Star Trek depicts and does AI like no other Hollywood TV show or movie franchise. From the original series where Captain Kirk battles Richard Daystrom’s rog…
Category: entertainment
Scientists invent new board games to reveal how we tackle the unknown
Playing board games can be fun, challenging, infuriating and a great way to pass the time. They can also help scientists understand how we solve new problems.
In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers created brand-new strategy games to see how players reason before tackling games they have no experience with. The goal of this research was to see how people react when they are thrown into an unfamiliar situation.
Most previous studies focused on how experts master games they already know or how massive supercomputers calculate millions of moves. What was missing was how everyday people reason about a game before they play it, which could provide insights into how we make quick decisions about situations we’ve never encountered before.
Biodegradation of polyethylene by the marine fungus Parengyodontium album
Year 2024 Marine fungus that eats plastic.
Plastic pollution in the marine realm is a severe environmental problem. Nevertheless, plastic may also serve as a potential carbon and energy source for microbes, yet the contribution of marine microbes, especially marine fungi to plastic degradation is not well constrained. We isolated the fungus Parengyodontium album from floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre and measured fungal-mediated mineralization rates (conversion to CO2) of polyethylene (PE) by applying stable isotope probing assays with 13 C-PE over 9 days of incubation. When the PE was pretreated with UV light, the biodegradation rate of the initially added PE was 0.044%/day. Furthermore, we traced the incorporation of PE-derived 13 C carbon into P. album biomass using nanoSIMS and fatty acid analysis.
Episode 1 — Rethinking Flight From First Principles
Episode 1 – Rethinking Flight From First Principles.
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Blender.
AIE Webinar — Making Horsegirls
Go behind the scenes of the acclaimed independent film Horsegirls with the creative team that brought this remarkable story to life. Join moderator, Devin Morrissey as he is joined by writer and director Lauren Meyering, lead actress Lillian Carrier, producers Michael Sherman, Mackenzie Breeden, and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Autism Sensitivity Coordinator Chloe Estelle for an engaging conversation about the filmmaking process—from developing the story and creating authentic performances to producing, promoting, and ensuring an inclusive production environment.
Whether you’re interested in filmmaking, storytelling, or advancing authentic representation of neurodivergent individuals in entertainment, this webinar offers a unique opportunity to hear directly from the talented team behind Horsegirls.
Video games might modestly sharpen your memory and other cognitive skills, review suggests
Because video games are a regular part of many people’s everyday lives, researchers have spent a lot of time trying to determine whether they are beneficial or detrimental to brain health. A new study, published in Acta Psychologica, has compiled 20 years of research on how video games affect cognitive abilities into a single systematic review and meta-analysis. This comprehensive study indicates that video games may provide some helpful cognitive benefits to gamers.
On the face of it, it might seem like video games fall into the “brain rot” category of entertainment, similar to endless social media scrolling or watching television. Yet most gamers would agree that video games involve at least some degree of skill, and many researchers would agree, too.
In fact, the interactive nature of video games has positioned them as a potential tool for cognitive training, helping to exercise core mental skills like memory, attention, self-control, spatial reasoning and broader problem-solving.
Even Hideo Kojima is afraid that ‘digital data will no longer be owned by individuals’ and that access to art that we love ’may suddenly be cut off‘
“The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep videogames playable after they stop being provided commercially. This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations.”
Players are (quite rightly) worried that without physical media their beloved games, or any kind of art, can be ripped away from them at a moment’s notice. “We will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved,” Kojima adds. “I would be a have-not. That’s what I’m afraid of. This is not greed.”
