Octopus arms are the animal kingdom's most flexible A mating pair of wild Octopus americanus, one displaying the arm action "raise." Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With three hearts, blue blood, and eight arms that seem to have a mind of their own, octopuses are among the ocean's most fascinating creatures . Their signature limbs and complex nervous system help them explore, communicate, capture prey, and mate in many marine habitats. Now, scientists are unlocking some of the secrets embedded in these arms, namely whether they have some degree of "handedness."

While humans may have cornered the market on writing songs (including public safety inspired bangers), rhythm itself is more widespread across the animal kingdom. And some animals could have better rhythm than us Homo sapiens. One trained California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) named Ronan can keep a beat better than some people, according to a new study published May 1 in the journal Scientific Reports. In lab settings, other non-human animals have shown some ability to move in time to a range of regular rhythms. Some bird species can be very precise, but do not necessarily maintain that persistence over time.

In the animal kingdom, having a big brain is usually linked with being smarter. But a new study by scientists in France shows this is not actually true when it comes to domestic dogs. They found that breeds with smaller brains respond best to training and have good short-term memory – two traits considered'clever' in dogs. Meanwhile, breeds with bigger brains scored higher for fear, aggression, attention-seeking behaviours and separation anxiety – traits linked with dimwittedness. So, if you've got a big dog such as a Retriever, Rottweiler or Siberian Husky, they're likely to have a smaller brain but higher brainpower.

Clever Hans, a performing horse, drew amazed crowds wherever he went. With his owner Wilhelm, a maths teacher, he put on incredible displays of arithmetic, beating out the answer to sums with his hooves. Hans even appeared to be able to read, though sceptics insisted the horse was merely responding to signals given by Wilhelm, touring Germany before the First World War. However the trick was done, neither the animal nor the teacher would have been surprised by news this month that horses are more intelligent than previously guessed. Researchers at Nottingham Trent University taught 20 horses to touch cards with their noses in return for treats.

It's safe to say that proboscis monkeys are some of the strangest looking creatures in the animal kingdom. While female monkeys have pointy noses, the males have large, rather phallic noses – earning them the title of the'world's ugliest animals'. Now, a study has finally got to the bottom of this unusual facial feature. Scientists from the Australian National University say that their large noses are more than just an eye sore. Instead, they offer several major benefits – especially when it comes to attracting a female partner.

Temporal grounding is crucial in multimodal learning, but it poses challenges when applied to animal behavior data due to the sparsity and uniform distribution of moments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Positional Recovery Training framework (Port), which prompts the model with the start and end times of specific animal behaviors during training. Specifically, Port enhances the baseline model with a Recovering part to predict flipped label sequences and align distributions with a Dual-alignment method. This allows the model to focus on specific temporal regions prompted by ground-truth information. Extensive experiments on the Animal Kingdom dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of Port, achieving an IoU@0.3 of 38.52. It emerges as one of the top performers in the sub-track of MMVRAC in ICME 2024 Grand Challenges.

But have you ever wondered what a fight between a hippopotamus and a great white shark might look like? Now, scientists have set the record straight, after using artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate battles between the most terrifying animals on Earth. Somewhat surprisingly, the simulations suggest that a hippo would beat a great white shark - and could even take down a polar bear. However, the ultimate champion of the animal kingdom is the African Elephant, according to researchers from Animal Matchup. In honour of World Animal Day, experts from Animal Match set out to settle the debate - which animal is the strongest?

MIT engineers have designed a walking lunar robot cleverly inspired by the animal kingdom. The "mix-and-match" system is made of worm-like robotic limbs astronauts could configure into various "species" of robots resembling spiders, elephants, goats and oxen. The team won the Best Paper Award last week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace Conference. WORMS (Walking Oligomeric Robotic Mobility System) is one team's vision of a future where astronauts living on a moon base delegate activities to robotic minions. However, to avoid "a zoo of machines" with various robots for every task imaginable, the modular WORMS would allow astronauts to swap out limbs, bases and appendages for the task at hand.

In this week's geeked-out edition of the Good News Roundup, Ukraine's jaw-dropping battlefield victories with HIMARS are documented using OSINT, South Africa implements AI technology to track dangerous locust swarms, biologists and naturalists overwhelmingly agree that gay sex is normal throughout the animal kingdom, and BirdNet proves reliable at crowdsourcing the task of identifying wild birds by their songs. In wholesome news for sci fi/space fantasy fans everywhere, Ukraine's president Zelensky continues attending technology trade shows through holograms in which he promises that Ukraine will defeat the Empire. Ukrainians are also using 3d imaging technology to preserve the cultural heritage of their country from looters and bombs, storing their data in a digital archive that will support restoration work when the invaders have been defeated. And in good news for new Ukrainian parents, the non-profit Embrace Global is making headlines for using innovative technology to provide incubators for babies in Ukraine at a tiny fraction of their usual cost. You can see their TED talk by entrepreneur Jane Chen here.

Artificial intelligence is helping us understand the language of animals. The technology can analyze hours of animal audio in a fraction of the time the same work would take for a human. "If you're manually trying to isolate these calls from audio files, it takes a really long time," said Kevin Coffey, a professor at the University of Washington. Coffey is also one of the creators of DeepSqueak, an A.I. program designed to pick up on high-pitched rat calls that human ears often miss. "In rats, these calls are often related to positive or negative effect," Coffey said.