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Increasing serotonin can change how people learn from negative information, as well as improving how they respond to it, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications.

The study by scientists at the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry and the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Oxford Health Biomedical Research Center (OH BRC) found people with increased serotonin levels had reduced sensitivity to punishing outcomes (for example, losing money in a game) without significantly affecting sensitivity to rewarding ones (winning money).

The study involved 26 participants who were given the drug to increase serotonin, with a further 27 in a control group, who were asked to do a series of tasks measuring learning and behavioral control. State-of-the-art models were then used to understand participant behavior.

Advanced control system positions robot to reshape aerial robotics:

Researchers have developed an overactuated aerial robot capable of full body control enabling it to conduct complex tasks.

Project’s creator talks to Ars about where FreeDOS has been, where it’s going.

Don’t fall into the determinism trap. Everything is, in fact, random, says chemist Lee Cronin.

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Realme will introduce its 300W charging technology at an event in China on August 14th.

Oxford scientists make new solar cell technology discovery which you could soon wear, stick on your mobile or coat your car with.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are now used to capture images and carry out a wide range of missions in outdoor environments. While there are now several UAV designs with different advantages and characteristics, most conventional aerial robots are underactuated, meaning that they have fewer independent actuators than their degrees of freedom (DoF).

Underactuated systems are often more cost-effective and can be controlled using simpler control strategies than overactuated systems (i.e., robots that have more independent actuators than their DoF). Nonetheless, they are often less reliable and not as capable of precisely controlling their position and orientation.

Researchers at Tecnalia’s Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA) in Spain recently developed a new overactuated aerial robot that can independently control the position and orientation of its main body. This robot, introduced in a paper published in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, has four quadrotors that cooperatively carry its central body.

A team of engineers at Google’s DeepMind Project has demonstrated a robot capable of playing amateur-level table tennis (ping-pong). The team has published a paper on the arXiv preprint server describing how they developed the robot, how well it performed at different ability levels and how human players responded to playing with the robot.

Over the past several years, robot scientists have been combining advancements in robot design with artificial intelligence, resulting in the development of robots with ever increasing abilities. In this new effort, the research team has developed an AI-based ping-pong player with the highest performance level ever for a robot.

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