Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nature has once again proven to be an efficient designer, showing time and again how ant teamwork is much better than that of humans. "Teamwork is often assumed to enhance group performance, particularly for physical tasks. However, in both human and non-human animal teams, the effort contributed by each member may, in fact, decrease as team size grows," researchers wrote in a study recently published in the journal Current Biology. This phenomenon is called the Ringelmann effect.

If it seems like every week there's a new scandal about ethics and the tech industry, it's not your imagination. Even as the tech industry is trying to establish concrete practices and institutions around tech ethics, hard lessons are being learned about the wide gap between the practices of "doing ethics" and what people think of as "ethical". This helps explain, in part, why it raises eyebrows when Google dissolves its short-lived AI ethics advisory board, in the face of public outcry about including a controversial alumnus of the Heritage Foundation on it, or when organized pressure from Google's engineering staff results in the cancellation of military contracts. This gap is important, because alongside these decidedly bad calls by those leading the charge for ethics in industry, we are also seeing the tech sector begin investing meaningful resources in the organizational capacity to identify, track, and mitigate the consequences of algorithmic technologies. We are at a point where it would seem that the academics and critics who had exhorted the industry to make such considerations for decades should be declaring a small victory.

U.S. bank regulators struck a major blow against some of the largest banks in the country Wednesday, rejecting the so-called living wills of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, Wells Fargo, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon. The banks' resolution plans, which outline how systemically important financial institutions would navigate a bankruptcy without splintering the financial system or costing taxpayers, have become a central focus of bank reformers since the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act authorized regulators to judge the submissions. The failing grades at five of the nation's eight largest banks reveal newfound consensus between the two regulators responsible for the assessments, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, which had diverged in previous rounds of analysis. The stricter judgments released Wednesday are likely to add momentum to advocates of big-bank breakups, such as presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. "No firm yet shows itself capable of being resolved in an orderly fashion through bankruptcy," said FDIC Vice Chairman Thomas Hoenig in a statement.