science

The tomtato plant is a recently engineered hybrid plant that grow both tomatoes and potatoes!

Via New Scientist:

It's relatively well understood how the first fish began to move on land and breathe in air, but how vertebrates switched from feeding via suction to evolve a tongue remains unclear. Seeking an answer, Krijn Michel at the University of Antwerp in Belgium and his colleagues looked to the mudskipper.

They captured high-speed X-ray footage of Atlantic mudskippers (Periophthalmus barbarus) out of water pouncing and chowing down on pieces of brown shrimp. The move takes less than half a second but, slowed down 50 times, they spotted that mudskippers carry water in their mouths, which they spit forwards to help grab food then suck it back to swallow, mimicking the action of a tongue.

Founded in 1997 with the ambitious goal to develop a robotic humanoid soccer-playing robot by 2050, the RoboCup is an annual robotics competition that sees robots play soccer against each other in an exercise of AI and applied robotics.

Each year of the competition also features a robot-on-human soccer game. And every once in a while, the robots will score a goal on the humans, just as they did this year in the above GIF.

They've happened in the past, but robot-on-human soccer goals at RoboCup are becoming a bigger deal. It's simply a function of goal quality being so dramatically improved over years before — robot AI is increasingly capable of masterminding some soccer strategy on our flesh-and-blood would-be Beckhams, and then putting that strategy to work effectively.

In a study published by the journal Psychiatry Research, researchers found that decreasing a person's height in a virtual experiment made them feel poorly about themselves, mistrustful, and more fearful that others were trying to hurt them, Reuters reports.

Via The Earth Story:

The cave has already been used in research on Saharan dust transport across the Atlantic since its depths make an ideal sediment trap, and now new work has confirmed the inference from other sources that the Maya civilisation fell after a series of long droughts. They used a series of sediment samples from the epoch of their demise (around 800-1000 CE) and compared the changing ratios of aluminium and titanium, which reveal periods of heavy rainfall from tropical cyclones (the source of most of the water that kept the Mayans alive).

These indicated several long periods of drought at the time of their slow downfall that eked out over two centuries as the inter tropical convergence zone shifted north and south, taking the rain giving cyclones with it. The science is simple, in times of greater rain, more of the volcanic rocks in the area are weathered, and the water flows into the sea dumping its sediment and accompanying titanium with it. Analysing through the core allows the shifting rainfall densities to be tracked over time.