Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log… Continue reading Animal Personalities Can Trip Up Science, But There’s a Solution
Tag: Quantum Stuff
Only Computers Can Solve This Map-Coloring Problem From the 1800s
One of the great episodes in the history of mathematics began on October 23, 1852. In a letter to Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Augustus De Morgan wrote, “A student of mine asked me today to give him a reason for a fact which I did not know was a fact — and do not yet.”… Continue reading Only Computers Can Solve This Map-Coloring Problem From the 1800s
How a DNA ‘Parasite’ May Have Fragmented Our Genes
Clément Gilbert, an evolutionary genomicist at Paris-Saclay University, thinks the aquatic bias in introners is an echo of what his group found in horizontal gene transfer events. In 2020, their work uncovered nearly 1,000 distinct horizontal transfers involving transposons that had occurred in over 300 vertebrate genomes. The vast majority of these transfers happened in… Continue reading How a DNA ‘Parasite’ May Have Fragmented Our Genes
Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying?
Explore One question for David Krakauer, president of the Sante Fe Institute for complexity science where he explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. Photo courtesy of David Krakauer Does GPT-4 really understand what we’re saying? Yes and no,” is the answer to that. In my new paper with computer scientist Melanie Mitchell,… Continue reading Does GPT-4 Really Understand What We’re Saying?
What Does ChatGPT Know About Science?
Unless you’ve been completely off the grid lately, you’ve heard about or met ChatGPT, the popular chatbot that first went online in November 2022 and was updated in March. Type in a question, comment, or command, as I’ve done, and it quickly produces a human-seeming response in good English for any topic. The system comes… Continue reading What Does ChatGPT Know About Science?
Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians
Explore When, at the dawn of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed western North America, they encountered a wondrous bestiary: the “fleet and delicately formed” coyote, the “bear of enormous size” which we call the grizzly. Yet few creatures impressed them more than the “Buzzard or Vulture” their party captured near the… Continue reading Humans Are Overzealous Whale Morticians
Record-Breaking Robot Highlights How Animals Excel at Jumping
And if there is life on other planets, it may have new things to teach us about jumping. At lower gravities, jumping could become easier and faster than flying, so organisms might evolve “Mario-like jumping characters,” Sutton said. Alien life might also have muscles that work differently, perhaps with their own ratchet-like solutions to energy… Continue reading Record-Breaking Robot Highlights How Animals Excel at Jumping
Climate Change Actions Are Far More Popular Than People in U.S. Realize
A multibillion-dollar slate of moderate climate-mitigation measures in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act has been met so far with general public approval. But a broader reaction to the historic federal action underlies the discourse: What took you so long? A survey-based study published on Tuesday suggests that a shared delusion among nearly all Americans… Continue reading Climate Change Actions Are Far More Popular Than People in U.S. Realize
Chaos Researchers Can Now Predict Perilous Points of No Return
Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough timescales, most real-world… Continue reading Chaos Researchers Can Now Predict Perilous Points of No Return
New Tool Helps Predict Where Wildfire Smoke Will Blow
Better satellite coverage of wildfires and improved climate models are giving scientists a more accurate view of smoke plumes as they drift across the country. These kinds of advances, they say, can help provide earlier warnings to residents endangered by wildfire smoke. A breakthrough in the field occurred during the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in… Continue reading New Tool Helps Predict Where Wildfire Smoke Will Blow