The massive seabirds' powerful beaks can be surprisingly gentle when preening their babies. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. As thousands of birds nest in the warm sun of Midway Atoll, some tend to their new chicks. In a video posted by Friends of Midway Atoll (FOMA), one of the newest Mōlī (Laysan albatross) chicks gets a careful "beak preen" from its parent. According to FOMA, their beaks are essential survival tools, but can also be used with "precision and gentleness, applying only the pressure needed to tend to a fragile chick."

An iceberg sealed the penguin colony's entrance, triggering a 70% survival drop. A group of Emperor penguin chicks is walking on the fast ice at the Emperor penguin colony at Snow Hill Island in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A massive iceberg has triggered a catastrophic die-off of Emperor Penguin chicks in Antarctica, blocking thousands of parents from reaching their young. The event claimed the lives of approximately 14,000 chicks at the Coulman Island colony in the Ross Sea, the region's largest breeding ground.

This African penguin baby will sadly not be named after a hot dog. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Last December, staff at Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey, celebrated the arrival of two newly hatched African penguin chicks (). Their births marked a big moment in conservation efforts for the critically endangered species, but even more good news was apparently on the way. Less than a month after welcoming Duffy and Oscar to the flock, Adventure Aquarium has announced newcomer.

Chicken swarm optimization is a new meta-heuristic algorithm which mimics the foraging hierarchical behavior of chicken. In this paper, we describe the preprocessing of handwritten document by contrast enhancement while preserving detail with an improved chicken swarm optimization algorithm.The results of the algorithm are compared with other existing meta heuristic algorithms like Cuckoo Search, Firefly Algorithm and the Artificial bee colony. The proposed algorithm considerably outperforms all the above by giving good results.

Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium celebrates their star penguin, Pesto, who weighs a whopping 49 pounds. PENGUIN-INSPIRED ROBOT EXPLORES SEA USING AI Pesto weighs more than both his proud parents combined at a staggering 49 pounds. His parents, Hudson and Tango, each weigh about 24 pounds. According to a statement from the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium, Pesto is the heaviest chick the facility has ever had. His gender was announced to the world earlier this month when his keeper, Michaela Smale, "shovel[ed] away a mountain of fresh snow to unleash an avalanche of blue."

If you own a copy of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition or Minecraft: Education Edition, you can now grab a free expansion pack based on the BBC's Planet Earth III. Much like the previous Frozen Planet II experience, this new wildlife documentary DLC lets players explore five scenarios through the lens of animals -- arctic wolves, ocelots, musk oxen, leopards, Cape fur seals, great white sharks, impalas and more. Basically, be the hunter or be hunted; you get to play both sides on locations ranging from the Arctic tundra to the Okavango Delta. A new addition to this educational experience is the "BBC Planet Earth Field Station," which is set in the heart of a pixelated jungle. This serves as a portal to the five biomes, with extra goodies including sound boards, animal facts and a cinematics album.

Vision transformers (ViTs) are top performing models on many computer vision benchmarks and can accurately predict human behavior on object recognition tasks. However, researchers question the value of using ViTs as models of biological learning because ViTs are thought to be more data hungry than brains, with ViTs requiring more training data to reach similar levels of performance. To test this assumption, we directly compared the learning abilities of ViTs and animals, by performing parallel controlled rearing experiments on ViTs and newborn chicks. We first raised chicks in impoverished visual environments containing a single object, then simulated the training data available in those environments by building virtual animal chambers in a video game engine. We recorded the first-person images acquired by agents moving through the virtual chambers and used those images to train self supervised ViTs that leverage time as a teaching signal, akin to biological visual systems. When ViTs were trained through the eyes of newborn chicks, the ViTs solved the same view invariant object recognition tasks as the chicks. Thus, ViTs were not more data hungry than newborn visual systems: both learned view invariant object representations in impoverished visual environments. The flexible and generic attention based learning mechanism in ViTs combined with the embodied data streams available to newborn animals appears sufficient to drive the development of animal-like object recognition.

My Big Idea came to me on a soggy August day on Long Island Sound, captive in a lifeless O'Day Mariner, knee to sweaty knee with the houseguest I so wanted to please, sails slopping about uselessly, out of beer and potato chips, at the mercy of the small outboard which--of course--conked out. During the long embarrassing tow, my guest, who was a physicist, speculated that a "shear pin" in the motor failed, exactly as it was designed to do, to keep the aging and overheated putt-putt from cooking itself to death--a deliberately weak link that breaks the circuit before real damage happens. What if such a circuit breaker in my brain had stopped me from suggesting Let's go sailing! on a day clearly meant for an air-conditioned movie theater. Wouldn't it be great if automatic brakes in our heads shut us down before we shot off our mouths? Such purposeful failure is routinely engineered into just about everything--by engineers, or by evolution.