【推荐3】Spider monkeys know that the best way to find food is in a group. But when they divide to hunt for fruit, there’s no random(随意性) pairing off. Researchers have found that they use collective computation(群体计算) when they break up into teams.

Typically, the older females lead the rest of the younger monkeys, having the final say in group activities. But that’s not the case for wild spider monkeys living in a protected area near Punta Laguna, Mexico.

When they’re ready to search for food, the monkeys form teams without a single leader picking who goes into which group. Instead, each monkey decides which group to join and when to move to another group. The result, say researchers, is that the monkeys are collectively computing good team sizes given the availability(可获性) of food in the forest.

“The spider monkeys seem to be collecting information about resources by forming these small teams, so that as a group they know their environment better than anyone does on its own,” lead study author, Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said.

To study the animals’ behavior, researchers spent two years recording 47 different spider monkeys for five hours each day. For hunting for food, they usually formed groups of 2 to 17 monkeys. Researchers worked together with the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico to find out how a spider monkey decided to stay with or leave a group. Their study found that the monkeys’ decisions were influenced by the decisions of the other monkeys on the team. They would feel out their teammates about the best size and then make their own decisions accordingly.

The results produced teams of many different sizes, which were helpful in finding fruit in the forest. The researchers said that collectively computed sizes were sometimes not a perfect match based on the food that was available. They suggest a similar study should be used to examine how other groups or systems work, such as flocks of birds or schools of fish.

【推荐1】On the side of a busy road leading into Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland, the blades (叶片) of a small wind turbine (涡轮机) move in the wind of passing cars and trucks. It is charging a battery that is below the ground. This is an invention by Sanwal Muneer, a young engineer from Pakistan.

Muneer was inspired to create the turbine as he stood on the side of a racetrack several years ago. “At first, the light wind from the cars was just a welcome relief from the heat,” he says. “Then I started to think about how we could use that energy.”

The turbine stands two-and-a-half metres tall. Made of recyclable carbon fibre, it weighs just nine kilogrammes, making it easy to transport and set up. The fully-charged battery can hold a kilowatt of electricity, enough to run two lamps and a fan for around 40 hours. The idea is that this could be a source of electricity for rural communities in developing countries, or could power traffic lights or road signs in urban areas.

Dundee City Council is the first local authority to allow Muneer’s company, Capture Mobility, to test the turbine beside its roads. “We want to help engineers create something inventive which is also beneficial to the city.” says Neil Gellatly, head of roads and transportation for Dundee City Council. Capture Mobility moved to Scotland from Pakistan in 2015. The Scottish government is investing (投资) in cleaner-energy technologies. Wind is also strong and plentiful all year round here. This made it a good location for Muneer’s company.

Production costs remain the company’s biggest challenge. The turbines must be affordable in developing countries, but achieving this will depend on commercial (商业的) scale (规模). Capture Mobility is now analysing data from the turbine. Later this year, the company plans to send the next stage of the design to the producers. “I am passionate about engineering,” Muneer says. “But engineering is only a success if it improves lives.”

【推荐3】If you love adventure(冒险), you may see the world differently. People who are open to new experiences can take in an unusual amount of visual information and combine it in unique ways.

Openness to experience is one of the “big five” features often used to describe personality. It is characterized by curiosity and an ability to do well at tests that ask people to come up with creative ideas, such as new uses for everyday objects like bricks.

There’s evidence that people who score highly in assessments of openness also have better visual awareness. For example, when focusing on letters moving on a screen, they are more likely to notice a grey square appearing elsewhere on the screen.

Now Anna Antinori at the University of Melbourne in Australia and her team have found that people who score higher for the openness feature “see” more possibilities.

The team gave 123 university students a test, in which they simultaneously(同时) saw a red image with one eye and a green image with the other eye for 2 minutes. Usually, the brain can only notice one image at a time, and most students reported seeing the image flip(快速翻动) between red and green. But some students saw the two images mix together.

The higher the students scored for openness on a personality test, the more they experienced this kind of mix. “Their brains are able to come up with less traditional solutions.” Antinori says. “We believe this proves that they have different visual experiences to the average individual.”

The findings also explain why extremely open people can suffer from delusions(幻想症), says NikoTillopoulos at the University of Sydney, “At those levels of openness, people may actually see reality differently,” he says.