Reports of orcas launching attacks on yachts have made waves in the news recently. This novel behavior – orcas ramming boats – has spawned a flurry of orca memes and prompted speculation about the root of this strange behavior.While we still don’t know why orcas are attacking boats, the phenomenon spotlights a fascinating aspect of the animal world: the emergence and spread of culture.Do Animals Have Culture?Culture, once thought to be a unique characteristic of humans, is actually found ...read more
In this summer of continuing extreme weather and devastating impacts, Canada has been particularly hard hit.As of Sunday, July 16, 881 wildfires were blazing there, according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. Since the start of the year, 4,157 fires have burned across nearly 39,000 square miles of land — an area slightly bigger than the State of Maine. That tally of torching — the result of a continuing combination of unusual heat, drought, and dry lightning — has a ...read more
Two-million-year-old teeth (four sets, in fact) tell new stories in a newly posted preprint paper that strips them of enamel and analyzes what the proteins have to say. This "proteomic" approach, which relied on the more rugged protein molecules instead of fragile DNA, revealed their relationship to the wider family tree of early humans.Taken from a sediment-filled cave in South Africa, the fossilized teeth once formed the dentition of an ancient hominin, Paranthropus robustus.This species was d ...read more
You know about Einstein, and you’re no doubt familiar with Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, but there are plenty of famous physicists alive today that you should know about if you don’t already. Here are a few worth getting to know. 1. Alan GuthA cosmologist and particle physicist, Guth is most famous for developing the idea of cosmic inflation, or an inflationary universe. This work helped nail down the details and fill in some of the gaps in the Big Bang theory. Guth’s 1997 book, ...read more
An individual’s personality can often shine in short texts and emails. The same also seems to be true of Large Language Model AI systems like Bard, ChatGPT and others. Hundreds of millions of people have discovered that in short conversations, these AI systems can come across as authoritative, sometimes as arrogant and occasionally as deranged. And that raises an interesting question: is it possible to reliably measure the characteristics of these AI personalities and then modify them in a way ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
