life inspired

"The people of Mangareva may have invented binary arithmetic independently of the West." Full news article @ Science/AAAS | News

"South African termites can relay vibrational alarm signals through their enormous nests by pounding their heads against the ground." Full news article @ The Scientist Magazine®

"The discovery of DNA in a 400,000-year-old human thigh bone will open up a new frontier in the study of our ancestors." News article @ BBC News

Related scientific article @ Nature.

Labels: dna, history

"Forget what you see in movies. Most robots sit in a factory somewhere doing dull, repetitive work. Even if their software does dream of a more interesting job, their physical form remains fixed from the day they’re assembled to the moment they’re junked. But it doesn’t have to be that way, say pioneers of `evo devo robo`—evolutionary developmental robotics, which applies principles of natural selection and biological development to machine design." Full news article @ Smithsonian Magazine

Labels: evodevo, evolutionary robots, robots

Submitted by Santosh: "In his last years, Feynman helped build an innovative computer. He had great fun with computers. Half the fun was explaining things to anyone who would listen." Full article @ Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now

"evolutionary algorithms in the development of antibiotic regimens given to production animals. [...] Treatment regimens were found that provided decreased antibiotic resistance relative to conventional methods while providing nearly the same benefits as conventional antibiotic regimes. By using a graph to control the information flow in the evolutionary algorithm, a variety of solutions along the Pareto front can be found automatically for this and other multi-objective problems." Full paper @ BioSystems