Humans

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and act like humans. AI technologies enable computers to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.A study led by a professor from the University of Central Florida has identified six challenges that must be overcome in order to improve our relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) and guarantee its…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is training four…

In 2011 Marcus Perlman saw a YouTube video of a gorilla named Zola spinning in circles while playing in a water puddle at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta. In 2017 he noticed Zola again, this time in a viral video from the Dallas Zoo in Texas. Zola whirled in a plastic blue kiddie pool as the water splashed up around him. Perlman, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England, had done research on communicative gesturing, and the YouTube video sparked his curiosity about this form of…

Some 500 years ago, a city-living, human-biting form of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti began to hitch rides out of West African ports during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It spread to the Americas and then to Asia, causing centuries of disease outbreaks to ripple through the colonial world. Today, its globally invasive descendants act as the main disease vector for the yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya, and dengue viruses, collectively causing hundreds of…

Image: DiMedia (Shutterstock)Well, it was a great run. Gone are the days of waking up two minutes before your first meeting, and checking your inbox in your pajamas according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who posit that the pandemic-era work-from-home boom is finally fizzling out. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics published last week, 72.5 % of private sector workplaces had “little or no telework” in August and September 2022—a figure that is up 12.5% from July to September 2021.…

After a mishap involving her office’s slick new printer, aging pencil-pusher Marlène gets called out by her smarmy young boss. Perhaps, he suggests, if she can’t evolve with the technology, she should take herself out of the workforce entirely. As sci-fi short Seniors 3000 reveals, there is another, far wilderway!Shared by Short of the Week, this 16-minute charmer from Julien David uses both 2D and 3D animation to weave a fantastical tale that explores some real-world themes, including ageism, the generation gap,…

Even a fisher’s yarn would sell a whale shark short. These fish—the biggest on the planet—stretch up to 18 meters long and weigh as much as two elephants. The superlatives don’t end there: Whale sharks also have one of the longest vertical ranges of any sea creature, filter feeding from the surface of the ocean to nearly 2000 meters down into the inky abyss. Swimming between bright surface waters and the pitch black deep sea should strain the shark’s eyes, making…

Teleoperating a physical robot could become an important job in future, according to Sanctuary AI, based in Vancouver, Canada. The company also believes that this might provide a way to train robots how to perform tasks that are currently well out of their (mechanical) reach, and imbue machines with a physical sense of the world some argue is needed to unlock human-level artificial intelligence.Industrial robots are powerful, precise, and mostly stubbornly stupid. They cannot apply the kind of precision and responsiveness…

Example of a long-tailed macaque using a stone tool to access food. Credit: Lydia V. LunczMacaques unintentionally created stone fragments that bear a resemblance to some of the earliest stone artifacts crafted by early hominins.The study focuses on fresh analyses of stone tools employed by long-tailed macaques in Thailand’s Phang Nga National Park. These primates utilize stone tools to open tough-shelled nuts, frequently causing their hammerstones and anvils to break in the process.The collection of fragmented stones…

The species Homo sapiens evolved some 300,000 years ago and has come to dominate Earth unlike any species that came before. But how long can humans last? Eventually humans will go extinct. At the most wildly optimistic estimate, our species will last perhaps another billion years but end when the expanding envelope of the sun swells outward and heats the planet to a Venus-like state. But a billion years is a long time. One billion years ago life on Earth consisted of microbes. Multicellular life didn’t make its debut…