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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine