Category: Humans
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Why did we start farming? The quest for answers in a harsh cosmos…
The reason that humans shifted away from hunting and gathering, and to agriculture - a much more labor-intensive process - has always been a riddle. "A lot of evidence suggests domestication and agriculture doesn't make much sense," says Elic Weitzel, a Ph.D. student in UConn's department of anthropology. "Hunter-gatherers are sometimes working fewer hours a…
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Tools: God. Humans. Apes.
Flexible tool use is closely associated to higher mental processes such as the ability to plan actions. Now a group of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists found out that the apes carefully weighed their options. To do so the apes considered the details such as differences in quality between the two food rewards and the…
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The third eye… Light… Darkness…
Just like land plants, algae use sunlight as an energy source. Many green algae actively move in the water; they can approach the light or move away from it. For this they use special sensors (photoreceptors) with which they perceive light. The decades-long search for these light sensors led to a first success in 2002:…
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Counting. Playing music.
Bees can solve seemingly clever counting tasks with very small numbers of nerve cells in their brains, according to researchers. (1) Scientists have developed a 3D-printed robotic hand which can play simple musical phrases on the piano by just moving its wrist. (2) Everyone feeling so important when counting. But every animal can do it.…
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AI. Games. Intelligence. Humans.
Artificial Intelligence is constantly beating humans in more and more board games. Some years ago, the same team that created that Go-playing bot celebrated something more formidable: an artificial intelligence system that is capable of teaching itself—and winning at—three different games. The AI is one network, but works for multiple games; that generalizability makes it…
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