Cambridge researchers have a new lettuce-picking robot. Its success underlines the challenges of automating vegetable picking. (Credit: leungchopan/shutterstock)
A skilled human can pick a head of lettuce every 10 seconds. Just reach down, slice a mature head off its stalk, bag it, toss it in the cart. Easy, right?
Tell that to wannabe veggie-picking robots. For them, it’s actually quite a challenge.
Earlier this week, a team from the University of Cambridge published their lates ...read more
(Credit: LightField Studios/Shutterstock)
The best poker players in the world can cash in on millions of dollars in a game. Played in casinos, poker clubs, private homes and on the internet, the game demands skill and strategy.
Now scientists have created an artificial intelligence (AI) bot that can best even the top human players. And this new AI won at six-player poker. Bots were already dominant at two, or three-player poker, but six players is much harder. The feat represents a ...read more
Hayabusa2 has successfully collected its second sample from the surface of asteroid Ryugu. (Credit: Illustration by Akihiro Ikeshita (C), JAXA)
Hayabusa2’s encounters with asteroid Ryugu have been delightfully action-packed. In February, the Japanese spacecraft collected its first sample by swooping close and firing a bullet into the asteroid’s surface to stir up material it then snagged with a horn-shaped collector. Then, in April, it shot a much larger impactor into Ryugu, creat ...read more
Sargassum covers a beach in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, in April 2019. (Credit: Kamira/shutterstock)
Marine scientist Mengqiu Wang is no stranger to questions about the forecast. The seaweed forecast, that is.
Wang, a researcher at the University of South Florida, is one of the scientists who tracked the largest seaweed bloom in history – an expansive 5,500 mile cluster that stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of West Africa in 2018. It was documented in a report published ...read more
A long-toed bird preserved in amber from Myanmar is the first of its kind. (Credit: Lida Xing)
Smaller than a sparrow, a bird that lived 99 million years ago in what's now Southeast Asia had legs unlike any other avian. The bird's hindlimb features one toe longer than its entire lower leg bone.
Lucky for paleontologists, a piece of amber has preserved the animal's odd anatomy.
Found in Burmese amber and identified as new species, Elektorornis chenguangi is known only from one hindl ...read more
The world's most widely-used personality test isn't relevant for much of the world. (Credit: By Gustavo Frazao / Shutterstock)
A lot of contemporary psychology research is based on the assumption that there are five basic dimensions of personality that define people around the world.
It’s called the “Big Five” personality model, and it assumes that each of our personalities are a unique blend of a handful of traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness ...read more
Voyager 2 shut down an instrument heater, but is still going strong, more than forty years after launch. (Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon/STScI)
Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 are the longest-running spacecraft, still operating at more than 11 billion miles from home, decades after the end of their nominal goal of exploring the outer solar system planets. They still get their power from the same three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, that have served them for years. But with th ...read more
Theories state that some black holes could have formed within the first second of the Big Bang.
(Credit: NASA/ESA and G. Bacon (STScI))
All the black holes that astronomers have seen fall into one
of three categories: stellar-mass black holes, intermediate-mass black holes,
and supermassive black holes. Each is more massive than our Sun and formed at
least hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang, as our universe grew
and evolved.
But there is another type of black hole astronom ...read more
The blueheaded wrasse. (Credit: Leonardo Gonzalez/shutterstock)
Sex transitions are commonplace for several species of fish, and that's consistently puzzling for scientists. How these changes occur on a genetic level is still not fully understood, but a new study published in the journal Science offers some insights.
A team of researchers say they've found that social stressors may play a role in triggering a cascade of hormonal changes in the bluehead wrasse, a small, coral-loving fish ...read more
(Credit: anetta/shutterstock)
Anyone who’s hung out with babies knows how eager they are to communicate, even if they can’t do it very well. One way they do this is with the gesture of pointing, sticking out the index finger to indicate some object without touching it. Babies all over the world point in roughly the same way, starting at around 9 to 14 months. It’s a fundamental part of human interactions, as borne out by so many emojis.
But as important as pointing is to ...read more
