In my opinion it's not a bad idea looking for new styles in this way, because the really poor people have few clothes, so the ones who want to look "good" are forced to be original doing the best they can. But about what the big trends do... It's unpleasant to think on how they can sell their ideas as easy as this.