To understand what epigenetics is, we need to understand what genes are and why determine who and what we are. Luckily when I started to dive into this topic, I found this wonderful BBC documentary that is worth watching every minute.
In the video, the story of Överkalix caught my interest and I simply had to research deeper into this topic. Let’s re-collect what we just learned in the video: Continue reading
Als Kind war ich ja Legasthemiker. Ganz schlimm. Vor allem die Brüder Grimm haben mich so gehänselt, dass meine Eltern beschlossen haben, mich über die Sommerferien einer Rosskur zu unterziehen. Buchstabensuppe. Jeden Tag. Hat geholfen. Und sogar meine grammatikalische Fehlstellung beseitigt. Habe nämlich bei vielen Sätzen das Verb. Naja, seitdem habe ich jedenfalls ein Fabel für Sprache und bin deswegen Linguistiker geworden. Bedeutungsemantik spielt eine ganz große Komponente in meinem Leben. Schon lustig, die Zusammenhänge zu sehen wenn man mal seine Biographie Revue kapitulieren lässt.
ich habe soeben meinem schwiegervater das DS203 geschenkt, weil es ein günstiges und kompaktes oszi ist, um die ganzen arduino schaltungen zu debuggen.
dabei haben wir festgestellt, dass es kein deutsches handbuch gibt und ich möchte gerne die deutsche arduino szene unterstützen, also habe ich beschlossen, zummindest wichtige teile des handbuchs zu übersetzen. also grundlage dient dieses englische original. Continue reading
cancer arises from changes in a single cell. these changes are the result of the interaction between a person’s genetic factors and three categories of external agents, including:
about 30% of cancer deaths are due to the five leading behavioral and dietary risks: Continue reading
today i was able free up another 20min of my time to work on the quadruped a bit further and prototyped the moving spine. the goal is to add the lego power functions servo so that i can change the direction of the walk by moving the spine’s angle.
the servo’s not on it right now, but it’s a start, still not sure whether it’ll be stable enough when in action, but we’ll see.
i just had to buy the power functions for lego. my sons were not happy that i had to slaughter one RC car to implant a little arduino brain, so i decided to buy the IR remote control two motors and a servo.
the first little thing i had to build was kind of a standard remote controlled car to get the boys started with it.
turns out that the car can actually go quite fast and that the steering servo can quite keep up with it. with the other motor i built a quadruped that i still had in mind from my childhood and wanted to see how the kids react to it. here’s the first working version:
the boys really like it and although there’s no head and tail they clearly perceive it as an animal.
it actually walks really nicely although the legs on each side walk in sync. there’s probably room for improvement. however, i actually want to build the servo into the spine first so that the bot can walk in circles.