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Categories: Anthropology: Early Humans, Computer Science: Virtual Reality (VR)

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A team has developed a novel approach for comparing neural networks that looks within the 'black box' of artificial intelligence to help researchers understand neural network behavior. Neural networks recognize patterns in datasets; they are used everywhere in society, in applications such as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems and self-driving cars.

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A team of scientists has discovered the earliest gibbon fossil, a find that helps fill a long-elusive evolutionary gap in the history of apes.

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Engineers find a way to identify nanophotonic materials with the potential to improve screens for virtual reality and 3D displays along with optical technologies in general.

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The skulls of tetrapods had fewer bones than extinct and living fish, limiting their evolution for millions of years, according to a latest study.

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The question of what makes modern humans unique has long been a driving force for researchers. Comparisons with our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, therefore provide fascinating insights. The increase in brain size, and in neuron production during brain development, are considered to be major factors for the increased cognitive abilities that occurred during human evolution. However, while both Neanderthals and modern humans develop brains of similar size, very little is known about whether modern human and Neanderthal brains may have differed in terms of their neuron production during development. Researchers now show that the modern human variant of the protein TKTL1, which differs by only a single amino acid from the Neanderthal variant, increases one type of brain progenitor cells, called basal radial glia, in the modern human brain.

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To automatically generate data for training deep convolutional neural network models to segment building facades, researchers used a three-dimensional model and game engine to generate digital city twin synthetic training data. They found that a model trained on these data mixed with some real data was competitive with a model trained on real data alone, revealing the potential of digital twin data to improve accuracy and replace costly manually annotated real data.

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Scientists use genomic data to resolve the phylogeny of zygnematophyte algae and pinpoint several emergences of multicellularity in the closest known relatives of terrestrial plants.

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The modalities and date of emergence of bipedalism remain bitterly debated, in particular because of a small number of very old human fossils. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, discovered in 2001 in Chad, is considered to be the oldest representative of the humankind. The shape of its cranium suggests a bipedal station. The description of three limb bones of Sahelanthropus confirms habitual bipedalism, but not exclusively.

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Research has established that there are traces of Neandertal DNA in the genome of modern humans. Now an exploratory study that assessed the facial structure of prehistoric skulls is offering new insights, and supports the hypothesis that much of this interbreeding took place in the Near East -- the region ranging from North Africa to Iraq.

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Did the 12th century B.C.E. -- a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text -- coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Think again, says a team of researchers whose new paper refutes a hypothesis that's growing increasingly popular among the science community.

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Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective and high-performance lidar systems. Lidar, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, free-space optical communications, 3D holography, biomedical sensing and virtual reality. Researchers describe their new chip-based optical phased array (OPA) that solves many of the problems that have plagued previous OPA designs.

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Augmented reality might allow printed books to make a comeback against the e-book trend, according to researchers.

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New research provide evidence that the crustacean carapace, along with other plate-like structures in arthropods (crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and myriapods) all evolved from a lateral leg lobe in a common ancestor more than 500 million years ago. This work further supports their proposal for a new concept of how novel structures evolve -- one which suggests that they aren't so novel, after all.

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A new technique opens a door to manufacturing of pressure-monitoring bandages, shade-shifting fabrics, or touch-sensing robots

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Artificial vision systems are implemented in motion sensing, object detection, and self-driving vehicles. However, they are not suitable for changing external environments and are limited to a hemispherical field-of-view (FOV). Addressing this issue, researchers have now developed a novel artificial vision with 360-degree FOV that can image both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The system, modeled after the eye structure of the fiddler crab, could help realize the all-weather vision and panoramic object detection.

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Researchers find that stem cells in the developing brain of modern humans take longer to divide and make fewer errors when distributing their chromosomes to their daughter cells, compared to those of Neanderthals.

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A newly identified 16th century horse specimen is among the oldest domestic horses from the Americas known to date, and its DNA helps clarify the history of horses in the Western Hemisphere, according to a new study.

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Whether by the spear or the plow, humans have been homogenizing the mammal communities of North America for 10,000-plus years, says a new analysis of 8,831 fossils representing 365 species.

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The study of the genomes of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, has opened up new research paths that can broaden our understanding of the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. A new study has made an estimation of the time when some of the genetic variants that characterize our species emerged. It does so by analyzing mutations that are very frequent in modern human populations, but not in these other species of archaic humans.

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Like a newborn animal, a four-legged robot stumbles around during its first walking attempts. But while a foal or a giraffe needs much longer to master walking, the robot learns to move forward fluently in just one hour. A computer program acts as the artificial presentation of the animal's spinal cord, and learns to optimize the robot's movement in a short time. The artificial neural network is not yet ideally adjusted at the beginning, but rapidly self-adjusts.