The AI program was way less cute than a real baby. But like a baby, it learned its first words by seeing objects and hearing words.
After being fed dozens of hours of video of a growing tot exploring his world, an artificial intelligence model could more often than not associate words — ball, cat and car, among others — with their images, researchers report in the Feb. 2 Science. This AI feat, the team says, offers
Red knots in their breeding plumage feed at Golfo de Santa Clara, Mexico. Julián Garcia Walther/Undark
This story was originally published by Undark and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Twice a year, members of a subspecies of red knots—salmon-colored sandpipers—migrate thousands of miles between their wintering grounds in northern Mexico and breeding sites in the Arctic tundra, encountering myriad obstacles along the way. Thought to migrate during both day and night, brightly lit cities likely disrupt
WASHINGTON — Brain scans could be used to predict how teenagers’ mental health will fare during a stressful time, an analysis that spanned the COVID-19 pandemic suggests.
The findings, presented November 13 in a news briefing at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, may help explain why some people succumb to stress while others are more resilient.
For a lot of research, “the study happens, and you report on the results, and that’s about it,” says Margot Wagner,
In May, a star in the Pinwheel galaxy exploded in just the right place at nearly the right time for astronomers to unravel details of its death. It was the closest supernova to go off in the last five years.
Astronomers have long been fascinated with these stellar explosions, which signal the end of life for the universe’s biggest stars. Not only are they dramatic — a supernova can shine 5 billion times as bright as our sun — but
Jeopardy!’s showrunner, Michael Davies, revealed that the game show will move forward with season 40 by reusing old questions and former contestants amid the ongoing writers’ strike.
“I believe, principally, that it would not be fair to have new contestants making their first appearance on the Alex Trebek Stage, doing it with non-original material, or as we’ll talk about a combination of non-original material and material that was written pre-strike,” said Davies on the Monday, August 7,
Although no one ever taught it to you, odds are that if you solve a lot of crossword puzzles, you’re fluent in the grammar of crosswords. Most crossword enthusiasts could explain that nouns clue nouns, verbs clue verbs, and so on. They also come to know—subconsciously—that answers must be interchangeable with their clues in a sentence, even for categories too particular to have a name.
These unspoken tenets can be deceptively complex. Consider how GALORE could be clued by “aplenty,”
The idea that one of Britain’s oldest cathedrals could help unlock the secrets of life the solar system may sound far-fetched.
But that is exactly what scientists are hoping for after embarking on a project to collect extraterrestrial dust which has fallen on ancient roofs from space.
It is hoped that these particles, which come from comets and meteorites, may hold clues to how life formed on Earth.
A team of experts drew up a list of 13 cathedrals they
Anyone who has spent time in Long Valley, California, this past year, may have noticed a shift in the Hot Creek springs and pools.
The creek has, visitors say, taken on a more malign bubbling in recent months —a new hot water feature even popping up on the shore of the creek.
For many, it was a sign that the ancient volcano was preparing to blow.
But this is not the
Though masturbation is common across the animal kingdom, it seems, at its face, to be an evolutionary paradox: Why would an animal waste time, energy and reproductive resources on self-pleasure instead of copulating with a partner?
Studies on individual species have found some explanations. Low-ranking Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), for example, masturbate to keep their sperm fresh for when they get a rare chance to mate. But the questions of when and why masturbation evolved in the first
