Group items tagged

birds in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl are adapting to -- and may even be benefiting from -- long-term exposure to radiation, ecologists have found. The study, published in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology, is the first evidence that wild animals adapt to ionizing radiation, and the first to show that birds which produce most pheomelanin, a pigment in feathers, have greatest problems coping with radiation exposure.

I Knew!!! I Knew!!! They are all around. I always though Marek was one :) "I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I'm not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist"

His rival putin on the other hand... He got into an ultra-light aircraft to guide birds during their migration - from the video it seems that only very few birds think he is credible (as a guide). --> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/9524900/Flying-Vladimir-Putin-leads-birds-on-first-ever-migration-in-latest-publicity-stunt.html

Yup. My structural perfection is matched only by my hostility.

Song birds don't eat in the morning because the added weight makes them slow and easy prey for other birds. They look for good food places during the early day and come back to eat as late as possible. Correlation of this behavior with the number of predators has been found as well...

A good occasion to get the idea out of the idea pool...?

Innovative individuals are less flexible learners while innovative species are also at the same time more flexible.

A Hungarian team has created the first drones that can fly as a coordinated flock. The researchers watched as the ten autonomous robots took to the air in a field outside Budapest, zipping through the open sky, flying in formation or even following a leader, all without any central control.

old news, but wow .... Nature is becoming more and more like a magazine and less and less a scientific journal. This stuff is highly irrelevant but to the group that did it.

this is not a nature paper but just an article on their website - the papers they provide as references are all old

Engineering and improving great tits so they can better withstand climate change. By selectively breeding and genetically engineering the birds scientists try to keep the time when the birds produce offspring in sync with the changing availability of food sources in spring (mainly grubs).

the Alaskan bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica baueri) (Figure 1), makes its eight-day, 11,000-km autumn migration from Alaska to New Zealand in one step, with no stopovers to rest or refuel. This roughly doubles the previous maximum direct flight distance in birds, challenging experts to square this remarkable marathon migration with our understanding of aerodynamic theory and endurance physiology.

What if heuristic algorithms (PSO, DE, ...) do not actually simulate flocking birds or school gish beahviour ?!

It is a bout a commercial aircraft which encounterd a bird swarm during flight and was forced to go back to the departure point.

Web site of the open-source database on bird migration

"A new Angry Birds-style game is set to help launch a new understanding of quantum science. Some find the concepts of quantum science confusing or unintuitive. Einstein even called quantum effects "spooky." To help people better understand some of the core concepts of quantum science, the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo is launching a game - the Quantum Cats" Looking forward to see the ACT winning the Quantum Cats competition :)

remember the discussion I tried to trigger in the team a few weeks ago ...

I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish .... "In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube. Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable. Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games. In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans. Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments." Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it. Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more

why are video games so much different than collecting stamps or spotting birds or planes ? One could say they are all just hobbies

Robotics scientists at TED unleash co-ordinated drones that mimic bird behavior to play the James Bond theme song At TED2012, the University of Pennsylvania's deputy dean for education Vijay Kuma showed off his latest accomplishment in robotics: a co-ordinated rendition of the James Bond theme song.

The enormous solar plant-jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google-opened for business today ... well yesterday, but still impressive!

impressive pictures - looking at the 2nd to last and 4th to last one, I am wondering how this distributed individually control of the mirrors works - and idea?

Machine learning obviously. Most likely neural networks :P On the other hand: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-is-killing-birds-meltin-1525107821

"Cuckoos have a bad reputation as home-wreckers, taking over the nests of other birds and killing their chicks. But one species benefits its hosts by producing a smelly fluid that repels predators. "Cuckoos are not always the villains we think they are," says Ros Gloag of the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the study."

So they not only take over part of the nest, but also crap all over the place? Then again, if that is the prize to pay for safety, it might well be worth the inconvenience.. :)

Always check your units! Your units are wrong! cried the teacher. Your church weighs six joules - what a feature! And the people inside Are four hours wide, And eight gauss away from the preacher! How Fermi could estimate things! Like the well-known Olympic ten rings, And the one-hundred states, And weeks with ten dates, And birds that all fly with one... wings. For things moving free or at rest, Observe what the first law does best. It defines a key frame, Inertial by name, Where the second law then is expressed.