【推荐2】Johannes Fritz, a biologist, needed to come up with a plan, again, if he was going to prevent his rare and beloved birds from going extinct.

To survive the European winter, the northern bald ibis (秃鹃) — which had once disappeared entirely from the wild on the continent — needs to migrate south for the winter, over the Alps, before the mountains become blocked. But shifting climate patterns have delayed when the birds begin to migrate, and they are now reaching the mountains too late to make it over the peaks, locking them in an icy death trap. Determined to save them, Mr. Fritz decided he would teach the birds a new, safer migration route by guiding them himself in a tiny aircraft. And he was confident he could succeed in this daring, unusual plan —because he had done it before.

Mr. Fritz was his young pupils’ only provider of food and love since they’d been just a few days old, and the ibises eagerly followed their teacher. He learned to fly, modifying a tiny aircraft so it would fly at speeds slow enough for his winged students to keep up. In 2004, three years after some experiments, Mr. Fritz led the first flock from Austria to Italy, and has since led 15 such migrations. Over that time, he has rewilded (放归) 277 young ibises, many of which then started to pass the route on to their own young. For now, however, the main worry is getting the birds to follow the aircraft. “While they have a strong bond with their ‘mothers’ and follow them around on the ground, flying is more difficult,” Fritz said.

“Fly Away Home was a huge hit with us biologists,” Mr. Fritz said, recalling the 1996 movie in which a Canada geese was led to migrate by an aircraft. When Mr. Fritz claimed he’d do the same with the ibises, he was initially laughed at. But through years of trial and error, he succeeded. He even learned to fly like a bird, he said, laughing with ease. Mr. Fritz’s two sons, both now teenagers, followed their flying father and the migrating birds on the ground, and his family and colleagues witnessed the risks he was taking. But the unexpected risks are “necessary”, Mr. Fritz said.

“It’s not so much a job,” he added, “but my life’s purpose.”

【推荐3】Tips to Keep Your Pets Safe During the Winter Season

You’re undoubtedly well aware of the dangers of leaving dogs in hot automobiles in warm weather.    1    Everyone may suffer from the effects of winter weather, including our four-legged pals. Remember to keep your pets safe while it’s chilly outside.

If it’s too cold for you, it’s probably too cold for your pets. Don’t keep your pets outdoors for long periods of time during freezing weather.    2    

Here are more suggestions to help avoid cold weather hazards from having an impact on your pet’s health.

Consider acquiring a coat or sweater for your pet if it has short hair and keep pet’s coat/sweater as long as you can in the winter to keep them warm. Veterinarians advise keeping your house humidified and towel dry for your pet as soon as they enter to prevent itchy (发痒的) skin.     3    When washing your pet, use a moisturizing (保湿的) shampoo. Provide extra food and water

    4    Give your pet extra food,and ensure the water in its bowl is always fresh and not frozen.To avoid your pet’s tongue freezing to their metal bowls, use plastic ones for food and water.

    5    .

Like people, pets’ resistance to cold can vary depending on their coat, body fat reserves, degree of exercise,and health. Consider your pet’s tolerance for chilly weather and make adjustments as necessary. To protect you and your pet from any health concerns brought on by the extreme cold, you should cut the length of your walks. Consult your veterinarian if you need assistance calculating your pet’s safe temperature range.

【推荐1】People who spend time without distractions enjoy the moments alone with their thoughts more than they think they will, according to a new study.

For the study, researchers compared expectation versus their actual experiences for a total of 259 participants across six experiments to measure how much people enjoyed being free from distraction.

One experiment asked participants to predict how much they thought they would enjoy sitting alone without doing anything else for 20 minutes. People enjoyed sitting alone with their thoughts far more than they predicted, researchers said.

“Humans have a striking ability to immerse themselves in their own thinking,” said study lead author Aya Hatano of Kyoto University in Japan. “Our research suggests that individuals have difficulty appreciating just how engaging thinking can be,” Hatano continued. “That could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy with devices and other distractions, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in daily life.”

Researchers said their findings were consistent along several variations of the experiment. One experiment, for example, had participants sit in a dark area with no visual stimuli(刺激物).

Another experiment split up the participants into groups. One sat alone, thinking, while the other checked the news on the Internet. The group sitting alone predicted they would enjoy the activity far less than the group reading the news. Yet both groups reported similar levels of enjoyment at the end.

Study co-author Kou Murayama said people who think their life will be less boring by distracting themselves from their thoughts risk missing the opportunity to positively engage with themselves without relying on such stimulation.

Researchers noted that sitting alone with one’s thought was not rated a particularly enjoyable task, but it was better than participants thought. There are also dangers for some, they added.

“Not all thinking is naturally rewarding, and in fact some people tend to fall into cycles of negative thinking,” Murayama said.

【推荐3】 Caribbean box jellyfish (水母) can learn to spot and avoid obstacles (障碍) despite lacking a central brain, according to a new study. This is the first evidence that jellyfish can do something called associative learning. The nervous systems of Caribbean box jellyfish are fairly simple, including four “rhopalia (视神经束)‌”on a jellyfish’s body, each of which has six “eyes‌”, by which the jellyfish judge a mangrove root’s distance based on how dark it looks compared to the water and make their way round it. In common waters, nearby roots have high contrast. Only distant roots fade into the background. But in murky waters, even near-by roots can blend into their surroundings and have low contrast. The researchers wondered if Caribbean box jellyfish could learn that low-contrast objects-which might at first seem distant-were actually close by.

To find out, the team put 12 jellyfish into a round water tank. The tank was surrounded by low-contrast gray and white stripes (条纹), which might appear to a jellyfish like roots in clear water. A camera filmed the animals for about seven minutes. At first, they seemed to see the gray stripes as distant roots and swam away, ending up bumping the tank wall. But those collisions (碰撞) seemed to lead the jellyfish to reconsider the stripes. Soon, the creatures treated the gray stripes more like close roots in murky water-and avoided them.

This suggests that the rhopalia alone can learn that seemingly distant, low-contrast objects are in fact close enough to avoid. That, in turn, hints that these nerve centers are behind Caribbean box jellyfish learning.

“That’s the coolest part of the paper,” says Ken Cheng, a biologist at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. “That gets us one step down into the wiring of how it works.” For Gaëlle Botton-Amiot, tracing learning to the rhopalia raises new questions. “They have four of these things in their bodies. So how does that work?‌” asks this neurobiologist. If a jellyfish loses one of its rhopalia, does it forget everything those eyes saw and the neurons had learned? Or do the other rhopalia remember it?

【推荐1】Walk around the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and you may see a green animal named Sluggo and a flying pig named Philomena. You might even see street artist David Zinn drawing them using only sidewalk chalk and charcoal (炭笔).

At the age of 12, David began working as an artist. His dad was writing a computer instruction and worried that it would be boring to read. So he asked David to draw pictures of turtles (the name of the computer program) to explain it. The publisher liked his drawings, and soon David had the job of drawing more turtles in action. “I learned a great lesson, which was that, to make money as an artist, I couldn't always draw what I wanted,” he says. “I had to figure out how to draw a turtle drinking tea and other things like that.”

David worked for 20 years as a commercial (商业的) artist, but he often felt cooped up (禁锢) sitting at a computer for 10 hours a day. Then, on a sunny afternoon about ten years ago, he brought some chalk and started drawing on the sidewalk. That's when Sluggo came to life.

“One of the reasons I like to put art on the street is to take people by surprise,” he says. “I can have fun drawing, and knowing it will be washed away helps me not think too much. It frees me up.”

It takes David about two hours to complete one drawing. He uses a lot of sidewalk characteristics in his street art. It can be difficult to draw on surfaces that are not flat. He has to notice where shadows will land so they won't destroy the 3D drawings he creates.

Today, more and more people are accepting and looking for his work. David's artwork can also be found across the country and even throughout the world. Photos of his drawings have been shown at many universities and museums.

【推荐2】Abstract painter Harold Cohen had represented Britain at important festivals with his oil paintings and was seeking a new challenge by the end of 1960s. “Maybe there are more interesting things going on outside my studio than inside it,” he thought. Cohen turned from the canvas to the screen, using computers to find new ways of creating art. In the late 1960s, he created a program that he named Aaron. It was the first artificial intelligence software in the world of fine art, and Cohen first presented Aaron in 1974 at the University of California.

Now, with AI dominating the headlines, a new exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, “Harold Cohen: Aaron,” running through June 2024, draws attention to Cohen’s pioneering work. The Whitney is offering something deeper than most previous Aaron exhibits: a real-time experience, in which visitors can watch the software produce art.

Cohen seeded Aaron with all sorts of knowledge: about basic objects, physics, and fundamental techniques of drawing. Aaron uses this knowledge to follow instructions, complete tasks, and make decisions like human beings — a very different approach from today’s generative AI art programs, which don't draw from scratch (从零开始) but rather rely on databases of images. Versions of Aaron still generate output, but anything done after Cohen’s death in 2016 is not considered genuine.

The Whitney is showcasing two versions of Cohen’s software, along with the art that each produced before Cohen died. The 2001 version, Aaron KCAT, generates images of figures and plants and projects them onto a wall more than ten feet high, while the 2007 version produces jungle-like scenes. The software will also create art physically, on paper, for the first time since the 1990s. “It is absolutely thrilling,” said Christiane Paul, the museum’s director of digital art, “to have one of those remarkable treasures of digital art in the collection.”

【推荐3】Think mind reading is science fiction? Think again.

Scientists have used brain scanners to detect and reconstruct the faces that people are thinking of, according to a study accepted for publication this month in the journal NeuroImage.

In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an MRI (功能性核磁共振成像) brain scanner—which determines activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow—and showed them images of faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces the people were looking at.

“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.

The study says it is the first to try to reconstruct faces from thoughts. The photos above are the actual photos and reconstructions done in the lab.

While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings are blurry, they approximate the true images. They got the skin color right in all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly detected the presence or absence of a smile.

The brain readings were worse at determining gender and hair color. About two-thirds of the reconstructions clearly detected the gender, and only half got hair color correct.

“There’s definitely room for improvement,” Cowen said, adding that these experiments were conducted two years ago, though they only recently were accepted for publication. He said he and others have been working on improving the process in the interim.

“I’m applying more advanced models to the brain scan results, so the results should get better,” he said.

To test out faces based on brain activity, the scientists showed participants in the study 300 faces while recording their brain activity. Then they showed the participants 30 new faces and used their previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain scans.

Once the technology improves, Cowen said, applications could range from better understanding mental disorders, to recording dreams, to solving crimes.

“You can see how people perceive faces depending on different disorders, like autism—and use that to help diagnose therapies,” he said.