カテゴリー
アルゴリズム コンピューティング 動植物 虫類

自然界のアルゴリズム

Algorithms in ancient times When you think of algorithms, you’re probably thinking of Wall Street supercomputers whizzing around making thousands of calculations and transactions in a fraction of a second or social media companies monitoring your every click and comment, targeting you with ads and polarizing content. The concept of an algorithm however, has been in use by humans for thousands of years in various forms such as instructions for performing tasks, solving problems and making decisions. Ancient civilizations, such as the Greeks and the Babylonians, have used algorithms in their mathematical and construction practices. Euclid, a Greek mathematician, described the Euclidean algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of […]

カテゴリー
虫類

キラービー

With World Bee Day coming up, let’s take a closer look at one of the most fascinating bee species on the planet: The killer bee. Origins of Africanized honey bees While their cousins are know to help police catch serial killers, Africanized bees prefer to do the killing themselves. In the 1950s, Brazilian researchers attempted to breed a more productive and disease-resistant honeybee by crossing a European honeybee with a subspecies of African honeybee. This resulted in the creation of Africanized honeybees, also known as “killer bees,” a hybrid species of honeybee. The goal was to create a bee that would be better suited to the subtropical climate of South […]

カテゴリー
動植物 虫類

ミツバチの寿命が急降下中

The world may soon be infested with serial killers. As we all know, honey bees play a crucial role in catching the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein and more. If we don’t act now, the serial killers will prevail. All joking aside, honey bee lifespans are 50% shorter than they were fifty years ago. This decrease in longevity in lab-kept honey bees may be to blame for recent declines in honey production and colony losses. Honey bees’ lifespan decreased by 50% A new study by entomologists at the University of Maryland reveals that the lifespan for individual honey bees kept in a controlled, laboratory environment is 50% shorter than […]

カテゴリー
犯罪 心理学

ミツバチが連続殺人犯の逮捕に貢献

If you’ve been bingeing Netflix’ serial killers series and you’re worried you might be living next-door to another Jeffrey Dahmer, you need not worry; he or she probably won’t pick you as their next victim, at least according to science and the study of the humble bumblebee. In order to track down and catch serial killers, police use algorithms created by studying bumblee behaviour. What’s the link? Bumblebees and serial killers have something in common, even if you don’t think so: Both prefer to stay close to home and don’t like to share their address. Now, it might be possible to locate the other by studying their routines. Geography based […]

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