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Luca Turin presents a theory according to which the sense of smell is aroused by molecular vibrations instead of the shape-based compatibility with receivers on the proteins.

Instead of round silk threads this spider produces flat ribbons 40-80 nm in thickness. Still the material is as strong as Kevlar and much more elastic.

Fascinating! New type of spider silk?

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...

I have no idea if an algorithm based on this already exists, but it would certainly be a good one for autonomous AI, I think. I think an algorithm based on this should be able to select his own input parameters and reject them if they are not stimulated any further or integrate them in the algorithm if they are continiously stimulated... this could enable self learning, etc.

By steering the neuron's back to an intermediate activity level the mechanism probably optimizes their efficiency within the network (after all a neuron that fires all the time is just as useless as one that never fires).

pretty interesting! I am still convinced we can do something in this :)

There surely must be possibilities indeed, maybe we should expand it to an RF? By coincidence, I bumped into a quantum optics PhD looking for a post-doc, who would love to give a talk in the team on his research (although very different topic) and I invited him for early January.

Does this have implications for AI algorithms??

I was actually thinking exactly about this question during my bike ride this morning. I am surprised that some codons would need to have a double meaning though because there is already a surplus of codons to translate into just 20-22 proteins (depending on organism). So there should be about 44 codons left to prevent translation errors and in addition regulate gene expression. If - as the article suggests - a single codon can take a dual role, does it so in different situations (needing some other regulator do discern those)? Or does it just perform two functions that always need to happen simultaneously? I tried to learn more from the underlying paper: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6164/1367.full.pdf All I got from that was a headache. :-\

Probably both. Likely a consequence of energy preservation during translation. If you can do the same thing with less genes you save up on the effort required to reproduce. Also I suspect it has something to do with modularity. It makes sense that the gene regulating for "foot" cells also trigger the genes that generate "toe" cells for example. No point in having an extra if statement.

TU Delft researchers have developed the DelFly Explorer, the world's first Micro Air Vehicle with flapping wings that can avoid obstacles by itself. The uniqueness of this achievement lies in the DelFly Explorer's very low weight (20 grams, i.e. a few sheets of paper), and this opens up new possible applications for both smaller and larger MAVs.

I'm kinda curious what you used for processing power there. Is that a DSP?

Looks like the genetic evidence for the interbreding of homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis becomes significant.

"Humans and Neanderthals interbred" - isn't that a bit weird since we call the result of the interbreeding "Humans" as well? This is a bit like saying "Ligers and Tigers interbred".

What is the best (wisest) size for a group of individuals? Couzin and Kao put together a series of mathematical models that included correlation and several cues. In one model, for example, a group of animals had to choose between two options-think of two places to find food. But the cues for each choice were not equally reliable, nor were they equally correlated. The scientists found that in these models, a group was more likely to choose the superior option than an individual. Common experience will make us expect that the bigger the group got, the wiser it would become. But they found something very different. Small groups did better than individuals. But bigger groups did not do better than small groups. In fact, they did worse. A group of 5 to 20 individuals made better decisions than an infinitely large crowd. The problem with big groups is this: a faction of the group will follow correlated cues-in other words, the cues that look the same to many individuals. If a correlated cue is misleading, it may cause the whole faction to cast the wrong vote. Couzin and Kao found that this faction can drown out the diversity of information coming from the uncorrelated cue. And this problem only gets worse as the group gets bigger.

Couzin research was the starting point that co-inspired PaGMO from the very beginning. We invited him (and he came) at a formation flying conference for a plenary here in ESTEC. You can see PaGMO as a collective problem solving simulation. In that respect, we learned already that the size of the group and its internal structure (topology) counts and cannot be too large or too random. One of the project the ACT is running (and currently seeking for new ideas/actors) is briefly described here (http://esa.github.io/pygmo/examples/example2.html) and attempts answering the question :"How is collective decision making influenced by the information flow through the group?" by looking at complex simulations of large 'archipelagos'.

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.

Ancient Earth might have had an extraterrestrial supply of vitamin B3 delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, according to a new analysis. The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of key molecules created in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts.

New form of locomotion found in spiders. They say it could be used for a robot on Mars...don't immediately see how though. :)

True Marek :) The article does quote a Journal Paper though ..... published in zootaxa: a staggering 0.9 impact factor journal!! And watching the video you immediately understand why :)

I of course watched the video and have trouble sleeping since.

I think this is something we/the group can work on for languages? The finding opens the road for simulations I think so can we do something with this? 

A recently published review on insect flight appeared in Review of Modern Physics. It might be of interest to the biomimetics unit.

Can our thoughts be deciphered?

A nice GPU-based framework that is basically an emulator of the brain of the fruit fly. If you need a fruit fly brain - here it comes!