1,000-Year-Old Macaw Breeding Community in the American Southwest

Piles of macaw bones found in Arizona and New Mexico—well outside the bird’s native range in South and Central America—have been dated to between 900 and 1200 CE. New findings—based on an analysis of mitochondrial genomes—have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that this is the result of breeders inside an an undiscovered pre-hispanic settlement from this time. It is likely that …

We Pay Attention Four Times Per Second

Two new studies in the scientific publication Neuron—authored by research teams from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley—posit that attention does not hone in like a spotlight, rather, it strobes in and out four times per second. “Perception is discontinuous,” says Sabine Kastner of Princeton Neuroscience Institute, but it is not flickering on and off entirely. Rather, we cycle between “periods of maximum focus and periods of …

Wear the Two-Armed Robot Companion, Fusion, Like a Backpack

With a head and two arms, Fusion is a robot prototype by Syrian designer Yamen Saraiji that’s supposed to be worn like a backpack. The machine’s two eyes act as cameras, porting a shared perspective to a second person, who can then operate both arms remotely (through an Oculus Rift headset and Touch controllers). The goal here is to enable work between collaborators who aren’t …