Environment Animals Wildlife Endangered Species German hairy snails are disappearing from London's River Thames Londoners are scouring riverbanks to save the endangered mollusk. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Researchers believe that its signature hairs help the strange creature live in its damp, riverside environments by enabling it to sweat off moisture. By wicking off that excess moisture, the slime gets more sticky, so the snail can hold onto the slick riverside debris and the plants it eats. However, the snail needs some extra support.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. If you step on a snail, you'll know it. Despite their slow speeds, and simple bodies, apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata) have eyes that are anatomically similar to human eyes. Both species have complex camera-like eyes with a lens, cornea, and retina that visually capture the world around them. Unlike humans, apple snails can regrow their peepers if they are injured or amputated.

Hal LaCroix's Here and Beyond takes place on a spaceship journeying for centuries to a new planet Riches galore await sci-fi fans in July, with two of the books I've enjoyed most so far this year due to be published for all to read. Fancy a beautifully written vision of a world turning ever faster, in which the consequences of this speed-up play out in subtle but increasingly disturbing ways? Try Alex Foster's Circular Motion. Set in the not-too-distant future, this stunningly impressive debut novel imagines an Earth orbited by massive aircraft, which allow the sufficiently wealthy to pop from New York to London in an hour, or order in sushi from Japan. Earth's spin, meanwhile, is gradually accelerating, with days at first just a few seconds shorter but, nightmarishly, contracting to just two hours as the novel progresses, with all sorts of terrible consequences.

A mucus-excreting robot with a single large foot can effectively imitate the way snails crawl over surfaces – even steeply inclined ones. "I always say that snails are like Michael Jackson to me. You don't see how they move, but somehow gliding is happening," said Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu at the University of Southern Denmark during a presentation at the American Physical Society's March Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on 4 March. Fascinated by the shelled molluscs, Saravana and his colleagues decided to build a version of a snail's single large, soft foot and use it as the basis of a robot that moves like a snail. The unique promise of'biological computers' made from living things During his presentation, Saravana explained that the team chose to build the foot from a soft material that could be inflated in segments by small pneumatic pumps.

Memories are shadows of the past but also flashlights for the future. Our recollections guide us through the world, tune our attention, and shape what we learn later in life. Human and animal studies have shown that memories can alter our perceptions of future events and the attention we give them. "We know that past experience changes stuff," said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. "How exactly that happens isn't always clear."

People can acquire knowledge in an unsupervised manner by reading, and compose the knowledge to make novel combinations. In this paper, we investigate whether pretrained language models can perform compositional generalization in a realistic setting: recipe generation. We design the counterfactual recipe generation task, which asks models to modify a base recipe according to the change of an ingredient. This task requires compositional generalization at two levels: the surface level of incorporating the new ingredient into the base recipe, and the deeper level of adjusting actions related to the changing ingredient. We collect a large-scale recipe dataset in Chinese for models to learn culinary knowledge, and a subset of action-level fine-grained annotations for evaluation. We finetune pretrained language models on the recipe corpus, and use unsupervised counterfactual generation methods to generate modified recipes. Results show that existing models have difficulties in modifying the ingredients while preserving the original text style, and often miss actions that need to be adjusted. Although pretrained language models can generate fluent recipe texts, they fail to truly learn and use the culinary knowledge in a compositional way. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xxxiaol/counterfactual-recipe-generation.

While cone snails are stunning animals with beautifully adorned shells, they're also some of the deadliest creatures to roam the oceans. Now, scientists from the University of Glasgow have revealed plans to harness their venom to develop new painkillers that are more effective and less addictive than current options. Dr Andrew Jamieson, who is leading the project, said: 'The cone snail might seem like an unlikely prospect for breakthroughs in drug discovery, but the conotoxins it produces have a lot of intriguing properties which have already shown promise in medicine.' While cone snails are stunning animals with beautifully adorned shells, they're also some of the deadliest creatures to roam the oceans Cone snails are marine gastropods characterized by a conical shell and beautiful color patterns. Cone snails possess a harpoonlike tooth capable of injecting a potent neurotoxin that can be dangerous to humans.

Abalone is a common name for any of a group of small to very large sea snails, marine gastropod molluscs in the family Haliotidae. Other common names are ear shells, sea ears, and muttonfish or muttonshells in Australia, ormer in the UK, perlemoen in South Africa, and paua in New Zealand. The age of abalone is determined by cutting the shell through the cone, staining it, and counting the number of rings through a microscope a boring and time consuming task. Other measurements, which are easier to obtain, are used to predict the age. Given is the attribute name, attribute type, the measurement unit and a brief description.