Scienceblogtwo

Geographers frequently go to the past for the answers to what environmental challenges our planet's warming globe will bring about in the future. The pyramids of Giza, one of the most famous man-made structures in the world, were made possible by the environment of ancient Egypt, according to a new study that was published on August 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors of the study discovered that people need the waterway to move tools and other supplies like stones and limestones to the Giza Plateau for pyramid construction on a now-dry arm of the Nile River known as the Khufu branch. Sheisha Hader, a physical geographer at the University of Aix-Marseille in France and the study's principal author, adds that the Nile was an essential resource for ancient Egypt's transportation, food, land for farming, and water supplies.                                      ...

A robot developed by Columbia Engineers learns more about itself than about its surroundings. As every athlete or fashion-conscious person knows, our impression of our bodies is not always accurate or practical, but it plays an important role in how we behave in society. While you play ball or get ready, your brain is continuously planning for movement so that you can move your body without bumping, tripping, or falling. Infant humans create their own bodily models, and robots are now beginning to do the same. Today, a team at Columbia Engineering announced the creation of a robot that, for the first time, can learn a model of its entire body from scratch without the assistance of a human. In a recent work published in Science Robotics, the researchers describe how their robot constructed a kinematic model of itself and how it used that model to plan motions, achieve goals, and avoid obstacles in a variety of circumstances. Even physical damage was automatically found and repaired. A r...

Individual agents, such as robots or drones, can cooperate and finish a task when communication channels are open. What happens, though, if their technology is insufficient or the signals are jammed, making communication impossible? Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began with this more challenging task. They created a technique using multi-agent reinforcement learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to teach many agents to cooperate. Huy Tran, an aeronautical engineer at Illinois, noted that it is simpler when agents can communicate with one another. "But we wanted to achieve this in a decentralized manner, so that they don't communicate with one another. We also concentrated on circumstances in which it is unclear what the various duties or responsibilities of the agents should be." Because it's unclear what one agent should do in contrast to another agent, Tran claimed that this scenario is far more complicated and a harder difficu...