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To learn more about the science behind a dog’s ability to find its way home, researchers tracked the 27 hunting dogs representing 10 breeds as they roamed the woods.

Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and wild bees for pollination, so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about food security, notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning crop production would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for native bee species and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K0yNvk8JV-8

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history getting to the space station. Now they’re coming home.

Storage is just as important aboard the International Space Station as it is on Earth. While the space station is about the size of a football field, the living space inside is much smaller than that. Just as you wouldn’t store garden tools in a house when you could store them in a shed outside, astronauts now have a “housing unit” in which they can store tools for use on the exterior of the space station.

On Dec. 5, 2019, a protective storage unit for robotic tools called Robotic Tool Stowage (RiTS) was among the items launched to station as part of SpaceX’s 19^th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. As part of a spacewalk on July 21, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Chris Cassidy installed the “robot hotel” where the tools are stored to the station’s Mobile Base System (MBS), where it will remain a permanent fixture. The MBS is a moveable platform that provides power to the external robots. This special location allows RiTS to traverse around the station alongside a robot that will use the tools it stores.

Carnegie Mellon today showed off new research into the world of robotic navigation. With help from the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the university has designed a semantic navigation that helps robots navigate around by recognizing familiar objects.

The SemExp system, which beat out Samsung to take first place in a recent Habitat ObjectNav Challenge, utilizes machine learning to train the system to recognize objects. That goes beyond simple superficial traits, however. In the example given by CMU, the robot is able to distinguish an end table from a kitchen table, and thus extrapolate in which room it’s located. That should be more straightforward, however, with a fridge, which is both pretty distinct and is largely restricted to a singe room.

“D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, gives us a coherent picture of temporal ontology: In the absence of observers, the arrow of time doesn’t exist — there’s no cosmic flow of time. With that in mind, your timeless cosmic self resides as a hyperdimensional being outside the ordinary space-time dimensionality of your experiential self… In fact, if we are to create high fidelity first-person simulated realities that also may be part of intersubjectivity-based, multiplayer virtualities, D-Theory of Time gives us a clear-cut guiding principle for doing just that.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics.

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The snake bites its tail

Google AI can independently discover AI methods.

Then optimizes them

Continue reading “AutoML-Zero: Evolving Code that Learns” »

In the ’90s, Jeff Bezos rented a house in the Seattle suburbs where he would launch an online bookstore from his garage. That house — billed as the birthplace of Amazon — sold last year for an estimated $1.5 million.