Category: Biology Philosophy
-
Going home…
New research indicates mantis shrimp use path integration to find their way back to their burrows after leaving to seek food or mates. That means they can track their distance and direction from their starting point. A series of creative experiments revealed that to do that, they rely on a hierarchy of cues from the…
-
Walk. Just walk.
Researchers have developed an AI-powered, smart insole that instantly turns any shoe into a portable gait-analysis laboratory. (1) Walk. There is no point in analyzing your gait. For that would need you to stop walking. Walk. At the end you will reach the end. And at the end you will stop and die. (Like Olson…
-
Touching with light…
In a lab at Columbia University, engineers have developed a strange yet clever way for robots to feel: Let’s call it the finger of light. It’s got a 3D-printed skeleton embedded with 32 photodiodes and 30 adjacent LEDs, over which is laid a squishy skin of reflective silicone, which keeps the device’s own light in…
-
Brain. Skin. Thinking. Not being.
Brain activity has an unmistakable signature: the firing of neurons, as brain cells relay information to one another through the triggered release of chemical neurotransmitters, which are received by the long, branching dendrites of neighbouring cells. This microscopic ritual is distinctive, but it doesn’t belong only to neurons. Scientists have now found bursts of neuron-like…
-
Ancestral asymmetries…
The left and right side of the brain are involved in different tasks. This functional lateralization and associated brain asymmetry are well documented in humans, but little is known about brain asymmetry in our closest living relatives, the great apes. Using endocasts (imprints of the brain on cranial bones), scientists now challenge the long-held notion…
You must be logged in to post a comment.