(Credit: thunderbrush)
Researchers at MIT have created a psychopath. They call him Norman. He’s a computer.
Actually, that’s not really right. Though the team calls Norman a psychopath (and the chilling lead graphic on their homepage certainly backs that up), what they’ve really created is a monster.
Tell Us What You See
Norman has just one task, and that’s looking at pictures and telling us what he thinks about them. For their case study, the researchers use Rorschach ...read more
Tumors, called fibropapillomatosis, on sea turtles are similar to human cancers. (Credit: Jen Zuber)
Hard shells. Tails. Flippers. Sea turtles differ from humans in many ways, but scientists recently discovered a genetic vulnerability shared by humans and these marine dwelling animals.
Wild animals are increasingly seeing new forms of disease emerge, further threatening vulnerable species like the sea turtle. And now it’s hit our flippered, shelly friends. First documented in Florida ...read more
An artist’s reconstruction of the 360 million-year-old Late Devonian world in which the first known polar tetrapods lived. Tutusius, right, eyes potential prey while Umzantsia, left, dives deeper into the brackish estuary the animals called home. All animals and plants shown have been found as fossils at the same South African site. (Credit: Maggie Newman)
Hey, tetrapod! Yeah, I’m talking to you. There’s a big update to the story of the earliest tetrapods — the first fou ...read more
A selfie of the Curiosity Rover taken on Vera Rubin Ridge. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
In a much-hyped press conference held on Thursday, NASA announced its Curiosity rover had uncovered new evidence of methane — a potential sign of life — as well as signs of organic compounds buried in ancient mudstone.
The space agency did not say it had found evidence of alien life. However, these new results are still tantalizing.
Curiosity landed on Mars back in 2012 and it’s been sl ...read more
(Credit: In The Light Photography/Shutterstock)
Tired of playing it safe? Go suck a lemon! No, really. A new paper published in Scientific Reports says tasting something sour is linked to more risk-taking behavior in people.
Researchers from the University of Sussex in England recruited 168 volunteers from both the United Kingdom and Vietnam. The team gave them a taste of just one of various solutions that fell into the five main taste groups of humans: bitter, salty, sour, sweet and the ...read more
The U.S. military logo for Project Maven, also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team. Credit: U.S. Department of Defense
Google recently bowed to employee protests by deciding to wind down involvement in a U.S. military initiative called Project Maven next year. The Pentagon project focuses on harnessing deep learning algorithms–specialized machine learning technologies often described as “artificial intelligence”–to a ...read more
Satellite imagery and flight tracking show the plane trying to evade a storm that ultimately destroyed its nose and smashed the windshield
Two views from the GOES-16 weather satellite show powerful storms boiling up over Texas and New Mexico. An infrared view is on the left, and visible imagery is on the right. The path of American Airlines Flight 1897 — which was struck by hail and forced to make an emergency landing — is included. Please click to watch the ...read more
(Credit: NASA)
Do you ever feel like there just isn’t enough time in the day? Well, the moon agrees with you — it’s actively slowing the Earth’s rotation, stretching out the length of our days little by little.
A study published on June 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that days on Earth lasted just 18 hours some 1.4 billion years ago, and that we can thank the moon’s gradual retreat for our ever-lengthening day.
It’s believed t ...read more
