The idea of a plant making noises may evoke a vision of the mandrakes from Harry Potter. But a new study suggests that plants really do produce distress calls when they do not get enough water. They also appear to produce alarm sounds after being cut, with these noises found to come from tomato and tobacco plants, as well as corn and the grapevines used to make Cabernet Sauvignon. Ultrasonic vibrations have been recorded from plants previously, using sensors directly touching them. Now the new study provides the first evidence that plants emit airborne sounds, which researchers estimate could be heard by animals with sharp hearing like mice and moths from up to 16 feet (five metres) away.

The technology, which can quantify distress calls made by birds housed in sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls compared to other barn noises with a 97% accuracy level, according to a new study. Until now, farmers have had to rely on stockmanship to distinguish welfare issues in individual birds and the deployment of human observers in large flocks is impractical and can further stress the birds. "Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of stress…" Alan McElligott, associate professor of animal behaviour and welfare at City University, Hong Kong, told the Guardian newspaper: "Chickens are very vocal, but the distress call tends to be louder than the others and is what we would describe as a pure tonal call." His team has developed a deep learning tool to automatically identify chicken distress calls based on recordings of individually farmed chickens. "Our end goal is not to count distress calls, but to create conditions in which the chickens can live and have a reduced amount of stress," said McElligott, who believes the technology could be commercially available within 5 years.

A team of researchers from the City University of Hong Kong, working with several colleagues from the U.K., has modified an AI application for use in detecting chick distress calls in noisy environments. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the group describes the modifications they made to a commercially available AI application and how well it worked when tested on a working poultry farm. As the world's global human population grows, farmers seek ways to improve efficiency. In this new effort, the researchers tested the idea of using artificial intelligence to identify and locate chicks in distress housed in very large buildings. Large commercial poultry farms typically house thousands of animals in large, airplane hangar–sized buildings.

Scientists have curated an Artificial Intelligence which can identify and count distress signals from chickens. The tool can be used by farmers to improve conditions for chickens raised on crowded commercial farms. As per the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there were over 33 billion chickens around the world as of 2020. Many of them were living in poor conditions. However, now, the researchers have claimed that the AI which quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, can correctly distinguish these calls from other barn noises.

Artificial intelligence that could improve the welfare of farmed chickens by eavesdropping on their squawks could become available within five years, researchers say. The technology, which detects and quantifies distress calls made by chickens housed in huge indoor sheds, correctly distinguished distress calls from other barn noises with 97% accuracy, new research suggests. A similar approach could eventually be used to drive up welfare standards in other farmed animals. Each year, about 25 billion chickens are farmed around the world – many of them in huge sheds, each housing thousands of birds. One way to assess the welfare of such creatures is to listen to the sounds that they make.

An AI has been trained to identify and count chickens' distress calls. Farmers could use the tool to improve conditions for chickens raised on crowded commercial farms. As of 2020, there were more than 33 billion chickens around the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Many of these animals live in poor conditions, packed together with little ability to move around or do things chickens like to do. "Despite the basic concerns about not being hungry or not being thirsty, there are still serious welfare concerns about how they're produced," says Alan McElligott at City University of Hong Kong.

Distress calls are an acoustically variable group of vocalizations ubiquitous in mammals and other animals. Their presumed function is to recruit help, but it is uncertain whether this is mediated by listeners extracting the nature of the disturbance from calls. To address this, we used machine learning to analyse distress calls produced by wild infant chimpanzees. It enabled us to classify calls and examine them in relation to the external event triggering them and the distance to the intended receiver, the mother. In further steps, we tested whether the acoustic variants produced by infants predicted maternal responses.

The Huntingdon Park police near Los Angeles has rolled out several robot police in public spaces around the city. However, reports and testimonies reveal that these autonomous police robots may not serve any purpose at all. The inefficiency of the supposed virtual police that secure the parks in Los Angeles (instead of actual human police officers) was highlighted when the Knightscope police robot ignored a distressed woman. A woman in a park near Los Angeles attempted to summon the futuristic police robot when a fight broke out in the area. Instead of responding to the distress call of the woman, the K5 model named "HP RoboCop," ignored her report and told her to "step out of the way," as earlier reported in NBC News.