Summary: A bee’s “waggle dance”, an intricate series of motions that signals the location of critical resources to other bees, is improved by social learning and can be culturally transmitted.
Source: UCSD
Passing down shared knowledge from one generation to the next is a hallmark of culture and allows animals to rapidly adapt to a changing environment.
Roboticists have developed many advanced systems over the past decade or so, yet most of these systems still require some degree of human supervision. Ideally, future robots should explore unknown environments autonomously and independently, continuously collecting data and learning from this data.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently created ALAN, a robotic agent that can autonomously explore unfamiliar environments. This robot, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv and set to be presented at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), was found to successfully complete tasks in the real-world after a brief number of exploration trials.
Continue reading “A robot that can autonomously explore real-world environments” »
FallenKingdomReads’ Beginner’s Guide to The Dark Tower by Stephen King
The Dark Tower is a series of novels written by the American author Stephen King. The series is a blend of several genres, including dark fantasy, horror, and western. The series follows the journey of the protagonist, Roland Deschain, as he seeks the Dark Tower, a mythical structure that is said to be the center of all universes.
In the Saudi Arabian desert, the Al Naslaa rock formation looks completely unnatural. Its perfectly vertical split remains a mystery.
Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately.
Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated memory retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures how remembered faces resemble newly encountered faces—or the deviation from the target in archery.
“What our findings say is that people might accept errors by misidentifying someone as a celebrity in the interest of securing a ‘celebrity sighting,’” said Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology, who led the study that appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “Our study explains why people are good and bad at spotting celebrities and highlights the importance of assessing both memory imprecision and bias in memory performance.”
FallenKingdomReads’ list of 7 Hard Science Fiction Books That Will Make You Smarter.
Hard science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that prioritizes scientific accuracy and explores scientific concepts in depth. These books often require a solid understanding of scientific principles and can be a great way to learn about complex scientific concepts in an engaging and accessible way.
Here are seven hard science fiction books that will make you smarter.
Researchers challenge their own assumptions to improve sea-level rise predictions.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.
Delta is a backyard wilderness listening device to bring you the sounds of nature we usually miss in cities.
The founder of Rainforest Connection whose listening devices capture jungle sounds, comes Delta, a device for hearing nature in the city.
Slimy biofilms made up of bacterial and eukaryotic life forms have taken over an abandoned, flooded uranium mine in Germany.
