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anlum

9 karma · joined April 14, 2022

Strongly interested in self-replicating machines and adaptive complex systems. Feel free to drop me a line at anlum@protonmail.com if you want to discuss these topics.
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anlum··on States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat
If you think lab-grown meat is anything other than a massive accelerrant to the problem of antibiotic resistance, you've got another thing coming.

A bioreactor is basically just an animal with a severely curtailed feature set - limited homeostasis, no sense organs, cognition, locomotion, etc.

Crucially, a bioreactor has no immune system. It's a soup of muscle cells with basically no defense against external pathogens. Sterile technique will only get you so far, especially at scale. Lab-grown meat pretty much constitutionally requires constant antibiotic input. It's the price you pay for stripping the concept of animal as meat machine down to its most basic essence.

anlum··on Research Request: Self-Reproducing Systems
I find this topic of great interest, as I think it's one of the most important technologies on the horizon, with applications both on Earth and on Mars.

A great place to start on this topic is with Robert Freitas' 'Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines', which covers pretty much every advancement in the field up until the date of its publication. Adrian Bowyer (inventor of the RepRap) also has a chapter in 'Biomimetics: Nature-Inspired Innovation' that is worth a read.

There has been some work done on the topic by Gregory Chirikjian's lab at Johns Hopkins: doi:10.1109/CIRA.2003.1222279

A lot has also been published on this topic by Alex Ellery at Charleton University, including an exploration of 3D printed electric motors and analog neural network control systems: doi:10.7551/ecal_a_026

You can also check out this wikibook I found on seed factories - a topic which I think will be relevant going forward: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Seed_Factories

Following the citations in the above papers will lead you to more labs working on the topic. I haven't looked into the topic since *2019, so I would love to hear about new developments. I would love to hear from you if you find something of interest: anlum [at] protonmail [dot] com