New research shows ill pupae emit a chemical signal before ever leaving their cocoons. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Ants are some of nature's most selfless animals. They practice social distancing when ill, consistently act for the good of the colony, and will die to protect their queen from outsiders. This evolutionary drive is so strong that at least one ant species will even willingly sacrifice before they leave their cocoons.

An important paradigm in 3D object detection is the use of multiple modalities to enhance accuracy in both normal and challenging conditions, particularly for long-tail scenarios. To address this, recent studies have explored two directions of adaptive approaches: MoE-based adaptive fusion, which struggles with uncertainties arising from distinct object configurations, and late fusion for output-level adaptive fusion, which relies on separate detection pipelines and limits comprehensive understanding. In this work, we introduce Cocoon, an object- and feature-level uncertainty-aware fusion framework. The key innovation lies in uncertainty quantification for heterogeneous representations, enabling fair comparison across modalities through the introduction of a feature aligner and a learnable surrogate ground truth, termed feature impression. We also define a training objective to ensure that their relationship provides a valid metric for uncertainty quantification. Cocoon consistently outperforms existing static and adaptive methods in both normal and challenging conditions, including those with natural and artificial corruptions. Furthermore, we show the validity and efficacy of our uncertainty metric across diverse datasets.

It's an ominous-looking disc that sits on a night table, resembling a tiny satellite dish. It uses radar to monitor your movements while you sleep, combining that data with information about your bedroom--temperature, humidity, and brightness--to measure the quality of your sleep. Around the time you've set the alarm--at the instant it senses your sleep has passed out of the deepest stages--it brightens its semicircle of soft LED light to ease you gently from your slumbers. And this most intimate companion is made by Amazon, one of the world's biggest--and to some scariest--companies. Meet Halo Rise, the latest contribution to Amazon's mission of creating a persistent yet almost undetectable computational cocoon that monitors, listens, and fulfills your every whim and need.

Scientists exploring the Ecuadorian Amazon have discovered a new species of parasitic wasp that turns its victims into zombies. In what the researchers say is a particularly'hardcore' form of hijacking, these wasps first make normally social spiders turn their backs on their own colonies, before spinning a cocoon for the larvae that will eventually eat it. The gruesome attack stands out from most other known instances of wasp parasitism, being unusual in that it does not target a solitary spider species, as is usually the case. In what the researchers say is a particularly'hardcore' form of hijacking, these wasps first make normally social spiders turn their backs on their own colonies, before spinning a cocoon for the larvae that will eventually eat it'Wasps manipulating the behaviour of spiders has been observed before, but not at a level as complex as this,' said Philippe Fernandez-Fournier, lead author of the study and former master's student at UBC's department of zoology. 'Not only is this wasp targeting a social species of spider but it's making it leave its colony, which it rarely does.'

This month, Aviva-backed smart home security system Cocoon revealed that it had signed a deal with digital home insurance platform PolicyCastle, which will see policyholders receive a 15% discount when they protect their home using the system. While telematics systems are widely used in the UK motor insurance industry, smart home technology is still in its infancy by comparison. However, the signs suggest that it could well be the next frontier in revolutionising insurance: in fact, 75% of home insurers expect smart home technology to positively affect risk mitigation, according to recent stats. Insurance Business asked Sanjay Parekh, CEO of Cocoon, about the benefits for the insurance industry of utilising smart home tech, and how AI will change the way homes are protected. "The development of AI-powered'smart' home security offers insurers the ability to more accurately price risk, reducing the cost of insuring security-conscious homeowners which in turn can be passed back as a reduction or saving on their premium," Parekh began.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our daily lives in unexpected ways. It is not just transforming online services with innovations such as Apple's Siri voice recognition app, which will send emails when you instruct it to, or Microsoft's Skype translation services, which enable you to communicate online with people whose languages you do not speak. Wider applications of artificial intelligence, such as image and pattern recognition (classifying data or objects based on common features), natural language processing (how computers understand and respond to human speech) and machine learning (when software learns something without being programmed to do so) will soon be featuring in many products and services. Pest control In recent years, pest control company Rentokil Initial has been experimenting with rodent traps equipped with sensors and WiFi. These send data to a command centre, which the company has built with partners Google and PA Consulting.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our daily lives in unexpected ways. It is not just transforming online services with innovations such as Apple's Siri voice recognition app, which will send emails when you instruct it to, or Microsoft's Skype translation services, which enable you to communicate online with people whose languages you do not speak. Wider applications of artificial intelligence, such as image and pattern recognition (classifying data or objects based on common features), natural language processing (how computers understand and respond to human speech) and machine learning (when software learns something without being programmed to do so) will soon be featuring in many products and services. Pest control In recent years, pest control company Rentokil Initial has been experimenting with rodent traps equipped with sensors and WiFi. These send data to a command centre, which the company has built with partners Google and PA Consulting.

The one redeeming feature of a spider is that the webs they create are usually too small, or too weak, to entrap a human. But Festo continues to corner the market on unsettling and slightly creepy robots with a machine that can create giant webs and even 3D cocoons that could easily hold a human hostage. The 3D Cocooner's web is made of a soft flexible thread that's coated in a liquid plastic resin. As it's being extruded, a UV light on the print head hardens the material giving the webs and cocoons the robot creates instant structure without the need for additional supports to be created A built-in saw slices the material when the robot's print head needs to move to another location, but the special resin can also be softened again at any time allowing beams and supports to be angled, repositioned, or connected to other parts of the 3D cocoon during the printing process. Admittedly, the 3D Cocooner doesn't really look as creepy as a spider. It has no beady eyes or menacing fangs, but the fact that it could quickly entomb you in its resin web is more than enough reason to question why this research needs to continue.