Category Archives: Evolution

It seems as though there might be a bit of controversy when it comes to wondering just why the puppetry of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, was kept rather similar to the original movie. Liz Shannon Miller of The Verge might give an explanation of this that some might listen to. Some might even go so far as to say that it wasnt nearly as professional as they wanted it to be, as it wasnt quite as smooth as CGI would be, and seemed to be kind of jerky and kind of halting at times. But seriously, what were you expecting? The Dark Crystal was meant to be unique, and it achieved that goal beautifully throughout the years since no one has ever really tried to recapture that same magic or even bothered to mess with the movie. Those of us that watched the movie as kids or younger people, whether we were terrified or loved it, or both, can surely be thankful since this has become a timeless legend that has had a great influence on the evolution of puppets and the Muppets as it became the central hub of Jim Hensons work and the world he returned to quite often it would seem when it came to continuing his work in puppetry and its evolution.

When you think of how Henson started out its insanely impressive to think how far along he came during his career. The Dark Crystal was in a sense his greatest creation no matter that it was left alone for so long. It still became a cult classic that many people have remembered throughout the years, and in fact as a kid I can still remember seeing it featured in OMSI, which was one of their best exhibits at the time since it drew quite a few people throughout the local area. In fact the dinosaur and Marvel superheroes exhibits were the only others that seemed to draw just as many people since The Dark Crystal was something that catered to a lot of different people since it had more than one element to it that many people enjoyed, much as it does now. The puppets back then had a very limited amount of mobility no matter that Henson and his people were operating at peak capacity and made something quite impressive. Today the inclusion of CGI is kind of hard to go without since without it a lot of viewers might still hang around, but the rich and enchanting world of Thra would not have been nearly as impressive as it became in the first season. What remains to be in the second season, whenever it comes, is no doubt going to blow us away again and show yet another stunning example of why this story is bound to become even more popular.

When thinking about how much goes into each puppet its not hard to be impressed since from the texture of their skin to the elite actors that stepped up to give an added bit of life to the characters. As Gretchen Smail of Bustle will gladly recite, Taron Egerton, Simon Pegg, Natalie Dormer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Mark Hamill, and many more came together to make this a very special return to a world that a lot of us can claim helped to entertain us as kids. Nearly every big role, even several smaller ones, were taken on by actors that have been around the business for a while and know their stuff, and can easily entertain us without much effort. That made for a show that was nothing less than exciting and that only a true cynic that doesnt like anything could possibly say anything negative about. The movements of the puppets were still close to the same, but it does seem to offer some kind of continuity since it didnt make them into smooth-moving characters that would be recognizable but somehow a little less than what we expected. Sometimes the simplicity of a single movement or the halting manner of several is more conducive to memory than the need to make everything absolutely smooth and without blemish. The creation of the world of Thra and the expansion of a story that had already grabbed the attention of so many is far more important since it shows just how far the story has come and how incredible the works of Henson have been throughout the years.

The fact that each and every person, mostly, that worked on the show were fans of the original movie only helped the effort since quite honestly people tend to do better when they care about more than the paycheck. That might seem a bit cynical but its very true. How good of a job does the average person do on anything when theyre simply concerned about getting paid? Now compare that to the job theyll do when they really care about what theyre doing, and one should see a marked difference. As Kelly Lawler of USA Today might agree with, those that shared Hensons vision were deeply invested in this show and continuing the legend that he created, and as such, the show and the continued evolution of his art has only increased as theyve moved forward.

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Video For The Dark Crystal Age of Resistance Explores The Evolution of Muppets - TVOvermind

Roundworms magnified beneath a microscope. Larger worms are adults; smaller worms are in dauer. Credit: Erik Andersen/Northwestern University

Evanston, Ill. Charles Darwin was right.

In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, the famed scientist hypothesized that artificial selection (or domestication) and natural selection work in the same ways.

Now an international team, led by Northwestern University, has produced some of the first evidence that Darwins speculation was correct.

This time, the studys subjects are not exotic birds in the Galapagos, but instead a roundworm, which relies on its sense of smell to assess the availability of food and nearby competition. In the Northwestern-led work, researchers found that natural selection acts on the same genes that control wild roundworms sense of smell as were previously found in domesticated worms in the lab.

The evolution of traits is rarely connected to exact genes and processes, said NorthwesternsErik Andersen, who led the study. We offer a clear example of how evolution works.

The scientists used a combination of laboratory experiments, computational genomic analysis and field work. Their research also shows that natural selection acts on signal-sensing receptors rather than the downstream parts of the genetic process.

The study was published on September 23, 2019, in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Andersen is an associate professor of molecular biosciences in Northwesterns Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

A keystone model organism,C. elegans is a one-millimeter-long roundworm that lives in decaying organic matter particularly rotten fruits and feeds on bacteria. These roundworms are typically found in gardens and compost piles.

ForC. elegans, having a keen sense of smell can be the difference between life or death. If they smell enough food in their environment, then they will stay, grow and reproduce. If they sense a shortage of food and/or too much competition from other worms, then they will undertake a long and potentially fatal journey in search of a more favorable environment. This process, called dauer, delays growth and reproduction.

In other words, dauer decreases reproductive success in the short term in order to ensure survival in the long run.

At some point in their lives, these worms must make a gamble, Andersen said. In the time it takes for a worm to come out of dauer and start growing again, the worm that stayed behind has already been multiplying. If the food runs out, then the dauer worm made the right decision and wins. If the food doesnt run out, then the dauer worm loses.

Andersen and his collaborators found that evolution plays a significant role in a worms decision to stay or enter dauer. Some roundworms have one genetic receptor to process scents; other roundworms have two. The roundworms with two receptors have a heightened sense of smell, which allows them to better assess the availability of resources in their environment and make a better gamble.

If worms can smell large numbers of worms around them, that gives them an advantage, Andersen said. This was discovered in a previous study of artificial selection in worms. Now we also found that result in natural populations. We can see specific evidence in these two genes that artificial and natural selection act similarly.

###

The study, Selection and gene flow shape niche-associated variation in pheromone response, was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Daehan Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in Andersens laboratory, was the papers first author.

Reference: Selection and gene flow shape niche-associated variation in pheromone response by Daehan Lee, Stefan Zdraljevic, Daniel E. Cook, Lise Frzal, Jung-Chen Hsu, Mark G. Sterken, Joost A. G. Riksen, John Wang, Jan E. Kammenga, Christian Braendle, Marie-Anne Flix, Frank C. Schroeder and Erik C. Andersen, 23 September 2019, Nature Ecology & Evolution.DOI: 10.1038/s41559-019-0982-3

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Charles Darwin Was Right: Catching Evolution in the Act - SciTechDaily

Evolution doesnt follow a preordained, straight path. Yet images abound that suggest otherwise. From museum displays to editorial cartoons, evolution is depicted as a linear progression from primitive to advanced.

A high school marching bands T-shirt places a horn-playing Homo sapiens at the end of the evolutionary process.

Image: Brian Kloppenburg, Jordan Summers, Main Street Logo

Youve certainly seen the pictures of a chimpanzee gradually straightening up and progressing through various hominids all the way to a modern human being. Yes, they can be humorous. But these kinds of popular representations about evolution get it all wrong.

As three scholars of biodiversity and biology, these images bother us because they misrepresent how the process of evolution really works and run the risk of reinforcing the publics misconceptions.

Climbing a ladder to perfection

This misunderstanding is a holdover from before 1859, the year Charles Darwin first published his scientific theory of evolution via natural selection.

The scala naturae presents a hierarchy of creation.

Image: Retorica Christiana, Didacus Valdes, 1579

Until then, the traditional view of how the world was organized was through a progression in perfection. This concept is explicit in the idea of the great chain of being, or scala naturae in Latin: All beings on earth, animate and inanimate, could be organized according to an increasing scale of perfection from, say, mushrooms at the bottom up through lobsters and rabbits, all the way to human beings at the top.

Originating with Plato and Aristotle, this view gets three main things wrong.

First, it holds that nature is organized hierarchically. It is not a random assortment of beings.

Secondly, it envisions two organizing criteria: things progress from simple to perfect and from primitive to modern.

And thirdly, it supposes there are no intermediary stages between levels in this hierarchy. Each level is a watertight compartment of similar complexity a barnacle and a coral reef on the same rung are equally complex. No one is halfway between two steps.

In the 1960s a variation of the scala naturae conceived by Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin became popular. His idea was that, although life is somewhat branched, there is direction in evolution, a progression toward greater cognitive complexity and, ultimately, to identification with the divine, that is, God.

Gradual changes, in every direction

At least since Darwin, though, scientists idea of the world is organized through transitions from inanimate molecules to life, from earlier organisms to different kinds of plants and animals, and so on. All life on Earth is the product of gradual transformations, which diversified and gave rise to the exuberance of organisms that we know today.

Two transitions are of particular interest to evolutionary biologists. Theres the jump from the inanimate to the animate: the origin of life. And theres the appearance of the human species from a monkey ancestor.

The most popular way to represent the emergence of human beings is as linear and progressive. Youve probably seen images, logos and political and social propaganda that draw on this representation.

Book covers are just one place you might see a riff on this evolutionary march.

Image: Howling at the Moon Press/Amazon

But none of these representations capture the dynamics of Darwins theory. The one image he included in his book On the Origin of Species is a tree diagram, the branching of which is a metaphor for the way species originate, by splitting. The absence of an absolute time scale in the image is an acknowledgment that gradual change happens on timescales that vary from organism to organism based on the length of a generation.

Forget a hierarchy each organism alive now is the most evolved of its kind.

Image: Phys.org

According to Darwin, all current organisms are equally evolved and are all still affected by natural selection. So, a starfish and a person, for example, are both at the forefront of the evolution of their particular building plans. And they happen to share a common ancestor that lived about 580 million years ago.

Darwins theory doesnt presuppose any special direction in evolution. It assumes gradual change and diversification. And, as evolution is still operating today, all present organisms are the most evolved of their kind.

Man Is But A Worm caricature of Darwins theory in the Punch almanac for 1882.

Image: Edward Linley Sambourne

An enduring misconception

Having been around nearly 2,000 years, the idea of the scala naturae did not disappear during Darwins time. It might actually have been reinforced by something so unexpected as a cartoon. Illustrator Edward Linley Sambournes immensely popular caricature of evolution Man Is But a Worm, published in Punchs Almanack for 1882, combined two concepts that were never linked in Darwins mind: gradualism and linearity.

Given centuries of religious belief in a great chain of being, the idea of linearity was an easy sell. The iconic version of this concept is, of course, the depiction of a supposed ape-to-human progression. Variations of all kinds have been made of this depiction, some with a humorous spirit, but most to ridicule the monkey-to-man theory.

A linear depiction of evolution may, consciously or not, confirm false preconceptions about evolution, such as intelligent design the idea that life has an intelligent creator behind it. Historians can work to unravel how such a simple caricature could have helped distort Darwins theory. Meanwhile, science writers and educators face the challenge of explaining the gradual branching processes that explain the diversity of life.

While less pithy, it might be better for the publics knowledge of science if these T-shirts and bumper stickers ditch the step by step images and use branching diagrams to make a more nuanced and correct point about evolution. Contrary to the Sambourne picture, evolution is better represented as a process producing continuous branching and divergence of populations of organisms.

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Written by

Quentin Wheeler, Senior Fellow for Biodiversity Studies, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Antonio G. Valdecasas, Senior Researcher in Biodiversity , Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, CSIC - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas

Cristina Cnovas, Biologist , Natural History Museum in Madrid, CSIC - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientficas

This article is published in collaboration with The Conversation.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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We've been drawing evolution wrong since the 1800s. So what does it actually look like? - World Economic Forum

Charles Darwin was right.

In his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, the famed scientist hypothesized that artificial selection (or domestication) and natural selection work in the same ways.

Now an international team, led by Northwestern University, has produced some of the first evidence that Darwins speculation was correct.

This time, the studys subjects are not exotic birds in the Galapagos, but instead a roundworm, which relies on its sense of smell to assess the availability of food and nearby competition. In the Northwestern-led work, researchers found that natural selection acts on the same genes that control wild roundworms sense of smell as were previously found in domesticated worms in the lab.

Erik Andersen

The evolution of traits is rarely connected to exact genes and processes, said NorthwesternsErik Andersen, who led the study. We offer a clear example of how evolution works.

The scientists used a combination of laboratory experiments, computational genomic analysis and field work. Their research also shows that natural selection acts on signal-sensing receptors rather than the downstream parts of the genetic process.

The study published this week (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Andersen is an associate professor of molecular biosciences in NorthwesternsWeinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

A keystone model organism,C. elegans is a one-millimeter-long roundworm that lives in decaying organic matter particularly rotten fruits and feeds on bacteria. These roundworms are typically found in gardens and compost piles.

ForC. elegans, having a keen sense of smell can be the difference between life or death. If they smell enough food in their environment, then they will stay, grow and reproduce. If they sense a shortage of food and/or too much competition from other worms, then they will undertake a long and potentially fatal journey in search of a more favorable environment. This process, called dauer, delays growth and reproduction.

The evolution of traits is rarely connected to exact genes and processes.We offer a clear example of how evolution works.

In other words, dauer decreases reproductive success in the short term in order to ensure survival in the long run.

At some point in their lives, these worms must make a gamble, Andersen said. In the time it takes for a worm to come out of dauer and start growing again, the worm that stayed behind has already been multiplying. If the food runs out, then the dauer wormmade the right decision and wins. If the food doesnt run out, then the dauer worm loses.

Andersen and his collaborators found that evolution plays a significant role in a worms decision to stay or enter dauer. Some roundworms have one genetic receptor to process scents; other roundworms have two. The roundworms with two receptors have a heightened sense of smell, which allows them to better assess the availability of resources in their environment and make a better gamble.

If worms can smell large numbers of worms around them, that gives them an advantage, Andersen said. This was discovered in a previous study of artificial selection in worms. Now we also found that result in natural populations. We can see specific evidence in these two genes that artificial and natural selection act similarly.

The study, Selection and gene flow shape niche-associated variation in pheromone response, was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Daehan Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in Andersens laboratory, was the papers first author.

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Catching evolution in the act - Northwestern University NewsCenter

On the rooftop of a Manhattan strip club in one of the opening scenes of box office hit Hustlers, Jennifer Lopezs character Ramona says to fellow stripper Destiny, portrayed by Constance Wu, Youre new, youre gorgeous, youre Asian youre a triple threat. Before this scene, we get a glimpse into the life of Asian American protagonist Destiny: She is struggling to take home enough money after exploitative managers and security at the strip club whittle down her wages, and audiences see her at home in Queens trying to provide for her aging grandmother.

Already, within the first few moments of the film, Destiny embodies the most nuanced portrayal of an Asian sex worker in Hollywoods long history of reducing them to age-old stereotypes about Asian women.In the West, representations of Asian women in popular culture are often relegated to the same limiting roles: the ultra-feminine, innocent and sexually submissive lotus blossom, the model minorityand the sexually aggressive, domineering dragon lady, to name a few. One trope used time and time again is the Asiatic prostitute, where Asian women are often depicted in Western narratives as sex workers or sex slaves.

Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes featuring an Asian sex worker in a contemporary Hollywood film is from Stanley Kubricks Full Metal Jacket (1987), in which a Vietnamese prostitute solicits two American GIs by telling them, Me so horny ... me love you long time. The films depictions of the Vietnamese sex workers offer nothing of their personalities, histories or inner lives, only that they are women with degenerate values and bodies to be exploited by the men.

The idea that all Asian women are prostitutes hasnt come solely from stereotypes in Western media; it was also perpetuated by U.S. immigration law. The Page Act of 1875, the first law to restrict immigration into the country, effectively halted the immigration of East Asian women (namely Chinese women) to the U.S., under the assumption that they were all prostitutes and undesirable immigrants.

Such legalized exclusion of Chinese women popularized American representations of them as degrading figures that could potentially debase white manhood and, as such, threaten the health of the United States social body as a modern nation and imperial power, Lily Wong, an associate professor at American University, wrote in Transpacific Attachments, which studies the shifting depiction of Chinese and Chinese American sex workers in transpacific popular media. The legalized policing of Chinese female bodies justified both anti-Chinese yellow peril discourse and U.S. civilizing rescue narratives of imperial expansion into Asia.

It is unsurprising, then, that a lions share of the most popular on-screen and onstage productions starring Asian actresses fed into this exact discourse of the Western white savior going to the East and being seduced by an Asian woman. Both The World of Suzie Wong (1960) and Claude-Michel Schnberg and Alain Boublils hit musical Miss Saigon feature Asian sex workers as female leads, both of whom play the role of a hooker with a heart of gold while simultaneously embodying the lotus blossom stereotype.

The World of Suzie Wong stars Cantonese-European actress Nancy Kwan in the title role. In the film, Suzie Wong, a Hong Kong prostitute, becomes the love interest to American architect Robert Lomax. Film scholar Celine Parreas Shimizu wrote about Suzie in her book The Hypersexuality of Race: Despite incredible hardship as an illiterate prostitute with an illegitimate son, she maintains her goodness, beauty, and innocence.

She embodies immoral practices while projecting an innate innocence, Shimizu wrote, so it is only ever Suzie, the lotus blossom, who was exploited by men. In Hustlers, while Destiny maintains some of her innocence by labeling Ramona as the ringleader, she and the rest of her stripper posse flip the script by exploiting their white male clients (by drugging them and stealing their money). Meanwhile, Suzie is the picture of subservience, promising her dedication to Robert by saying, I will follow you until you say, Suzie, go away, and asking him in another scene, Robert, why you not let me be your permanent girlfriend?

Suzie was forced into the sex trade after being abandoned at 10 years old. Her character is a mirror to Kim, the female lead in Miss Saigon, a 17-year-old Vietnamese bargirl who also exemplifies the prostitute with a heart of gold archetype. Kim falls in love with and marries a U.S. Marine who leaves once the war is over, and she waits for his return for three years with their love child. When they reunite, the man is with his new American wife, whom Kim meets, triggering her to ultimately kill herself. The musical has long been protested by Asian American activists for its racist, sexist and Orientalist depictions, as well as for yellowface controversies.

These more contemporary stories are spawned from earlier texts, which all replicated the same repeated tropes. Miss Saigon is actually based on Giacomo Puccinis 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, which instead followed the doomed romance between an American lieutenant and a Japanese geisha. Before that, Madama Butterfly was inspired by Madame Chrysanthme, an 1887 semi-autobiographical novel about naval officer Pierre Lotis temporary marriage to a Japanese woman named Kiku. These recurrent storylines perpetuate the image of the Asian woman as war brides, geishas and prostitutes, all of whom lack agency and live to serve the white male lead. Meanwhile, Destinys purpose in life seems much more layered: to find a sense of belonging, to take care of her family, to chase thrills, to succeed in life. And we can tell that aspects of her job excite her, exhaust her and bore her at the same time.

However, in Miss Saigon, when the non-lead prostitute characters were allowed to display their inner lives on stage, audiences view them as desperate and suffering.

The production of Miss Saigon may actually represent other particular women in the sex industry beyond those enmeshed within conditions of sexual slavery, Shimizu wrote. While sexual slavery indeed exists for Asian female prostitutes, other situations coexist simultaneously in ways that should not be removed.

However, thanks to persistent stereotypes like those deployed in Suzie and Kims characters, Asian sex workers, especially those who are migrants, are often assumed to be trafficking victims.

The perpetuation of this stereotype has expressed itself in real-life police practices, which play out Western savior narratives. For example, Asian massage parlors were recently targeted in anti-trafficking stings in Florida, though no one has been charged with human trafficking. (These spa raids were made infamous for leading to Patriots owner Robert Krafts arrest.) In New York, similar crackdowns have led to the shuttering of parlors in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, Manhattan, and Long Island in the past couple years, often leading to arrests. And typically, the people harmed most by these anti-trafficking raids are the women themselves.

Hollywoods insistence on stereotyping Asian women as helpless, innocent lotus blossoms has been met with inevitable consequences, like the fetishization of Asian women, and even some unintended ones, like a hammer-wielding man who killed Chinese men to protect Chinese women from them after watching an unspecified movie.

While Wus character in Hustlers is leaps and bounds better than the characters that came before, presenting a more nuanced and dimensional portrayal of an Asian sex worker on screen, there are still ways in which she fits into the same lineage as Suzie, Kim and Madame Butterfly.

Destiny still maintains a bit of the Asian American ingenue innocence as Ramonas protege, Kate Zen, co-founder of Red Canary Song, an organization that advocates for the rights of migrant sex workers, said in an interview. She ultimately caved in interrogation and sold out the group to the police, in a way that might arguably be retaining the model minority myth.

Sex workers had many other criticisms of the film, from maintaining the whorearchy by portraying the Russian dancers who were willing to give blow jobs as lesser than to ignoring the fact that strippers are often the victims of crimes rather than the perpetrators.

The dimensionality is positive, Zen said, though the focus on drugging and robbing customers also perpetuates stigma against sex workers and is a bit of an aberration from the reality of stripping, where strippers are more likely to get drugged by customers than the other way around.

Brooke, a 20-year-old former stripper from the Chicago area, pointed out that while Hustlers does some work to destigmatize the sex trade, she wishes it wouldve shed more of a light on the abuses and racialized harassment endured by Asian sex workers.

I was told on my first night that being Asian equals money, but they fail to tell you how many times youll hear, Ive never fucked an Oriental girl, Brooke, who requested to not use her last name in regard for her privacy, told HuffPost in an interview. I had many people excited just to see an Asian dancing, thought I was naturally into certain things like being dominated and bossed around, and also treated like a disgrace by Asian men who came into the club.

Still, in Hustlers, audiences are treated to a more well-rounded portrayal of an Asian stripper, whose complex inner life is revealed to us on-screen one that we nearly missed out on, given Dakota Johnson was initially considered for the lead role. (Though perhaps a Southeast Asian actress wouldve been even better casting, considering the real life stripper Destiny was based off of is Rosalyn Keo, who is Cambodian.)

Ultimately, the portrayal of Asian sex workers on screen has come a long way since the me so horny streetwalker, which is especially important given the inextricable ties between the treatment of Asian women in real life and our on-screen depictions.

Its so positive for us to see ourselves portrayed at all, Zen said. What a breath of fresh air!

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'Hustlers' And The Evolution Of Asian Sex Workers On-Screen - HuffPost

This urban sameness is allowing researchers to determine whether isolated populations of the same species develop similar adaptations when placed in parallel environments. What cities offer us is this amazingly large-scale, worldwide experiment in evolution, where you've got thousands of life-forms that are experiencing the same factors, says Marc Johnson, who heads an evolutionary ecology lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Laypeople can be forgiven for not instinctively sharing that enthusiasm, however: At first glance, settling the decades-long debate over evolution's replicability doesn't appear likely to make our post-climate-change lives any less hellish.

But in the quest to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, urban evolution researchers are also revealing the fundamental genetic attributes that make some species adept at adjusting to urban lifeintelligence that could give us the power to forecast evolution's winners and losers in a world that's increasingly hot and crammed with people. When he concluded that killifish in four US cities had developed the same form of toxin resistance, for example, Andrew Whitehead ascribed the species' evolutionary success to its high degree of genetic diversitythat is, the killifish genome naturally contains an abundance of genetic information that isn't usually expressed. So the key to desensitizing the aryl hydrocarbon receptor was probably already present inside killifish DNA, and natural selection simply brought it to the fore.

When the environment changes very rapidly, and changes in a way that poses fitness challenges, then species that are going to be able to adaptively respond to that are ones that already have the necessary genetic diversity in hand, Whitehead says. The environment is changing right now. You can't wait for migrants. You can't wait for new mutations.

Urban evolution researchers are grappling with the question of how their work can help make the reality of a ravaged environment less grim.

Perhaps the greatest asset any creature can have hidden in its genome, of course, is the capacity to withstand heat. With global temperatures set to rise by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the turn of the century, the species likeliest to survive will be those that develop traits to guard against the broil. Today's cities, which are typically 2 to 5 degrees warmer than their surroundings, offer a sneak preview of how evolution will reshape wildlife on a sweltering planet.

The humble acorn ant is among the city-loving harbingers of the genetic churn that lies ahead. Two researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Sarah Diamond and Ryan Martin, have found that acorn ants they collected in both Cleveland and Knoxville, Tennessee, are able to thrive and reproduce in much warmer conditions than those from rural habitats. They hypothesize that natural selection may have favored urban ants whose genes manufacture more robust heat-shock proteins. If they can sort out the genetic markers linked to that suddenly useful trait, we may be able to tell which other species have the potential to adapt when the mercury rises and which are in danger of roasting into extinction.

Diamond hopes that evolutionary prediction will lead to smarter conservation choices. If we know which taxa are most vulnerable to urbanization, she says, then we can do something about it before biodiversity might be adversely impacted. That could involve simple things, such as building strategically situated green spaces within cities. In extreme cases, though, our only option for preserving some species may be to uproot and transport entire populations to distant lands.

There is an intriguing flip side to the idea that urban evolution research can be used to rescue species that lack the capacity to flourish in megacities: If we can identify which animals are genetically primed to adapt well to living amid glass and steel, we might be able to use that knowledge to engineer a more hospitable world for ourselves. That's because certain species, once tweaked in clever ways, have the potential to help heal the environment.

Take oysters, whose feeding process involves filtering harmful bacteria and contaminants out of up to 50 gallons of water per day. The gelatinous mollusks were once abundant in America's urban rivers and bays, but they were largely gobbled up by shellfish lovers decades ago. By the time anyone realized it might be environmentally wise to have massive oyster beds in places like New York, it was too late for the populations to be easily revived: Underwater landscapes had been ruined by decades of dredging and dumping, as well as saturated in anthropogenic pollutants that cause fatal oyster diseases.

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How Cities Reshape the Evolutionary Path of Urban Wildlife - WIRED

Lysette Maurice N. SandovalSep 28, 2019 10:33 AM EDT

Is it possible for a machine to think like that of a human? Since the "A Space Odyssey" release in 2001, people have been wondering if this were ever possible. With the advent of technology, machines that come with artificial intelligence have become possible and who knows what else technology can give birth to.

A team of researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) believes that is it possible for a machine to have human-like intelligence, but they think the idea is still far fetched from reality. However, the team published their new paper in the American Naturalist exploring how it is possible for computers to undergo an evolution in their learning patterns just like how natural organisms. Their study involves the implications for many fields which covers artificial intelligence too.

"Every living organism is somehow equipped with intelligence that allows them to undergo some kind of learning. Perhaps the only downside is that people are yet to discover how their learning patterns have evolved over time. Now, we now have the capacity to witness the unfolding of such learning through virtual space," Anselmo Pontes said, lead researcher and researcher on Computer Science from MSU.

"An understanding of how the evolution of intelligence works means learning how the other fields such as education, psychology, and neuroscience work. It also supplies us with clues on how the brain processes information to help us build robots that could mimic the human experience perfecting how humans do what they do and why they do it."

"The findings of this study have a huge potential," said Fred Dyer, co-author and integrative biology professor at the MSU. "What we are trying to do is to untangle the very process of how human cognition came to be, because we want to use it to shape the future."

The goal is to understand the origins of how people think to be able to develop robots that can eventually learn how a task is done instead of bing programmed to do a task. The initial results of the study show an evolution of associative learning in an artificial organism that didn't come with a brain.

"Our inspiration was how animals learned to navigate the environments by learning landmarks," Pontes said. "During laboratory experiments, the bees were able to associate colors and shapes with directions, that allowed them to navigate through the environment as a complex space.

"The evolution that happens naturally may take a long time to study," Pontes said. "However, a revolution is similar to that of an algorithm, so it can easily be replicated by a computer. All that we have to do is to figure out how that's done."

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Artificial Intelligence and The Evolution Of Learning - Science Times

As the discussion about AI ensures an extreme change of the company, leaders are particularly inquisitive to know whether it will make it simpler for them. While a lot of them are energized, some of them dont need decision-making made simpler. Their capability to settle on cool-headed decisions without complex innovation is the very foundation of their notoriety for being great leaders.

New research from Forbes Insights affirms that by far most of the organizations are as of now well on their way with AI and that these organizations outflank their companions. In view of a survey of 305 executives, Forbes Insights finds that practically all (92%) perceive and proselytize the value of an extensive AI system. The vast majority of these organizations are building the muscle to shape effective AI projects and culture, particularly around data and analytics.

Like it or not, AI has arrived, and its as of now influencing how your organization works. Indeed, even in its earliest stages, AI is far better than people in perceiving patterns, automating performance, and removing mistakes. Whats more, its acing the job. Half of the C-level executives report that improving operational productivity is the most critical way AI impacts their business. While drivers, bookkeepers, paralegals, and many more may keep on losing their positions, the leaders of things to come need to concentrate on what people are better at: analyzing. Its in replying why that people surpass their opposition. Fruitful leaders must form nonstop training, learning, and critical analysis into their way of life to stay with their employees and company competitive.

Fairly unexpectedly, AI is currently training people. 46% of the officials put resources into AI for employee training, while just 33% put resources into AI for building new solutions dependent on data. This pattern is a carefully reassuring sign that AI is being utilized to enable employees to be better at their jobs, instead of supplanting them through and through.

The primary critical fact about AI is that you dont know early what the data will uncover. By its very nature, AI is an act of pure trust, similarly as embracing your numbness and radical reframing may be. Also, such learning to give up, tuning in to AI can enable you to discover really novel, disruptive experiences in amazing and surprising spots.

A second fact about AI is that it makes reality to think by separating the sign from the noise. You let the algorithms free on a tremendous scene of data, and they report back just what you have to know and when you have to know it.

When settling on complex decisions, executives commonly need to take a look at a lot of various factors. Where theres an excessive amount of data to be considered, the leader may get overpowered, prompting bad decisions.

Despite what might be expected, a machine can undoubtedly deal with various contributions without fatigue or disarray. All that is required is a lot of guidelines or programs that control the machine to utilize probability and propose or execute the most logical decision.

Loads of exciting changes are not too far off. While AI may not really make the procedure simpler, its going to altogether contribute towards streamlining decisions for better procedures and an agile future enterprise.

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Artificial Intelligence is at the Cutting-Edge of Evolution - Analytics Insight

Editor's note:The Giants sorted through stacks of their own Topps baseball cards as part of the "In the Cards" series with NBC Sports Bay Area's Alex Pavlovic. The fifth and final edition is with Giants manager Bruce Bochy.

In a few days, Bruce Bochy no longer will be a major league manager.

But before Bochy retires as the skipper of the Giants, he sat down with NBC Sports Bay Area'sAlex Pavlovic to go through some of his old Topps trading cards.

In 1979, Bochy's second season in the big leagues, he was clean-shaven. There was no facial hair for the 24-year-old Astros catcher.

"Oh man, how young I was," Bochy said when asked what comes to mind when he sees that image of himself. "I don't recognize the guy. He's too young."

But the baby-face look didn't last long. A few years later, Bochy had a solid mustache.

"It's hard to believe it's the same guy," Bochy said. "I don't know if it's a good [mustache], but I've had some comments about it."

Right now, Bochy has a bit of a distinctive stubble. But he told Pavlovic he'snot ruling out bringing back the classic mustache.

[RELATED: Longoria confirms fun facts on Topps cards]

Mustache or no mustache, Bochy is a legend. He guided the Giants to three World Series titles and likely will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in a few years.

The Giants' final series against the Dodgers will be one long tribute to Bochy. He's earned it.

He should celebrate by purchasing a few packs of cards.

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Bochy shares evolution of his mustache through Topps cards - NBCSports.com

POLICE INTERROGATIONS are by their very nature dramatic. The stakes are high. There is an imbalance of power. Those involved are under pressure. Narrative is essential to the proceedings: both the police and the suspect have their own version of events, and seek to convince the other that theirs is correct. Interrogations are also an exercise in characterdetectives might play good cop, bad cop in an attempt to winkle out a confession. Important clues can be found in what a suspect says, and what they omit.

Little surprise, then, that interrogations have long featured in police procedurals and buddy-cop shows. Television dramas often saw interrogations as a set piece from which the police would emerge as brave, smart and victorious. In Prime Suspect (1991), the wily and quick-witted DCI Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) would come alive in front of the one-way glass; DCI John Luther (Idris Elba, pictured below) knew how to push a perpetrators buttons. The audience was encouraged to trust the judgment of law enforcement.

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But in recent years, as police brutality and misconduct have made headlines, confessionsand the means by which they are elicitedhave been examined more closely on television. Making a Murderer (2015), a true-crime documentary, shows Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old with learning difficulties, confessing to the murder of Teresa Halbach, a photographer, in 2005. Using footage from the interrogation room, the film-makers argue that the police in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, unconstitutionally coerced him in order to bolster their version of events, which until then had little substantial evidence. The Confession Tapes (2017) likewise takes contentious real-life confessions and inspects them with a rigour that (according to the show) the justice system has failed to.

When They See Us (2019), a four-part series directed by Ava DuVernay, looks at how interrogations, institutional racism and injustice interact. It dramatises the true story of the Central Park Five, a group of minority-ethnic boys wrongly convicted in 1990 of rape and assault. During questioning, the accusedall aged between 14 and 16 at the timewere denied food and drink and access to legal counsel. In the show, they are portrayed as sleep-deprived and desperate, subjected to intense off-the-record questioning in cleaning closets and filing rooms. The police threaten the boys with violence if they do not cooperate; detectives are depicted as more interested in finding someone they can pin the crime on than in nailing the actual perpetrator. In that they were successful: their bullying resulted in taped false confessions, and time in prison for the five boys. (In 2002 a court vacated the convictions.)

In A Confession, a new British drama also based on true events, the failure of Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher (Martin Freeman) to act above board has severe repercussions for the prosecution of a case. In his eagerness to interrogate a taxi driver suspected of murdering a young woman, he ignores the procedures in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The man does confess both to the murder in question and to another, but his statement is inadmissible as evidence in court. Here, once again, law enforcement is shown to be prone to making rash, emotional decisions.

Criminal (pictured top), released on Netflix on September 20th, pursues that idea and sets up a fictional game of cat-and-mouse between detectives and suspects. The drama in each of the 12 episodesset in either Britain, France, Germany or Spainis confined to an interrogation room in an anonymous police station. On one side of the mirror, bright lights illuminate police officers, the accused and, sometimes, a lawyer; on the other, a red-lit backroom hosts office politics, a running commentary on the cases progress and a ticking digital clock which informs the officers how long they have left until they have to charge the suspects or release them. Lies are exposed, but often not the ones the detectives had intended to uncover. Investigators are manipulated, led down wrong paths and frustrated in their quest. The suspects guiltor innocenceis not always clear.

Where interrogations once allowed TVs protagonists a chance to outsmart their opponents and heroically solve cases, now they show them to be fallible: think of the interview in Bodyguard in which David Budds reading of the situation is dangerously wrong. These characters bring their own foibles to bear on cases, and are willing to do whatever is necessary, morally permissible or not, to reinforce their version of events. They can make for difficult viewing, but these new shows offer a satisfying combination of suspense, friction and the search for truth.

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The evolution of police interrogations on screen - The Economist