These are the questions that a team of mechanical engineers and computer scientists at the University of California San Diego sought to answer in a study presented recently at the ICRA 2024 conference in Japan.

“To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating robots that infer human perception of risk for intelligent decision-making in everyday settings,” said Aamodh Suresh, first author of the study, who earned his Ph.D. in the research group of Professor Sonia Martinez Diaz in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He is now a postdoctoral researcher for the U.S. Army Research Lab.

“We wanted to create a framework that would help us understand how risk-averse humans are-or not-when interacting with robots,” said Angelique Taylor, second author of the study, who earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego in the research group of Professor Laurel Riek. Taylor is now on faculty at Cornell Tech in New York.

The team turned to models from behavioral economics. But they wanted to know which ones to use. The study took place during the pandemic, so the researchers had to design an online experiment to get their answer.

Subjects-largely STEM undergraduate and graduate students-played a game, in which they acted as Instacart shoppers. They had a choice between three different paths to reach the milk aisle in a grocery store. Each path could take anywhere from five to 20 minutes. Some paths would take them near people with COVID, including one with a severe case. The paths also had different risk levels for getting coughed on by someone with COVID. The shortest path put subjects in contact with the most sick people. But the shoppers were rewarded for reaching their goal quickly.

The researchers were surprised to see that people consistently underestimated in their survey answers indicating their willingness to take risks of being in close proximity to shoppers infected with COVID-19. “If there is a reward in it, people don’t mind taking risks,” said Suresh.

As a result, to program robots to interact with humans, researchers decided to rely on prospect theory, a behavioral economics model developed by Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in 2002. The theory holds that people weigh losses and gains compared to a point of reference. In this framework, people feel losses more than they feel gains. So for example, people will choose to get $450 rather than betting on something that has a 50% chance of winning them $1100. So subjects in the study focused on getting the reward for completing the task quickly, which was certain, instead of weighing the potential risk of contracting COVID.

Researchers also asked people how they would like robots to communicate their intentions. The responses included speech, gestures, and touch screens.

Next, researchers hope to conduct an in-person study with a more diverse group of subjects.

According to new research at the University of Birmingham, in the UK, and Central European University, in Austria and Hungary, babies are not only capable of creative thinking well before starting to speak, but this sort of thinking may be essential for language acquisition.

In the study, published in PNAS, the researchers set out to explore the origins of human creativity and productive thinking to try to find out how people arrive at completely new thoughts and ideas. The basic mechanism for doing this is taking familiar concepts and combining them into new structures, but little is known about how early in life these abilities can be used.

The researchers found that babies were able to very quickly learn new words that describe small quantities — an impressive achievement — and combine these spontaneously with familiar words to fully understand a phrase.

Lead researcher, Dr Barbara Pomiechowska, carried out the research while a postdoctoral fellow at the Central European University (CEU). She is now an assistant professor in the School of Psychology, at the University of Birmingham, in the UK.

Dr Pomiechowska said: “Human creativity has no boundaries: it has taken us to the moon and allowed us to cure deadly diseases — but despite its importance, we don’t yet know when and how this impressive ability to combine ideas and invent new things emerges. This research shows that we must go right back to the beginning of language acquisition to solve this puzzle.”

In the study, the researchers worked with a cohort of 60 babies, all around the age of 12 months. They started by teaching the babies two novel words describing quantity: ‘mize’, to mean ‘one’, and ‘padu’, to mean ‘two’.

Then the babies were asked to combine these new number words with different object names, for example to identify ‘padu ducks’ from among a choice of images. By teaching novel words to represent quantities, the researchers were able to test the babies’ ability to combine concepts in real time, rather than simply recall combinations of words that they already knew from previous experience.

By using eye-tracking technology to monitor where the babies look, the researchers were able to show that the infants could successfully combine the two concepts to understand what they were being asked about.

Dr Agnes Kovacs, from CEU’s Department of Cognitive Science and CEU’s Cognitive Development Center, added: “For babies, this ability to combine different concepts is likely to help not only to interpret the complex language input, but also to learn about different aspects of the physical and social world. For adults, it’s an ability that helps to move past everything that’s already been thought of, opening the mind towards endless possibilities.”

The collaborative research team focused on a specific type of atmospheric wave, known as Convectively Coupled Kelvin Waves, (CCKWs), which are massive waves over 1,000-miles long that travel in Earth’s atmosphere along the equator and significantly influence global rainfall patterns. The study, published June 1, 2024, in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, provides researchers with a new way to study the behavior and attributes of these Kelvin waves in weather forecast models.

“Our findings suggest that improving the simulation of these Kelvin waves in weather models could enhance the accuracy of predictions for other high-impact weather features,” said Quinton Lawton, a recent graduate of the Rosenstiel School’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences and a lead author of the study. “This has the potential to provide communities, especially those in tropical regions, with more lead time and readiness for destructive weather.”

Utilizing NCAR’s high-performance computing system and cutting-edge weather models including the Model for Prediction Across Scales — Atmosphere (MPAS-A) and ECMWF’s Integrated Forecast System (IFS), the team simulated several Kelvin waves from 2021. One notable Kelvin wave over the Atlantic Ocean was linked to the formation of Tropical Storm Victor.

The study found that current weather forecast models poorly simulated an Atlantic Ocean CCKW, indicating a need for future improvements in weather forecasting systems to better predict these waves and, consequently, other extreme weather events.

The researchers introduced a novel methodology for modifying the strength of Kelvin waves in weather forecast models. With this new tool, researchers will be able to better quantify the characteristics and impacts of Kelvin waves, enhancing our understanding of how these waves are represented in weather forecast models.

Kelvin waves are now recognized for their role in increasing the likelihood of hurricane formation and triggering extreme rainfall events. In a previous study by Rosenstiel School scientists Lawton and Sharan Majumdar published in 2023, they explain how these waves can encourage tropical cyclone formation in the Atlantic.

This study represents the culmination of two years of collaborative research, originating from the lead student author’s PhD dissertation at the University of Miami. The work brings together expertise and resources from UM, NCAR, and ECMWF to push the boundaries of meteorological science.

“The research is a step towards better understanding and predicting the tropical atmosphere,” said study coauthor Sharan Majumdar, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the Rosenstiel School. “The study also highlights the need for further research into why current models struggle with accurately simulating these waves.”

“This exciting new species demonstrates that pseudosuchians were occupying coastal habitats on a global basis during the Middle Triassic,” said Dr. Nate Smith, lead author of the paper, and Gretchen Augustyn Director and Curator of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Capturing fossil life from the eastern Panthalassan Ocean of the Triassic, the locality that includes the Favret Formation is known for fossils of sea-going creatures like ammonites along with marine reptiles like the giant ichthyosaur C. youngorum — finding the newly described B. eremicarminis came as a bit of a shock.

“Our first reaction was: What the hell is this?” said co-author Dr. Nicole Klein of the University of Bonn. “We were expecting to find things like marine reptiles. We couldn’t understand how a terrestrial animal could end up so far out in the sea among the ichthyosaurs and ammonites. It wasn’t until seeing the nearly completely prepared specimen in person that I was convinced it really was a terrestrial animal.”

Pseudosuchian archosaurs have been unearthed in fossil beds from the shores of the ancient Tethys Ocean, but this is the first coastal representative from the Panthalassan Ocean and western hemisphere, revealing that these crocodile relatives were present in coastal environments worldwide during the Middle Triassic. Interestingly, these coastal species aren’t all from the same evolutionary group, suggesting that pseudosuchians (and archosauriforms more broadly) were independently adapting to life along the shores.

“Essentially, it looks like you had a bunch of very different archosauriform groups deciding to dip their toes in the water during the Middle Triassic. What’s interesting, is that it doesn’t look like many of these ‘independent experiments’ led to broader radiations of semi-aquatic groups,” said Smith.

During the Triassic, archosaurs, “the ruling reptiles,” arose and split into two groups with two surviving representatives: birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, and crocodilians (alligators, crocodiles, and gharials), the descendants of pseudosuchian archosaurs like B. eremicarminis. While today’s crocodilians are similar enough to be mistaken for one another by most people, their ancient relatives varied wildly in size and lifestyle. The evolutionary relationships of B. eremicarminis and its relatives suggest that pseudosuchians achieved great diversity very quickly following the End-Permian mass extinction — the extent of which is waiting to be discovered in the fossil record.

“A growing number of recent discoveries of Middle Triassic pseudosuchians are hinting that an underappreciated amount of morphological and ecological diversity and experimentation was happening early in the group’s history. While a lot of the public’s fascination with the Triassic focuses on the origin of dinosaurs, it’s really the pseudosuchians that were doing interesting things at the beginning of the Mesozoic,” Smith said.

The new species underlines the multiplicity of these ancient reptiles during the Triassic, from giants like Mambawakale ruhuhu to smaller animals like the newly described B. eremicarminis, which probably reached around 5-6 feet in length. Exactly how long B. eremicarminis was and how it survived along the coasts remains shrouded in the past. Only a few elements of the individual’s skull were found, and any clues to how it fed and hunted are similarly absent. What’s more clear is that B. eremicarminis likely stuck pretty close to the shore. Its well-preserved limbs are well-developed without any of the signs of aquatic living like flippers or altered bone density.

The research team wanted a name that paid respect to the original human inhabitants of the Augusta Mountains where the specimen was found, and so consulted a member of the Fallon Paiute Shoshone Tribe to decide on an appropriate name.”Benggwi-Gwishinga,” a word that means “catching fish” in Shoshone, was combined with the Greek word for Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile-headed god, to coin the new genus, Benggwigwishingasuchus. The specific epithet eremicarminis translates to “desert song,” honoring two supporters of NHMLAC who have a passion for the paleontology and opera of the Southwest. Thus, the full name is meant to translate roughly as “Fisherman Croc’s Desert Song.”

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and the University of Konstanz used a special method to study male common noctule bats, which are found throughout Europe. Their aim was to understand exactly how much energy bats consume during the day and how this changes over the course of the year.

“Bats are fascinating animals that often share their habitat with us humans,” says Lara Keicher, the lead author of the study. “But bats are still shrouded in mystery. We don’t yet have a clear answer to simple questions such as: How much food do they need and can they find enough of it in different seasons to survive?” To predict how bats will fare in a changing climate, Keicher says it is crucial to know their energy requirements.

Bats with heart rate transmitters

To find out, the scientists fitted bats with small heart rate transmitters weighing just 0.8 grams. As with humans, heart rate can be used to determine energy consumption. The transmitters, which the bats only wore for a few days, send out an audio signal of the bats’ heartbeat, which is then recorded using a radio receiver. However, this only works if the receiver is within a few hundred meters from the bats.

“During the day, it was no problem to record the heart beats without major interruptions because bats were resting in tree caves or bat boxes,” says Keicher, who carried out the study as part of her doctoral thesis at the University of Konstanz and the MPI-AB. At night, however, bats fly out to hunt insects and can cover several kilometers in a short time. In order to accompany the bats around the clock, including during their nocturnal flight, the researchers flew in a small airplane to follow individuals for entire flights lasting more than an hour. “I know that we surprised Konstanz locals when our small plane flew in circles over the island of Mainau late at night,” recalls Keicher.

Awake during the day

The team, which also included members of the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research and the University of Freiburg, found that the heart rate of bats reaches around 900 beats per minute during flight. According to Keicher, who analyzed the signal, “it sounded like a single high-pitched tone to our ears.”

Using the unique recordings of heart beats, the scientists discovered fascinating strategies that bats use to budget their energy consumption in different seasons. They found that male common noctule bats consume up to 42% more energy in summer compared to spring. This is mainly due to the fact that the bats in spring go into a kind of short daytime hibernation known as “torpor” — an energy-saving state in which heart rate can be reduced to six beats per minute. “We saw that bats in spring could ramp up their heart rates when they wake up, reaching the top speed of 900 beats per minute within only a few minutes,” says Keicher.

The team was surprised that male bats did not use torpor in summer at all. Keicher explains: “In the warmer months, when food is plentiful, males stay awake during the day to invest energy in sperm production in order to be ready for mating in the autumn.” To replenish the energy used up, the males hunt twice as long in summer as in spring and eat up to 33 June beetles or over 2500 mosquitoes in one night.

The results have provided insights into the energetic challenges of bats and their fascinating survival strategies. This understanding will allow better predictions of how increasingly extreme temperature fluctuations or changes in food availability will affect the animals’ lives and potentially threaten them.

The senior author of the study, MPI-AB scientist Dina Dechmann, says: “All bat species are protected in Germany and some are threatened with extinction. Basic research that investigates the behavior of the animals and their adaptations to the environment can help us develop protective measures so that, for example, common noctule bats can continue to be seen in the night sky over Konstanz.”

In a new study published July 10 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, archaeologists from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Pittsburgh and their colleagues report the largest and most extensively dated archaeobotanical record from interior east Africa.

Up until now, scientists have had virtually no success in gathering ancient plant remains from east Africa and, as a result, have had little idea where and how early plant farming got its start in the large and diverse area comprising Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

“There are many narratives about how agriculture began in east Africa, but there’s not a lot of direct evidence of the plants themselves,” said WashU’s Natalie Mueller, an assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences and co-first author of the new study. The work was conducted at the Kakapel Rockshelter in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya.

“We found a huge assemblage of plants, including a lot of crop remains,” Mueller said. “The past shows a rich history of diverse and flexible farming systems in the region, in opposition to modern stereotypes about Africa.”

The new research reveals a pattern of gradual introductions of different crops that originated from different parts of Africa.

In particular, the remnants of cowpea discovered at Kakapel rock shelter and directly dated to 2,300 years ago constitute the earliest documented arrival of a domesticated crop — and presumably of farming lifeways — to eastern Africa. Cowpea is assumed to have originated in west Africa and to have arrived in the Lake Victoria basin concurrent with the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples migrating from central Africa, the study authors said.

“Our findings at Kakapel reveal the earliest evidence of domesticated crops in east Africa, reflecting the dynamic interactions between local herders and incoming Bantu-speaking farmers,” said Emmanuel Ndiema from the National Museums of Kenya, a project partner. “This study exemplifies National Museums of Kenya’s commitment to uncovering the deep historical roots of Kenya’s agricultural heritage and fostering an appreciation of how past human adaptations can inform future food security and environmental sustainability.”

Constantly changing landscape

Situated north of Lake Victoria, in the foothills of Mount Elgon near the Kenya-Uganda border, Kakapel is a recognized rock art site that contains archaeological artifacts that reflect more than 9,000 years of human occupation in the region. The site has been recognized as a Kenyan national monument since 2004.

“Kakapel Rockshelter is one of the only sites in the region where we can see such a long sequence of occupation by so many diverse communities,” said Steven T. Goldstein, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh (WashU PhD ’17), the other first author of this study. “Using our innovative approaches to excavation, we have been uniquely able to detect the arrival of domesticated plants and animals into Kenya and study the impacts of these introductions on local environments, human technology and sociocultural systems.”

Mueller first joined Goldstein and National Museums of Kenya to conduct excavations at the Kakapel Rockshelter site in 2018. Their work is ongoing. Mueller is the lead scientist for plant investigations at Kakapel; the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology (in Jena, Germany) is another partner on the project.

Mueller used a flotation technique to separate remnants of wild and domesticated plant species from ashes and other debris in a hearth excavated at Kakapel. Although she has used this technique in her research in many other parts of the world, it is sometimes difficult to use this approach in water-scarce locations — so it has not been widely used in east Africa.

The scientists used direct radiocarbon dating on carbonized seeds to document the arrival of cowpea (also known as the black-eyed pea, today an important legume around the world) about 2,300 years ago, at about the same time that people in this area began to use domesticated cattle. Researchers also found evidence that sorghum arrived from the northeast at least 1,000 years ago. They also recovered hundreds of finger millet seeds, dating back to at least 1,000 years ago. This crop is indigenous to eastern Africa and is an important heritage crop for the communities that live near Kakapel today.

One unusual crop that Mueller uncovered was field pea (Pisum), burnt but perfectly intact. Peas were not previously considered to be part of early agriculture in this region. “To our knowledge, this is the only evidence of peas in Iron Age eastern Africa,” Mueller said.

The exceptional pea is pictured in the paper, and it represents its own little mystery. “The standard peas that we eat in North America were domesticated in the near east,” Mueller said. “They were grown in Egypt and probably ended up in east Africa by traveling down the Nile through Sudan, which is also likely how sorghum ended up in east Africa. But there is another kind of pea that was domesticated independently in Ethiopia called the Abyssinian pea, and our sample could be either one!”

Many of the plant remnants that Mueller and her team found at Kakapel could not be positively identified, Mueller said, because even modern scientists working in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda today don’t have access to a good reference collection of samples of plants from east Africa. (As a separate project, Mueller is currently working on building such a comparative collection of Tanzania’s plants.)

“Our work shows that African farming was constantly changing as people migrated, adopted new crops and abandoned others at a local level,” Mueller said. “Prior to European colonialism, community-scale flexibility and decision-making was critical for food security — and it still is in many places.”

Findings from this study may have implications for many other fields, Mueller said, including historical linguistics, plant science and genetics, African history and domestication studies.

Mueller is continuing to work on identifying the wild plants in the assemblage, especially those from the oldest parts of the site, before the beginning of agriculture. “This is where human evolution occurred,” Mueller said. “This is where hunting and gathering was invented by people at the dawn of time. But there has been no archaeological evidence about which plants hunter-gatherers were eating from this region. If we can get that kind of information from this assemblage, then that is a great contribution.”

Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute led the study in which volunteers did physical exercise and had brain scans.

Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr Daniel Blackmore have shown high intensity exercise boosts cognition in healthy older adults and the improvement was retained for up to 5 years.

Emeritus Professor Bartlett said it is the first controlled study of its kind to show exercise can boost cognition in healthy older adults not just delay cognitive decline.

“Six months of high-intensity interval training is enough to flick the switch,” Emeritus Professor Bartlett said.

“In earlier pre-clinical work , we discovered exercise can activate stem cells and increase the production of neurons in the hippocampus, improving cognition.

“In this study, a large cohort of healthy 65 — 85-year-old volunteers joined a six-month exercise program, did biomarker and cognition testing and had high-resolution brain scans.

“We followed up with them 5 years after the program and incredibly they still had improved cognition, even if they hadn’t kept up with the exercises.”

Ageing is one of the biggest risks for dementia, a condition that affects almost half a million Australians.

“If we can change the trajectory of ageing and keep people cognitively healthier for longer with a simple intervention like exercise, we can potentially save our community from the enormous personal, economic and social costs associated with dementia,” Emeritus Professor Bartlett said.

Emeritus Professor Bartlett and Dr Blackmore worked in collaboration with Honorary Professor Stephan Riek and The School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at UQ.

During the study, the researchers assessed the impact of three exercise intensities: • Low — predominantly motor function, balance and stretching • Medium — brisk walking on a treadmill • High — four cycles running on a treadmill at near maximum exertion

Dr Blackmore said only the high-intensity interval exercise led to cognitive improvement that was retained for up to 5 years.

“On high-resolution MRI scans of that group, we saw structural and connectivity changes in the hippocampus, the area responsible for learning and memory,” Dr Blackmore said.

“We also found blood biomarkers that changed in correlation to improvements in cognition.

“Biomarkers can be useful in predicting the effectiveness of the exercise a person is doing.”

With 1 in 3 people aged 85 years likely to develop dementia, Dr Blackmore said the impact of the research was far-reaching.

“Our finding can inform exercise guidelines for older people and further research could assess different types of exercise that could be incorporated into aged care,” he said.

“We are now looking at the genetic factors that may regulate a person’s response to exercise to see if we can establish who will and who will not respond to this intervention.

“The use of biomarkers as a diagnostic tool for exercise also needs further research.”

The research was published in Aging and Disease.

It receives ongoing support from the Stafford Fox Medical Research Foundation.