Environment Animals Wildlife World's smallest possum may be hiding in South Australia The tiny mammal weighs less than one pound. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Weighing less than one pound, the little pygmy possum () is one of the smallest mammals in Australia. These miniscule mammals feed on nectar, pollen, and insects, and differ from opossums . Opossums live in the United States and parts of Canada and have a bare tail instead of a furry tail.

The early 2020s has seen the rise of two strange and potentially quite impactful social phenomena, namely pseudolaw, where users rely upon pseudolegal arguments that mimic the form and ritual of legal argumentation but fundamentally distort the content of law, and generative AI/LLMs, which generate content that uses probabilistic calculations to create outputs that look like human generated text. This article argues that the juxtaposition of the two phenomena helps to reveal that they both share two fundamental traits as both elevate form and appearance over substance and content, and users of both routinely mistake the form for the substance. In drawing upon legal theory, computer science, linguistics and cognitive psychology, the article argues that both phenomena rely upon creating illusions of meaning that users mistake for the underlying primary phenomenon. I then explore four implications of this conception of both phenomena. Firstly, both rely on human tendencies of conceptual pareidolia resulting in the erroneous perception of meaningful linguistic legal patterns from nebulous inputs. Secondly, both rely upon the confidence heuristic, the human cognitive bias for treating confidence as a proxy for competence. Thirdly, both succeed when the primary concern is with the form of the output and not its content. Fourthly, both rely heavily upon the magical thinking of users and the desire for the promise of the approach to be real. The article argues that the legal context helps to reveal a solution for the problems caused by both phenomena as it is only where users possess sufficient legal and technological literacy that it becomes possible to reveal to them the illusionary nature of the phenomena.

Dr. Wendy Troxel, a sleep therapist in Utah, discusses a study that found small bouts of light exercise in the evening can help promote more restful sleep. Good shut-eye is critical for all sorts of reasons -- but now there's a compelling new one, according to a study. An international team of scientists discovered an interesting incentive for getting eight hours of sleep a night. Make sure to get plenty of slumber if you're trying to learn a new language, researchers say. The study, led by the University of South Australia, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain "significantly" improves its ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules, as news agency SWNS reported.

Global Climate Models (GCMs) are crucial for predicting future climate changes by simulating the Earth systems. However, GCM outputs exhibit systematic biases due to model uncertainties, parameterization simplifications, and inadequate representation of complex climate phenomena. Traditional bias correction methods, which rely on historical observation data and statistical techniques, often neglect unobserved confounders, leading to biased results. This paper proposes a novel bias correction approach to utilize both GCM and observational data to learn a factor model that captures multi-cause latent confounders. Inspired by recent advances in causality based time series deconfounding, our method first constructs a factor model to learn latent confounders from historical data and then applies them to enhance the bias correction process using advanced time series forecasting models. The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the accuracy of precipitation outputs. By addressing unobserved confounders, our approach offers a robust and theoretically grounded solution for climate model bias correction.

Universities should stop panicking and embrace students' use of artificial intelligence, AI experts say. South Australia's three main universities have updated their policies to allow the use of AI as long as it is disclosed. The advent of ChatGPT, a language processing chatbot that can produce very human-like words, sparked fears students would use it to write essays. Anti-plagiarism software wouldn't pick it up because ChatGPT isn't plagiarising anything, it's producing new work in response to prompts from users. Flinders University, the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia have adjusted their policies to allow AI use under strict controls.

Australian and Iraqi engineers have designed a system to remotely measure blood pressure by filming a person's forehead and extracting cardiac signals using artificial intelligence algorithms. Using the same remote-health technology they pioneered to monitor vital health signs from a distance, engineers from the University of South Australia and Baghdad's Middle Technical University have designed a non-contact system to accurately measure systolic and diastolic pressure. It could replace the existing uncomfortable and cumbersome method of strapping an inflatable cuff to a patient's arm or wrist, the researchers claim. In a new paper published in Inventions, the researchers describe the technique, which involves filming a person from a short distance for 10 seconds and extracting cardiac signals from two regions in the forehead, using artificial intelligence algorithms. The systolic and diastolic readings were around 90 per cent accurate, compared to the existing instrument (a digital sphygmomanometer) used to measure blood pressure, that is itself subject to errors.

An autonomous shuttle bus is currently being tested at Flinders University and has now entered the second stage of its trial. Dubbed the "Flinders University Express Shuttle" (FLEX), the bus can carry 11 seated passengers. It operates on a 2.8km route and is described as a "test bed" for the future of autonomous vehicles in South Australia. In what continues to be one of Australia's only public autonomous vehicle testing programs, the Flinders University autonomous shuttle bus travels around the Tonsely innovation district, between the train station, the residential village, the university and the TAFE. It's a walking distance route, but keep in mind that it's only a trial at the moment.

In a classic case of finding a balance between costs and benefits of science, researchers are grappling with the question of how artificial intelligence in medicine can and should be applied to clinical patient care – despite knowing that there are examples where it puts patients' lives at risk. The question was central to a recent university of Adelaide seminar, part of the Research Tuesdays lecture series, titled "Antidote AI." As artificial intelligence grows in sophistication and usefulness, we have begun to see it appearing more and more in everyday life. From AI traffic control and ecological studies, to machine learning finding the origins of a Martian meteorite and reading Arnhem Land rock art, the possibilities seem endless for AI research. The genuine excitement clinicians and artificial intelligence researchers feel for the prospect of AI assisting in patient care is palpable and honourable. Medicine is, after all, about helping people and the ethical foundation is "do no harm."

Home owners could soon save money on loans and insurance by making their homes more energy efficient, while banks and insurers gain new insights into the sustainability of their residential portfolios, thanks to Adelaide-based fintech startup ValAi. ValAi's core product, known as Greenhouse, is an app that allows residential homeowners to see their home's energy use and climate resilience in real time. It includes advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide practical tips that allow homeowners to save money and improve the value of their property by making it more sustainable and energy efficient. Meanwhile, for banks and insurers, the platform will fill a vital need by providing data on the sustainability of the properties in their residential portfolios at an individual asset level. The platform could potentially allow banks to make energy efficiency improvements a condition on the loans they issue.

Melbourne/Canberra: Private companies and public authorities are quietly using facial recognition systems around Australia. Despite the growing use of this controversial technology, there is little in the way of specific regulations and guidelines to govern its use. Spying on shoppers We were reminded of this fact recently when consumer advocates at CHOICE revealed that major retailers in Australia are using the technology to identify people claimed to be thieves and troublemakers. There is no dispute about the goal of reducing harm and theft. But there is also little transparency about how this technology is being used.