Turings paper sought to answer the question of how an embryo made up of identical cells can transform into something with specialist parts and a specific shape. His idea rested on the existence of excitatory agents that cause reactions to happen and inhibitory agents to suppress them. This allows patterns of chemically different cells to form in the embryo of complex organisms, including ourselves. The excitatory/inhibitory model is now well established, but despite the enormous progress in biochemistry since the 1950s, experimental evidence of the theory as a whole has only appeared now, in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By operating in an abiological system, scientists removed the possibility of distortions from other factors and produced all six of the patterns Turing predicted. As he anticipated, the differentiated structures also change size in response to osmosis. The scientists propose that the findings may be useful for growing, rather than building, soft robots, which would then be powered computer codes developed from Turings more famous activity.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 14:58:04 +0000
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