Have you ever wondered how insects take off from the ground as they fly? Thanks to modern technology, we are now able to observe these creatures up close and in slow motion, and we are also able to see how they differ from each other. Some insects fly awkwardly. Some need a leg up before flying, and others need a literal “jump start.”

In this video, Adrian Smith from Ant Lab documents the flight of 11 insects in slow motion.

Via Laughing Squid

(Image Credit: Ant Lab/ YouTube)

In this rather solemn video, Ozzy Man decides to wrap up 2020 by reviewing nothing and just “let the fabric of life” unfurl itself and reveal to us the magical, the weird, and the amazing things that we can see in this lifetime.

(Image Credit: Ozzy Man Reviews/ YouTube)

Bumblebee butts are cute, and I believe you will also agree to that, as there are no buts to that statement. Those who say otherwise are those who don’t know how to appreciate nature’s beauty.

Want to see more bumblebee butts? Check out the many pictures over at Sad and Useless.

(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)

If you’re a gamer who spends a lot of time playing video games, then it’s a must that you sit on something that’s comfortable and really supports your body. In other words, a gaming chair.

But even if you’re not a gamer, you might also consider buying a gaming chair, as gaming chairs today have excellent ergonomic design. They are pretty expensive, however.

The Inventory asked various gamers what the best gaming chairs out there are. Check out their answers over at the site.

(Image Credit: Ella Don/ Unsplash)

One of the best things that you can experience as a child is growing up with an animal companion, who always stays by your side and tries to take care of you as well. Watch as this pittie, Dora, stays by baby Teddy’s side as Teddy grows up. The video can be seen over at The Dodo.

(Image Credit: The Dodo)

Clean water is an essential part of many aspects of human life, such as in agriculture, energy production, and drinking. One of the ways to make clean water is through a desalination membrane. Through this device, the salt from salt water is filtered out, making the water safe for consumption. It might look simple at first glance, but scientists have been baffled by the complex intricacies of the process. For decades, this has been the case, until now.

Researchers from Penn State, The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, Dow Chemical Company and DuPont Water Solutions published a key finding in understanding how membranes actually filter minerals from water, online today (Dec. 31) in Science…

"Despite their use for many years, there is much we don't know about how water filtration membranes work," said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State, who led the research. "We found that how you control the density distribution of the membrane itself at the nanoscale is really important for water-production performance."

Learn more details about this over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: ronymichaud/ Pixabay)

After taking off on his powered parachute near a school in Rio Linda, California to deliver candy canes to children in his community, a man dressed up as Santa found himself in a maze of power lines and ended up being suspended in them. Thankfully, the man was not injured.

Video from the rescue shows the red-white-and-blue aircraft dangling overhead as Santa sat fastened to the pilot seat.

Neighbors watched from the ground as crews worked.

Colleen Bousliman, who lives nearby, said the pilot flies overhead often.

“He flies just around so people can see and flies around people’s houses,” she said. “This was the first time he was in his Santa suit.”

[...]

“W/o a scratch & full of good cheer we made sure Old St. Nick will use his reindeer when he sees you later this year,” the fire department said in a tweet after the incident.

I guess Santa has better watch out, too.

(Image Credit: California Highway Patrol via AP)

Augie, along with his mom, Katina Behm, loves to make fun of his uncle Aristotle Polites, who works as a model, by recreating Polites's photos. And because Polites is a model, Augie gets to have a lot of photos to recreate.

See Augie’s recreations over at Bored Panda.

Cute!

(Image Credit: Bored Panda)

Would you keep a leech as a pet? For many of us, the answer would be no, but believe it or not, there are some people who keep leeches as pets. To make things even weirder, these people even let these leeches suck their blood. But why in the world would they do that?

ScienceAlert documents the story of Ariane Khomjani, a leech keeper. This is what he has to say.

"They're amazing, curious creatures that grow like crazy and make wonderful pets,"...

He explained how individual leeches have their own unique personalities, with some being more adventurous and others more shy.

"Some like to try and sneak a feed more often than others, haha! But once they're full, they're content to sit and rest for a bit out of water if handled gently," he said.

… The species he keeps is one of the larger types: buffalo leeches (Hirudinaria manillensis) from Asia.

 Learn more about this strange practice over at the site.

(Image Credit: Ariane Khomjani/ Instagram/ ScienceAlert)

Two robots, both of which have brains that have evolved for over 300 generations, can be seen in the video. Both of them have one leg broken as well. However, only one of them can walk upright, while the other struggles to get back up. But why? That’s because one of them has been programmed to keep learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) often relies on so-called neural networks, algorithms inspired by the human brain. But unlike ours, AI brains usually don’t learn new things once they’ve been trained and deployed; they’re stuck with the same thinking they’re born with.

So, in a new study, researchers created nets with “Hebbian rules”—mathematical formulas that allow AI brains to keep learning. Rather than their synaptic weights—the values dictating how activity spreads from one neuron to another—remaining static, they change based on experience. Then, the team partially removed the left front leg of both bots, forcing them to try to compensate for the injury. Both bots struggled at first, but the Hebbian bot was able to walk nearly seven times as far, the researchers report this month at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Hebbian learning could someday improve algorithms used to recognize images, translate languages, or drive.

Truly amazing.

(Image Credit: Science Magazine/ YouTube)

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could see tardigrades in action with our naked eye? Perhaps that’s what the guys Archie McPhee had in their minds when they decided to make these cute racing tardigrades.

These pull-back tardigrades come in a set of four so you can race up to three of your friends to see who has the fastest time in a drag race.

The full set goes for just $14.95 and would be lots of fun to race against some babies, possums, or cockroaches. Place your bets now!

I have a feeling that this will be a hit in the market.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Archie McPhee/ Technabob)

To what would you compare a home run? For this commentator, he would compare it to an ex-girlfriend. Did he just break up with a girl when this happened? Was it recent that time? Only he knows.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Most Viral/ Team Super Saiyan/ YouTube)

Scientists from UChicago have created a groundbreaking tool called Voltair that allows researchers to measure voltage differences between organelles. Scientists knew that there were voltage differences in the organs of the human body. However, they weren’t able to measure these. This went on for decades.

"Scientists had noticed for a long time that charged dyes used for staining cells would get stuck in the mitochondria," explained graduate student Anand Saminathan, the first author for the paper, which was published in Nature Nanotechnology. "But little work has been done to investigate the membrane potential of other organelles in live cells."

The Krishnan lab at UChicago specializes in building tiny sensors to travel inside cells and report back on what's happening, so that researchers can understand how cells work—and how they break down in disease or disorders. Previously, they have built such machines to study neurons and lysosomes, among others.

In this case, they decided to use the technique to investigate the electric activities of the organelles inside live cells.

Details over at PHYS.org.

Awesome!

(Image Credit: allinonemovie/ Pixabay)

Can you picture your first grade classroom? How about that restaurant where you had your first date? For many of us, it would be easy, but for some, it is extremely difficult.

These individuals have a rare condition called aphantasia, which prevents them from easily recreating images in their mind's eye—in fact, the phrase "mind's eye" may be meaningless to them.

"Some individuals with aphantasia have reported that they don't understand what it means to 'count sheep' before going to bed," said Wilma Bainbridge, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who recently led a study of the condition, which can be congenital or acquired through trauma. "They thought it was merely an expression, and had never realized until adulthood that other people could actually visualize sheep without seeing them."

What goes inside the mind of an individual who has aphantasia? Bainbridge’s study, published in the journal Cortex, sheds some light on the topic. More about this over at MedicalXpress.

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

If you want to be great at games, consider paying attention to Albert Einstein’s advice, which is to learn the rules of the game, and then play better than anyone else. Of course, this is easier said than done. But if you’re an AI like DeepMind, then it would be much easier for you — so much easier that you can even skip Einstein’s first advice.

DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has previously made groundbreaking strides using reinforcement learning to teach programs to master the Chinese board game Go and the Japanese strategy game Shogi, as well as chess and challenging Atari video games. In all those instances, computers were given the rules of the game.

But Nature reported… that DeepMind's MuZero has accomplished the same feats—and in some instances, beat the earlier programs—without first learning the rules.

Programmers at DeepMind relied on a principle called "look-ahead search." With that approach, MuZero assesses a number of potential moves based on how an opponent would respond. While there would likely be a staggering number of potential moves in complex games such as chess, MuZero prioritizes the most relevant and most likely maneuvers, learning from successful gambits and avoiding ones that failed.

More details about this over at TechXplore.

Wow!

(Image Credit: PIRO4D/ Pixabay)