From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we're ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains In a grey-walled room in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, a strange activity is underfoot. Wearing a cap covered in sensors and positioning themselves into a chair, a person places their bare feet over two holes in a platform. Beneath this lies a robot, which uses a metal probe to begin to tickle their soles. Here, at Radboud University's Touch and Tickle lab, volunteers are being mercilessly tickled in the name of science. "We can manipulate how strong the stimulation is, how fast and where it is going to be applied on your foot," says Konstantina Kilteni, who runs the lab, of the robot tickling experiment.

This paper presents a bonobo detection and classification pipeline built from the commonly used machine learning methods. Such application is motivated by the need to test bonobos in their enclosure using touch screen devices without human assistance. This work introduces a newly acquired dataset based on bonobo recordings generated semi-automatically. The recordings are weakly labelled and fed to a macaque detector in order to spatially detect the individual present in the video. Handcrafted features coupled with different classification algorithms and deep-learning methods using a ResNet architecture are investigated for bonobo identification. Performance is compared in terms of classification accuracy on the splits of the database using different data separation methods. We demonstrate the importance of data preparation and how a wrong data separation can lead to false good results. Finally, after a meaningful separation of the data, the best classification performance is obtained using a fine-tuned ResNet model and reaches 75% of accuracy.

Bonobos are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, sharing about 98.7 per cent of our DNA - and it seem they have picked up a few human-like characteristics along the way. A new study has revealed that the apes produce high-pitched'baby-like' cries when they are attacked, in order to attract comfort from others. These displays of distress are strategic, increasing their chances of receiving consolation from bonobo bystanders, scientists claim. They resemble those typically used by infants - such as pouting, whimpering and showing tantrums. The study by psychologists at Durham University reveals that adult bonobos are also less likely to be re-attacked by their former opponent when they display these'baby-like' signals following a conflict.

Apes like chimps and bonobos often use special signals to begin and end social interactions -- much like we might say hello and goodbye -- a study has found. This behaviour had never before been seen in another species outside of humans, explained the researchers, who were led from Durham University. The team also found that, just like with humans, bonobos who were close friends were more likely to be more relaxed about the social niceties when interacting. Apes like chimps and bonobos use special signals to begin and end social interactions -- much like we might say hello and goodbye -- a study has found. The researchers found that social interactions between apes often began and end with distinct signals.

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years ago. At first, archeologists assumed he'd fallen in a snowstorm and frozen to death. Then they discovered various cuts and bruises on his body and an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. They also found traces of blood on the stone knife he was carrying. Most likely, he died fighting. Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan regards the Iceman story as emblematic of our violent nature. Humans are a quarrelsome lot with a special talent for waging war. In her book War: How Conflict Shaped Us, she argues that warfare is so deeply embedded in human history that we barely recognize its ripple effects.

Men's dress clothing, mine included, can be a little boring. Like many male office workers, I lean toward clothes that are sharp but not at all showy. Nearly every weekday, I wear a dress shirt that is either light blue, white or has some subtle check pattern, usually paired with slacks and a blazer. The description alone could make a person doze. I used to buy my dress shirts from a Hong Kong tailor.

This time, Google's latest machine learning system, DeepMind, has learned to respond to stress with extreme aggression. I dunno about you, but that sounds like we just gave computers a fight or flight response. You may recall DeepMind as the computer that bested human Go players for the first time last years. Now, researchers have been using it to explore the limits of game theory -- a field of psychology that analyzes how people respond to cooperative and competitive opportunities. The team found that when DeepMind suspects that it's about to lose, it will switch to "highly aggressive" tactics to either win or maximize damage to its opponents.

Human minds are only one example of mind on earth. So what are those other minds really like? It is often talked about as the ultimate prize of artificial intelligence: a machine that can think like a human. But human minds are only one example of the kinds of minds on earth. So what are those other minds like? How do they work and how can we understand them?