This is the latest in a series of drawings by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. (This one also harmonizes with the Halloween season.) This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize that was awarded in the year 2017 to Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human […]
Humanoid robots are often experienced as unnerving, a psychological phenomenon called the “uncanny valley.” The Uncanny Valley is quite a problem for ‘humanoid’ robot designers – who currently struggle to make their robots 100% convincing. A newly proposed solution involves ‘dehumanizing’ ‘humanoid’ robots. By, for example, removing the robot’s face to expose bare electronic circuit […]
Kees Moeliker reports a well-known—but seldom noticed by humans—butterfly behavior: drinking human tears. Here is a machine-translation into English of his report in the September 22, 2020 issue of the Dutch newspaper NRC: ——— Drinking tears While on holiday in the Alps, a butterfly feasts on the eye fluid of Kees Moeliker’s daughter The splendor […]
A new review study creeps and leaps upon a physiological resemblance of cats and humans. The study is: “We Are Upright-Walking Cats: Human Limbs as Sensory Antennae During Locomotion,” Gregory E.P. Pearcey and E. Paul Zehr, Physiology, epub 2019. The authors, at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria, explain in un-catlike […]