Yeast experiment offers fresh insights on the nature of natural selection

An experiment involving yeast has revealed a method that allows organizations to avoid the “tragedy of the commons,” the situation in which individuals take advantage of shared resources — such as common grazing land for animals — without paying for their use or maintenance.

By performing the experiment on small organisms, researchers have shown a way to avert a prediction of evolution theory: that natural selection necessarily favors “cheaters” — individual organisms determined to game the system — over “cooperators” who obey the rules.

The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals a way in which evolutionary adaptation via mutations can benefit cooperators over cheaters.

"It gives a larger role to adaptation," said Adam Waite, a graduate student in molecular and cellular biology at the University of Washington, who performed the research with his supervisor, Wenying Shou, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "While natural selection should help cheaters, it can also help cooperators defeat cheaters."

Death: A special report on the inevitable

The only certain thing in life is that it will one day end. That knowledge is perhaps the defining feature of the human condition. And, as far as we know, we alone are capable of contemplating the prospect of our demise. In these articles we explore the implications: the shifting definition of death, how knowing that we will die gave birth to civilisation, the grim reality of decomposition and whether it makes sense to fear death. But first, when did we become aware of our own mortality?

Bird-brains solve problems spontaneously

In certain situations animals can spontaneously solve problems without planning their actions, according to research from The University of Auckland’s School of Psychology.

Animals rarely solve problems spontaneously, yet certain bird species are able to rapidly gain access to food hung on the end of a long string, by repeatedly pulling and then stepping on the string. For over 400 years it has been a mystery as to how the birds spontaneously solve the “string pulling” problem.

The University of Auckland research shows that such problem solving is not created by birds first solving the problem in their heads. Rather, problem solving occurs online as the bird makes the food on the end of the string move.

“Crows and parrots have long been known to solve the string pulling problem immediately. What our new research shows is that these performances are due to the birds being able to react in the moment to the effects of their actions, rather than being able to mentally plan out their actions,” says Dr Alex Taylor, lead author on the study.

“Thus string pulling appears to be based on a different type of intelligence than we had thought. Instead of the crows using sophisticated cognitive software to model the world, it appears their neural hardware is sufficiently well connected and/or specialised for them to react to the effect of their actions immediately. This allows them to solve problems that other bird species cannot.”

The work, by Dr Taylor, Brenna Knaebe and Professor Russell Gray, titled “An end to insight? New Caledonian crows can spontaneously solve problems without planning their actions”, has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences online.

The Consequences of Machine Intelligence

If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers. The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy’s main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly “Singularitarians” who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term “singularity” as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to “machine-intelligence explosion” was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.

Read more

Ping-pong-playing robot learns to play like a person

A ROBOT that learns to play ping-pong from humans and improves as it competes against them could be the best robotic table-tennis challenger the world has seen.

Katharina Muelling and colleagues at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany suspended a robotic arm from the ceiling and equipped it with a camera that watches the playing area. Then Muelling physically guided the arm through different shots to return incoming balls.

The arm was then left to draw on its training to return balls hit by a human opponent. When the ball was in a position it had not seen before, the arm used its library of shots to improvise new ones. After an hour of unassisted practise, the system successfully returned 88 per cent of shots.

Other robots have played table tennis in the past, but none have used human demonstration to learn the game. Ales Ude of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia says that doing so allows robots to play more like people.

The work, which will be presented at an AAAI symposium in Arlington, Virginia, next month, is part of a broader goal to develop robots that can do a range of tasks after being guided by their owners, Muelling says.

Mind over machine: Use your brainwaves to control your computer

When it comes to controlling our computers, the last five years has seen incredible improvements in user interfaces including amazing touch screens and much more natural vocal recognition. Now, a Toronto company wants to take the UI to the next level — by going directly to the brain. You think it, and the Muse headband will make it happen under very limited circumstances.

InteraXon, the maker of the Muse headband, has listed it device on Indiegogo in hopes of raising $150,000 for building out a mass-produced headband that translates your mental commands into a computer action. The example they show on the site is playing a game using an iPad, where the rotation of a wooden block occurs when the user focuses on it. The user tilts the iPad to change the angle of the rotation.

The ideas behind the Muse are echoed in a project released by Chaotic Moon Studios earlier this year called the Board of Imagination, whereby a user controls a skateboard that connected to an iPad and a brainwave reader made by a different company called Emotiv. In that use case, the user’s focus is what makes the skateboard move forward.

Biofeedback-augmented video game helps children curb their anger

Often, when people talk about children and the psychological effects of playing video games, it’s nothing good – there are certainly plenty of individuals who maintain that if a child spends too much time blowing away virtual enemies, they will become more aggressive, antisocial people in the real world. A new game developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, however, is intended to do just the opposite. It helps children with anger problems to control their temper, so they’ll get along better with other people.

The game, appropriately called RAGE Control, requires the young player to shoot at enemy spaceships while sparing friendly ones. The child’s heart rate is monitored and displayed on the screen, via a sensor attached to one of their fingers. As long as they keep calm and their heart rate stays below a certain threshold, they can keep blasting at the spaceships. If they lose control and their heart rate goes too high, however, they lose the ability to shoot – the only way to regain that ability is to calm back down and lower their heart rate.

“The connections between the brain’s executive control centers and emotional centers are weak in people with severe anger problems,” said Dr. Joseph Gonzalez-Heydrich, co-creator of the game and senior investigator on the study. “However, to succeed at RAGE Control, players have to learn to use these centers at the same time to score points.”

5 Bizarre Ways Brain Scans Can Predict the Future