Insect venom means nothing to some amphibians. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In hindsight, the North American " murder hornet " () scare of 2020 was probably a overblown (not to mention culturally problematic). Of course, you still want to avoid the venomous sting from a northern giant hornet, as they're now known. According to entomologist Masato Ono, receiving a dose of the insect's potent, neurotoxic venom felt "like a hot nail being driven into my leg."

Social insect colonies routinely face large vertebrate predators, against which they need to mount a collective defense. To do so, honeybees use an alarm pheromone that recruits nearby bees into mass stinging of the perceived threat. This alarm pheromone is carried directly on the stinger, hence its concentration builds up during the course of the attack. Here, we investigate how individual bees react to different alarm pheromone concentrations, and how this evolved response-pattern leads to better coordination at the group level. We first present an individual dose-response curve to the alarm pheromone, obtained experimentally. Second, we apply Projective Simulation to model each bee as an artificial learning agent that relies on the pheromone concentration to decide whether to sting or not. If the emergent collective performance benefits the colony, the individual reactions that led to it are enhanced via reinforcement learning, thus emulating natural selection. Predators are modeled in a realistic way so that the effect of factors such as their resistance, their killing rate or their frequency of attacks can be studied. We are able to reproduce the experimentally measured response-pattern of real bees, and to identify the main selection pressures that shaped it. Finally, we apply the model to a case study: by tuning the parameters to represent the environmental conditions of European or African bees, we can predict the difference in aggressiveness observed between these two subspecies.

SUBSCRIBE OUR CHANNEL It's hard to believe how far we've come. We launched just a few years ago with our surveillance drones, and in this short amount of time, we've retooled cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, such as deep learning and convolution neural networks, into hardware systems that governments and peace-keeping agencies can use to keep their troops safe. Now the artificial intelligence does all of the work. Our autonomous weapons are small, fast, accurate, and unstoppable. And they are just the beginning.

Scientists have discovered a nightmare-inducing species of wasp in the Amazonian rainforest. The new species is equipped with a massive stinger that'looks like a fierce weapon' – and, it uses this to deliver powerful venom that paralyzes its victims, before laying eggs inside the body. Researchers say it can be found throughout the transitional zone between the Andes and the lowland rainforest. The new species is equipped with a massive stinger that'looks like a fierce weapon' – and, it uses this to deliver powerful venom that paralyzes its victims, before laying eggs inside the body In a paper published to the journal Zootaxa, the international team of researchers describes several previously unknown wasp species. But, a species called Clistopyga crassicaudata stands out in particular.