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Evolutionary robotics is a sub-field of robotics aimed at developing artificial “organisms” that can improve their capabilities and body configuration in response to their surroundings, just as humans and animals evolve, adapting their skills and appearance over time. A growing number of roboticists have been trying to develop these evolvable robotic systems, leveraging recent artificial intelligence (AI) advances.

A key challenge in this field is to effectively transfer robots from simulations to real-world environments without compromising their performance and abilities. A paper by researchers at University of York, Edinburgh Napier University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of the West of England and University of Sunderland, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, investigated the impact that hardware can have on the development space of evolvable robots.

“One of the greatest challenges for evolutionary robotics is bringing it into the hardware space and creating real, useful robots,” Mike Angus, a research engineer who designed hardware for the study, told Tech Xplore.

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Summary: New findings challenge our understanding of fruit fly social behaviors. While traditionally thought to rely primarily on chemical receptors for social interactions, the fruit fly’s visual system plays a pivotal role too.

By manipulating the visual feedback neurons in male fruit flies, researchers discovered that their social inhibitions were altered, leading males to court other males. This novel insight can potentially enlighten our comprehension of social behaviors in humans, including those with bipolar disorder and autism.

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Summary: Toddlers as young as 19 months old exhibit natural logical thinking, independent of language knowledge. This ability, manifesting as exclusion by elimination, allows toddlers to make conclusions about unknown realities by discounting known impossibilities.

Through analyzing gaze movement patterns in tests, they discerned this innate reasoning process. The study further found no significant differences between bilingual and monolingual toddlers, suggesting that this logic doesn’t hinge on linguistic experience.

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Astronomers have observed the outer edge of a disk of matter surrounding a feeding supermassive black hole for the first time.

These observations could help scientists better measure the structures that surround these cosmic monsters, understand how black holes feed on those structures and put together how this feeding influences the evolution of galaxies that house such phenomena.

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Male fruit flies don’t usually like each other. Socially, they reject their fellow males and zero in on the females they discern via chemical receptors—or so scientists thought.

New research from Cornell University biologists suggests the fly’s , not just chemical receptors, are deeply involved with their social behaviors. The work sheds light on the possible origin of differences in human social behaviors, such as those seen in people with and autism.

The paper is published in Current Biology.

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National University of Singapore (NUS) scientists demonstrated a conceptual breakthrough by fabricating atomically precise quantum antidots (QAD) using self-assembled single vacancies (SVs) in a two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD).

Quantum dots confine electrons on a nanoscale level. In contrast, an antidot refers to a region characterized by a potential hill that repels electrons. By strategically introducing antidot patterns (“voids”) into carefully designed antidot lattices, intriguing emerge.

These structures exhibit periodic potential modulation to change 2D electron behavior, leading to novel transport properties and unique quantum phenomena. As the trend towards miniaturized devices continue, it is important to accurately control the size and spacing of each antidot at the . This control together with resilience to environmental perturbations is crucial to address technological challenges in nanoelectronics.

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Graphene-based two-dimensional materials have recently emerged as a focus of scientific exploration due to their exceptional structural, mechanical, electrical, optical, and thermal properties. Among them, nanosheets based on graphene-oxide (GO), an oxidized derivative of graphene, with ultrathin and extra wide dimensions and oxygen-rich surfaces are quite promising.

Functional groups containing oxygen, such as carboxy and acidic hydroxy groups, generate dense negative charges, making GO nanosheets colloidally stable in water. As a result, they are valuable building blocks for next-generation functional soft materials.

In particular, thermoresponsive GO nanosheets have garnered much attention for their wide-ranging applications, from smart membranes and surfaces and recyclable systems to hydrogel actuators and biomedical platforms. However, the prevailing synthetic strategies for generating thermoresponsive behaviors entail modifying GO surfaces with thermoresponsive polymers such as poly (N-isopropylacrylamide). This process is complex and has potential limitations in subsequent functionalization efforts.

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