Lifeboat Foundation

Evolutionary biologists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have combined PET scans of modern pigeons along with studies of dinosaur fossils to help answer an enduring question in biology: How did the brains of birds evolve to enable them to fly?

The answer, they say, appears to be an adaptive increase in the size of the cerebellum in some fossil vertebrates. The cerebellum is a brain region responsible for movement and motor control.

The research findings are published in the Jan. 31 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Sun Somei continues sharing behind-the-scenes sneak peeks at their new commercial.

Nice!

XReal’s AR glasses aim to be an affordable alternative to Apple’s pricier Vision Pro, CEO Chi Xu told Bloomberg.

The findings aren’t as simple as increased detection, seen with increases in late-stage cancer for white women and mortality among Black women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si\u003dGp5uRChnBm-OuMqT\u0026v\u003d1Kt58VJCt5c\u0026feature\u003dyoutu.be

RN, BSN, breelyn wilky, MD, denise castillo, tessa mcspadden, stephanie hill, MA, CCRP, and tiffany cull.

How can back-to-back atmospheric rivers impact the economy? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of researchers led by Stanford University investigates the economic toll of back-to-back atmospheric rivers compared to single events. This study holds the potential to help scientists, the public, and city planners better prepare for atmospheric rivers, as they can cause widespread flooding in short periods of time.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2, (MERRA-2) between 1981 and 2021 and computer algorithms to ascertain the economic impact of atmospheric rivers throughout California. The goal was to ascertain how much worse back-to-back atmospheric rivers were compared to single events. The study’s findings discovered that back-to-back atmospheric rivers caused three times greater economic damage than single events, which is also higher when the first atmospheric river exhibits greater strength.

“Our work really shows that we need to consider the likelihood for multiple, back-to-back events for predicting damages, because damage from multiple events could be far worse than from one event alone,” said Dr. Katy Serafin, who is a coastal scientists and assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida and a co-author on the study.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

World Futures Day begins at 12 noon in New Zealand and moves each hour around the planet ending at 12 noon in Hawaii. If you would like to be a Facilitator at 12 noon in your time zone or in others, click here to sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BEdW5rk_MOtGWuY-uGs_…edit#gid=0

Guidelines for facilitating can be downloaded at.

Continue reading “World Futures Day 2024 Call for facilitators” »

Would social robots speaking in a familiar accent or dialect enable you to trust them more, or perhaps perceive them to be smarter? This is what a recent study published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the University of Potsdam in Germany investigated how a social robot’s dialect using a Nao robot impacted its interaction with a human counterpart. This study holds the potential to help scientists and the public better understand behavioral and social norms between humans and robots, especially with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) around the world.

For the study, the researchers conducted a survey-based study with 120 German native speakers who lived either in Berlin or Brandenburg to determine their satisfaction level with a Nao robot speaking German in a Berlin accent, the latter of which is considered working-class and informal accent in Germany. The participants were asked to watch a video of the Nao robot and fill out the questionnaire regarding if they trusted or found the Nao robot to be smarter with the Berlin dialect. In the end, the researchers found a positive correlation between participants who spoke with a Berlin dialect and the Berlin-dialect Nao robot.

“If you’re good at speaking a dialect, you’re more likely to trust a robot that talks the same way,” said Katherine Kühne, who is a PhD student at the University of Potsdam and lead author of the study. “It seems people trust the robot more because they find a similarity.”