News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
We know about the devastating effect that Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia can have on people – but what’s less clear is how they get started in the brain and what can be done to cure them or prevent them from happening in the first place. Some clues could be found amongst indigenous … Read more
By Emma Hart Ruby Fresson ROBOTS have come a long way in the century since Czech writer Karel Čapek used the word to describe artificial automata. Once largely confined to factories, they are now found everywhere from the military and medicine to education and underground rescue. People have created robots that can make art, plant … Read more
Experiments show that two species of mosquitoes change their behaviour after exposure to five common pesticides, which could make the chemicals less effective Life 17 February 2022 By Chen Ly A female Aedes aegypti mosquito BSIP SA/Alamy Mosquitoes can learn to avoid pesticides after just one exposure to them, which means current pesticides may not … Read more
Captive orangutans that had never seen stone tools could work out how to use them to hit or cut things – but they couldn’t get the hang of making them Life 16 February 2022 By Michael Marshall Orangutans live in trees and rarely encounter stones MERVYN REES/Alamy Stock Photo Captive orangutans that had never seen … Read more
Our life satisfaction is shaped by many things including our genes and relative wealth, but there is now good evidence that you can boost your basic happiness with these key psychological strategies Humans 19 January 2022 By David Robson Tara Moore/Getty Images; Matt Dartford WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY? You probably know the type: those Pollyannas … Read more
To christen the new year in style, IDW Publishing is striking off two-thousand years into the far future with a bold new “Star Trek: Discovery” limited series titled “Adventures in the 32nd Century.” This cat-tastic offering kicks off with a tale of Book’s mysterious feline Grudge and is centered around the daring exploits of The … Read more
By Bencie Woll Simone Rotella Not so long ago, deaf children were punished in the UK for using sign language in the classroom. Recounting his experience in the 1960s, one deaf person told one of my colleagues many years later: “I had a lot of punishments for signing in classrooms… One morning at assembly, I … Read more
Some 60,000 years ago, in what is now western France, a Neanderthal picked up a chunk of hyena femur and a stone tool and began to work. When the task was complete, the bone bore nine notches that were strikingly similar and approximately parallel, as if they were meant to signify something. Francesco d’Errico, an … Read more
Rather than engineering robotic solutions from scratch, some of our most impressive advances have come from copying what nature has already come up with. New research shows how we can extend that approach to robot ‘minds’, in this case by getting a robot to learn the best route out of a maze all by itself – even … Read more
Hundreds of thousands of brain cells in a dish are being taught to play Pong by responding to pulses of electricity – and can improve their performance more quickly than an AI can Mind 17 December 2021 By Michael Le Page Living brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong when they are … Read more