Did you know that there are road engineering nerds and they do things like commission drone flights and mine interesting satellite data to understand major road failures like the one in NJ?
Thank god I'm obsessed with ants because this would easily take me. But, I know how ya'll are.
This will "awaken something" in someone on here I'm certain.
This is an excellent question.
There are some very small cameras and robots, but they aren't tiny enough to explore the world of ants, although laparoscopic cameras can be useful for tree hollows.
I often think about how much one could learn about ants with an ant-sized robot that could interact with them like another insect.
I mean.
All of the "exciting tech so-called revolutions" have been software as of late and I'm a little sick of software.
There are problems in miniaturization and robotics that get so little attention and funding. Probably because "robotics is hard" ... but the rewards for making a real advancement would be so much bigger than all of these things people keep calling "revolutionary"
Show me a more tiny motor.
Show me some real magic.
I remember just after the last dot-com boom there was a lot of noise about the "next big thing" being bio-tech.
That didn't last long. I think modern investors are too impatient for any R&D that takes actual time or effort to make material advancements.
With software it's easier to just pretend that that you have something when you don't.
The people who really care about technology just keep working even as the funding swirls in and washes away.
Maybe the market is irrelevant.
I guess what I'm saying here is:
Invest in ants.
Fund ant research. That is the future.
OK i will stop spamming u now.
@futurebird @Klara
1/2
there definitely was a huge expansion in biological *science*. Most of it very genetics-oriented, but there were also expansions in other areas of biology, including paleonotology and ecology.
the trouble is, investors actually don't like science, especially when it investigates environmental problems, which is where much of the biological science ended up going.
well - there's kind of a lot of hardware innovation that got sank into making fixed-point special purpose matrix multipliers ... eargh... what a waste.
@futurebird @Klara I have friends in the #origami community and it will come as no surprise that a large number of them are also academic nerds in origami-adjacent fields. I had an opportunity to go to 6OSME and there were people presenting truly astounding research in material science, not to mention topology (because guess who designs how satellite solar panels pack/unfold).
I find that 1000x more interesting and useful than another machine learning advancement.
myrmepropagandist
Klara
llewelly
Gabriel N
Jocelynephiliac 
Benjamin Reed