March 14, 2024: Happy pi day! We're covering smart robots, Voyager 1's gobbledygook and CRISPR to prevent avian flu. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | It's pi day! Pi is an irrational number that equals the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which equals 3.14159…and continues infinitely. In 2022, Google Cloud calculated pi out to one hundred trillion digits. That's a lot of pi. Over the years there have been competitions to memorize the sequence of numbers that make up pi. In this fun episode of Science, Quickly, you can listen to a lullaby by science writer Devin Powell, who composed the song to help him remember the digits. It's 3:14 minutes long (see what he did there?).
How it works: To write the Lullapi (the song's official name), Powell used one note on the musical scale for each number, in the same way that the musical The Sound of Music used "Do, Re, Mi" to match song notes with words. In that way he created an entire song inspired by sequences of numbers in pi.
Why this is cool: Memory aids like this can help some people memorize vast sequences of numbers, or recall extensive and detailed information. By far the most widely used mnemonic device is the method of loci (MoL), a technique devised in ancient Greece. It involves picturing highly familiar routes through a building (your childhood home) or a town (your way to work) and mentally placing your important items at notable spots along the route. | | | Credit: SVTeam/Getty Images; Kelso Harper/Scientific American | | | Several robotics research groups are incorporating the impressive powers of ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) into their robots. For example, one Florida company built a robot dog to patrol and inspect industrial sites. It can speak and understand a limited vocabulary specific to the context of its workplace. At Google, researchers instructed an LLM to give commands to a robot on wheels to fetch and deliver items based on human requests.
Why this is interesting: Robots excel at doing the same actions over and over again in tightly constrained environments. They are unable to adapt to new environments and have nowhere near human flexibility and coping abilities. LLMs could give robots a "mental" boost and enable them to respond to the world. As one 2022 paper puts it, "the robot can act as the language model's 'hands and eyes,' while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task."
What the experts say: As of now, installing an LLM inside a robot creates a lopsided system. "The language understanding is amazing, and the robots suck," says Stefanie Tellex, a roboticist at Brown University who works on robots' grasp of language. "The robots have to get better to keep up." | | | • Avian flu has killed millions of chickens worldwide. In a recent paper, scientists showed that, using the gene editing tool CRISPR, they could alter the chicken's genetic code to make the birds more resistant to the disease. But given the genetic variability of the flu virus, and the variability of bird species, this tool is unlikely to curb bird flu, write veterinary doctors Carol Cardona and Michelle Kromm. "We think there are too many unpredictable outcomes related to combating avian influenza with CRISPR-modified chickens to expect this technology will be a solution to this destructive disease," they say. | 4 min read | | | Circles are everywhere in nature. Celestial bodies, eddies in rivers, tree rings and raindrops all take that wonderfully symmetrical shape. The circle inspired wheels and gears, and the mathematical study of the shape led to geometry and even astronomy. We gift each other rings to signify relationship status, sports teams circle-up before important games, and ancient artists painted sacred figures adorned in halos. Yet for all its ubiquity and exaltation, mysteries about circles continue to fascinate mathematicians after thousands of years. Like the shape itself, our circular fascination seems to have no end. | Thank you for being part of our circle of science-curious readers! Email me anytime: newsletters@sciam.com. I read all your notes and respond to many. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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