According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, Apple is working on a new smart home doorbell, to compete with the likes of Ring. It’d offer “advanced facial recognition”, and integrate wirelessly with smart home locks.
Category: habitats
Octopuses and their relatives are a new animal welfare frontier − here’s what scientists know about consciousness in these unique creatures
Posted in habitats, health, neuroscience | Leave a Comment on Octopuses and their relatives are a new animal welfare frontier − here’s what scientists know about consciousness in these unique creatures
Considering what’s known about their brain structures, sensory systems and learning capacity, it appears that cephalopods as a group may be similar in intelligence to vertebrates as a group. Since many societies have animal welfare standards for mice, rats, chickens and other vertebrates, logic would suggest that there’s an equal case for regulations enforcing humane treatment of cephalopods.
Such rules generally specify that when a species is held in captivity, its housing conditions should support the animal’s welfare and natural behavior. This view has led some U.S. states to outlaw confined cages for egg-laying hens and crates too narrow for pregnant sows to turn around.
Animal welfare regulations say little about invertebrates, but guidelines for the care and use of captive cephalopods have started to appear over the past decade. In 2010, the European Union required considering ethical issues when using cephalopods for research. And in 2015, AAALAC International, an international accreditation organization for ethical animal research, and the Federation of European Laboratory Animal Science Associations promoted guidelines for the care and use of cephalopods in research. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is currently considering similar guidelines.
Built to full scale, it mimics our anatomy in an incredibly precise way. But it is not yet fully functional.
A muscuskeletal designed for the home.
ATLANTA — An innovative approach to public safety is taking shape on Cleveland Avenue, where Atlanta City Councilman Antonio Lewis has partnered with the 445 Cleveland apartment complex to deploy AI-powered robotic dogs to deter crime.
The robotic dog, named “Beth,” is equipped with 360-degree cameras, a siren, and stair-climbing capabilities. Unlike other artificial intelligence robots like “Spunky” on Boulevard, Beth is monitored in real time by a human operator located in Bogotá, Colombia.
“Our operator who is physically watching these cameras needs to deploy the dog. It’s all in one system, and they are just controlling it, like a video game at home, except it’s not a video game—it’s Beth,” said Avi Wolf, the owner of 445 Cleveland.
Drift Algal Accumulation in Ice Scour Pits Provides an Underestimated Ecological Subsidy in a Novel Antarctic Soft-Sediment Habitat
Posted in habitats | Leave a Comment on Drift Algal Accumulation in Ice Scour Pits Provides an Underestimated Ecological Subsidy in a Novel Antarctic Soft-Sediment Habitat
Ice scouring is one of the strongest agents of disturbance in nearshore environments at high latitudes. In depths, less than 20 m, grounding icebergs reshape the soft-sediment seabed by gouging furrows called ice pits. Large amounts of drift algae (up to 5.6 kg/m2) that would otherwise be transported to deeper water accumulate inside these features, representing an underestimated subsidy. Our work documents the distribution and dimensions of ice pits in Fildes Bay, Antarctica, and evaluates their relationship to the biomass and species composition of algae found within them. It also assesses the rates of deposition and advective loss of algae in the pits. The 17 ice pits found in the study area covered only 4.2% of the seabed but contained 98% of drift algal biomass, i.e., 60 times the density (kg/m2) of the surrounding seabed.
Envision a settlement where the sunlight that beams across Australia buoy on its vast outback powers millions of homes and industries across Southeast Asia. This is how the Australia-Asia PowerLink (AAPowerLink) is being realized: the longest sub-sea cable in the world, linking northern Australia to Singapore, presently is one of the all-time break-through renewable energy developments. By virtue of this mammoth solar farm with its advanced energy transmission technology, this ambitious vision will shape the future energy systems around the world while addressing some critical climate issues.
Taking enormous advantage from its plentiful sunlight, northern Australia houses the world’s biggest Solar Precinct in its Northern Territory gathering between 17–20 GW peak electricity, a size surpassing that of Australia’s largest coal-fired power station.
The project incorporates advanced storage of 36–42 GWh, supplying 800 MW to Darwin and 1.75 GW to Singapore. In addition to reducing emissions and electricity prices for the Darwin region, it creates a renewable energy export marketplace for the region and demonstrates the use of the solar-rich area to meet 15 percent of Singapore’s electricity demand.
In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia.
Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay.
He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century.
From superorganisms to superintelligences, how studying crabs could reveal that we are unintentionally building an artificial world brain.
Gwynne Shotwell discusses the transformative potential of SpaceX’s Starship program for space exploration and colonization, emphasizing its upcoming Flight 6, the importance of Starlink for revenue, and the integration of Tesla technologies for sustainable human habitats on Mars Questions to inspire discussion Launch.