Seeing human-like robots, dolls, and AI-generated faces can trigger eerie, put-off feelings towards the figure, a phenomenon known as the uncanny valley. Though these figures look almost human, there is just something slightly off about them. It could be the unblinking eyes, unnatural stillness, or — for AI-generated figures — poorly synced facial and lip movements. Recently, researchers from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, have noticed AI-generated avata ...read more
Fire is one of the building blocks of human life. Whether for providing warmth, cooking food, casting light, or assisting in the creation of the first tools, fire has been responsible for much of the progress our ancestors made that helped modern humanity get to where we are today.If we want to make a fire, it’s simple. Grab some wood from the corner store, set it up in your backyard fire pit, and strike a match. But how did our Ice Age ancestors do it? There actually isn’t much in the archa ...read more
Dean Cliver, an expert in food microbiology at the University of California Davis, was the OG of cutting-board research. In the early 1990s, Cliver, who died in 2011, and his colleagues set out to discover how home cooks could clean their wooden cutting boards so that wooden boards would be as safe to use as the plastic variety. But the results of their experiments showed that the plastic boards weren’t necessarily safer than the wooden ones. Or to be more precise, under the same experimental ...read more
Patterns exist all around the world, creating unforgettable designs exhibited by organisms and acts of nature. Some of these designs even share surprising connections, like a spiral shape seen in both marine mollusks and a newly discovered structure of light that moves like a vortex. A recent study found that the movement of this light vortex — called an optical rotatum — occurs in a way that is very similar to the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical concept behind many of nature’s most i ...read more
If one were to eat substances from blandest to nastiest, the bracket fungus, Amaropostia stiptica, would sit at the farthest end of the unpleasant spectrum.A team of scientists determined just what makes that particular fungus so aggressively distasteful, a group of researchers report in the Journal of Agricultural Food Chemistry. They identified a compound called oligoporin D in the bracket fungus that activates the human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46. The substance is so strong that even barel ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine