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Categories: Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Paleontology: Climate

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A new gelatinous robot that crawls, powered by nothing more than temperature change and clever design, brings 'a kind of intelligence' to the field of soft robotics.

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Sediment cores obtained from Eifel maar sites provide insight into the presence of large Ice Age mammals in Central Europe over the past 60,000 years: Overkill hypothesis not confirmed. Herds of megafauna, such as mammoth and bison, have roamed the prehistoric plains in what is today's Central Europe for several tens of thousands of years. As woodland expanded at the end of the last Ice Age, the numbers of these animals declined and by roughly 11,000 years ago, they had completely vanished from this region. Thus, the growth of forests was the main factor that determined the extinction of such megafauna in Central Europe.

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Changes in Earth's orbit that favored hotter conditions may have helped trigger a rapid global warming event 56 million years ago. Researchers found the shape of Earth's orbit, or eccentricity, and the wobble in its rotation, or precession, favored hotter conditions at the onset of the PETM and that these orbital configurations together may have played a role in triggering the event.

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A new model describes how biological or technical systems form complex structures equipped with signal-processing capabilities that allow the systems to respond to stimulus and perform functional tasks without external guidance.

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Self-driving cars need to implement efficient, effective, and accurate detection systems to provide a safe and reliable experience to its users. To this end, an international research team has now developed an end-to-end neural network that, in conjunction with the Internet-of-Things technology, detects object with high accuracy (> 96%) in both 2D and 3D. The new method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods and the way to new 2D and 3D detection systems for autonomous vehicles.

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In a survey and study of hospital employee volunteers, researchers found that a low-cost computer vision system was feasible and well received.

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By assessing so-called 'flavors' of El Nino events in past climate records and model simulations, researchers have a clearer picture of El Nino patterns over the past 12,000 years and are able to more accurately project future changes and impacts of this powerful force.

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Researchers have been studying the effects of the sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred about 8,200 years ago, the so-called 8.2-kiloyear event, with the help of mineral deposits present in White Moon Cave in Northern California. New indications show that oscillations between extreme wetness and aridity in California were closely linked with the occurrence of wildfires. The researchers have concluded that such events are likely to become more common in the face of human-induced climate change.

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Engineers have created a soft robot capable of detecting when and where it was damaged -- and then healing itself on the spot.

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How is the weather changing as a consequence of global warming? Climate archives provide valuable glimpses into past climate changes, especially into the processes that drive our planet from one climate setting to the next. For humans and ecosystems, however, time spans of just weeks to years, which are the scope of weather events, are often most important. Using an newly developed and tested analytical method these two aspects have now been merged, and the impacts of the most recent global warming on seasonal temperature fluctuations have been described.

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Two-million-year-old DNA has been identified -- opening a 'game-changing' new chapter in the history of evolution. Microscopic fragments of environmental DNA were found in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, researchers discovered the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. The ancient DNA has been used to map a two-million-year-old ecosystem which weathered extreme climate change.

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A chance find of an unstudied Antarctic sediment core has led researchers to flip our understanding of how often ice ages occurred in Antarctica.

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The Southern Hemisphere is stormier than the Northern -- but no one knew why. A new study lays out the first concrete explanation for this phenomenon. Researchers found two major culprits: ocean circulation and the large mountain ranges in the Northern Hemisphere.

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Major ice streams can shut down, shifting rapid ice transport to other parts of the ice sheet, within a few thousand years. This was determined in reconstructions of two ice streams, based on ice-penetrating radar scans of the Greenland ice sheet.

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Years of research show that climate change signals are amplified in the Arctic, and that sea ice in this region is sensitive to increases in Arctic warming. Sea ice greatly modifies the exchanges of heat, momentum and mass between the atmosphere and the ocean. So, the timings of the sea ice melt and freeze onsets, as well as the length of the melt and freeze seasons, play a key role in the 'heat budget' of the atmosphere-ice-ocean system.

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A new analysis of more than 20,000 trees on five continents shows that old-growth trees are more drought tolerant than younger trees in the forest canopy and may be better able to withstand future climate extremes. The findings highlight the importance of preserving the world's remaining old-growth forests, which are biodiversity strongholds that store vast amounts of planet-warming carbon, according to forest ecologists.

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Machine learning drives self-discovery of pulses that stabilize quantum systems in the face of environmental noise.

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Paleontologists say environmental DNA is not always helpful in identifying when animals like mammoths went extinct because genetic material found in sediment could have come from animals that died thousands of years earlier.

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Imagine a team of humans and robots working together to process online orders -- real-life workers strategically positioned among their automated coworkers who are moving intelligently back and forth in a warehouse space, picking items for shipping to the customer. This could become a reality sooner than later, thanks to researchers who are working to speed up the online delivery process by developing a software model designed to make 'transport' robots smarter.

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The 1930s Dust Bowl affected heat extremes across much of North America and as far away as Europe and East Asia, according to new research. The study found that the extreme heating of the Great Plains triggered motions of air around the Northern Hemisphere in ways that suppressed cloud formation in some regions and contributed to record heat thousands of miles away.