We’ve shaped them, and they’ve shaped us.
The patterns are good for our well-being.
A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport, next to a particularly ugly orchid, top the list of 156 new plants and fungi from Kew Botanical Gardens worldwide in 2020.
In fact, a third of the new species are orchids; and a total of 19 orchids were found on the island of New Guinea. In the following photo you can see an image of what is considered "the ugliest orchid in the world."
Other findings
Six new species of webcap toadstool fungi have been named in the UK this year, including Cortinarius heatherae (pictured at the top of this post), which was discovered along the river on the edge of Heathrow Airport by field mycologist Andy Overall. Other discoveries by scientists at Kew include:
- A Peruvian plant related to the sweet potato that could be a future food source.
- A rare and rare scaly shrub growing in the arid regions of Namibia, which has scaly leaves and grows in hot natural sand trays.
- A plant related to the pineapple, which is pollinated by hummingbirds, lives on a limestone cliff in central Brazil, but is at risk of extinction due to the mining of limestone to make cement.
- A bush related to the blueberry found near the world's largest gold mine in New Guinea, Indonesia.
- An herb with medicinal properties found in a forest on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
- Two new species of Aloe (as in Aloe vera) from Madagascar.
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The news
A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport is one of 156 new plants and fungi on the 2020 list
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
A second wave of relief.
The little space telescope that could.
We once again have new evidence of the universality of facial expressions (and emotions), but this time from a new approach. In a new study was examined the occurrence of 16 expressions in 6 million videos from 144 countries using machine learning.
Potential applications of this study include helping people who have trouble reading emotions, such as children and adults with autism, recognize the faces that humans make to convey certain feelings.
Neural networks
At least since the time of Aristotle, scholars have tried to understand how and why the face reveals our feelings, from joy to sadness. The debate on universality is fundamental to understanding the nature, causes and functions of emotions.
The study, in two experiments using deep neural networks, examined the extent to which 16 types of facial expressions were systematically produced in thousands of contexts in 6 million videos from 144 countries.
In each region, certain facial configurations were observed relatively more frequently in certain contexts. The associations were subtle (i.e., the magnitude of associations between facial expression and context tended to be weak), but, surprisingly, the expression-context association pattern observed in videos from one region of the world was similar to those in from other regions of the world.
For example, across the various regions sampled, people in the videos performed facial-muscular movements labeled 'awe' more frequently in contexts that involved fireworks, a parent, toys, a pet, and dancing than in contexts that did not include these. items. such as those related to music, art, police and team sports.
It was thus discovered that each type of facial expression had different associations with a set of contexts that were conserved in a 70% in 12 regions of the world.
16 facial expressions that one tends to associate with amusement, anger, amazement, concentration, confusion, contempt, satisfaction, desire, disappointment, doubt, elation, interest, pain, sadness, surprise and triumph.
According to these associations, regions varied in the frequency with which different facial expressions occurred depending on which contexts were most salient. The results reveal fine patterns in human facial expressions that are conserved throughout the modern world.
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The news
Thanks to AI we now know that there are 16 universal facial expressions
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
It rules over never-ending darkness.