Latest news with #FrontiersinEthology
Politico
23-05-2025
- Business
- Politico
The big push to power AI
Presented by Programming note: Future Pulse will be off on Monday but back in your inboxes on Tuesday. DATA DIVE Data centers — large-scale artificial intelligence server hubs — are a hot topic right now, in Sacramento and beyond. Our POLITICO data team colleagues Catherine Allen, Rosmery Izaguirre and Claudine Hellmuth did a deep dive into the data around data centers. It comes as Stargate, a joint venture between San Francisco-based OpenAI and other big technology players, is investing $500 billion toward expanding data center infrastructure over the next four years, POLITICO's Technology: California Decoded newsletter reports. California is among 16 states being reviewed for data center sites. California has the second-largest number of operational data centers in the country after Virginia, and more are underway, the POLITICO analysis found. Nationwide, data centers are projected to double their power consumption by 2026, tightening already limited supplies of water and electricity. At the same time, lawmakers in Sacramento are trying to strike a balance between incentivizing AI investments and environmental goals. What's next: The Trump administration is moving full steam ahead on data centers, announcing last month that it's eyeing 16 sites for new AI infrastructure. WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. A New Jersey hawk is using traffic signals to hunt its prey. The clever predator relied on sound cues from traffic signals to exploit cars for cover, and sneak up on its next meal, according to an editorial in Frontiers in Ethology. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Danny Nguyen at dnguyen@ Carmen Paun at cpaun@ Ruth Reader at rreader@ or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@ Want to share a tip securely? Message us on Signal: Dannyn516.70, CarmenP.82, RuthReader.02 or ErinSchumaker.01. FORWARD THINKING Texas is about to launch an initiative to research psychedelics as a potential treatment for mental health conditions. The state has approved $50 million in funding for clinical trials of ibogaine, a psychedelic drug derived from an African shrub. The move follows the Texas legislature's passage of a bipartisan bill earlier this month to fund a grant program through Texas' Health and Human Services Commission aimed at gaining FDA approval for the psychedelic as a drug therapy. The $50 million will fund a partnership with an-as-yet-to-be-named drug developer, which will run the trials. Texas will retain a financial stake in any drug successfully developed, with trials likely taking place at a Texas university or hospital system. One of the Republican co-authors of the bill, state Sen. Tan Parker, has said he sees veterans with opioid dependence, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries as key beneficiaries of the research bill. 'The opioid crisis has left too many families shattered and too many Veterans without answers,' said his co-author, Republican state Rep. Cody Harris, in a statement. Why it matters: The first-in-the-nation initiative positions Texas as a hub for ibogaine research and creates a blueprint for other states that may want to replicate Texas' approach. While the FDA last year rejected drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics' plan to offer a different psychedelic drug, MDMA, alongside therapy as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, advocates are cautiously optimistic about their prospects for advancing psychedelic therapy under the Trump administration.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Most Ingenious Hawk in New Jersey
In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk. The bird—a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact—wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey. The crossing signal—a loud, rhythmic click audible from at least half a block away—was more of a pre-attack cue, or so the hawk had realized, Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. On weekday mornings, when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour, roughly 10 cars would usually be backed up down a side street. This jam turned out to be the perfect cover for a stealth attack: Once the cars had assembled, the bird would swoop down from its perch in a nearby tree, fly low to the ground along the line of vehicles, then veer abruptly into a residential yard, where a small flock of sparrows, doves, and starlings would often gather to eat crumbs—blissfully unaware of their impending doom. The hawk had masterminded a strategy, Dinets told me: To pull off the attacks, the bird had to create a mental map of the neighborhood—and, maybe even more important, understand that the rhythmic ticktock of the crossing signal would prompt a pileup of cars long enough to facilitate its assaults. The hawk, in other words, appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is, with all due respect, more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk. Cooper's hawks are known for their speedy sneak attacks in the wild, Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me. Zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover, they'll conceal themselves from prey until the very last moment of a planned ambush. 'They're really fantastic hunters that way,' Ng said. Those skills apparently translate fairly easily into urban environments, where Cooper's hawks flit amid trees and concrete landscapes, stalking city pigeons and doves. That sort of urban buffet seems to have been a major incentive for this particular Cooper's hawk, Dinets, who published his observations of the bird in Frontiers in Ethology, told me. One of the (human) families in the neighborhood regularly dined outdoors in the evening, leaving a scattering of food scraps on their front lawn that would routinely attract a group of small birds the next morning. But the hawk needed perfect conditions to successfully dive-bomb that flock: enough cover, from a long-enough line of cars, to attack unseen. That scenario would play out only on weekday mornings, when both foot and car traffic were heavy enough that the crosswalk signal would stall lines of cars down the streets. Over several months, Dinets noticed that the bird seemed to have figured out this complex system of ifs, ands, or buts. The hawk appeared only when the necessary degree of congestion was possible. And only after the pedestrian-crossing signal was activated would it ready itself for an attack—perching in a nearby tree to wait for the backlog of cars that it knew would soon manifest. Then, only after the queue stretched long enough to totally conceal its path, the bird would head toward its prey. The crosswalk signal seems to have been key to this plan: The hawk could predict with startling accuracy how well cloaked it would be—and, thus, the success of its attack. 'The hawk understood the connection,' Dinets told me. That's hard to prove without experimentation, beyond Dinets's observation of this single bird—but that this hawk figured out the chain reaction that this signal could set off, under weekday-morning conditions, is definitely plausible, several researchers told me. Plenty of animals, including other types of birds, have proved themselves savvy in human environments. Pigeons, for instance, wait for humans to turn on drinking fountains, then sip the water. Ng has spoken with farmers and ranchers in Alberta and Saskatchewan who have seen hawks use the sounds of gunshots during gopher hunts as a cue that a feast is impending. And crows have been spotted dropping hard-shelled nuts into roads so that cars will crack them open. Still, Ng, who wasn't involved in the observations, told me that this hawk's feat is impressive, even if no other bird ever replicates it. The hawk clued into a human signal, in a human system, that was multiple steps removed from its target. Managing these attacks required a degree of foresight, a mental map of the neighborhood, even a sense of a human week's rhythm—understanding, for instance, the difference between weekday rush hours and weekend lulls. The bird also appears to have picked up on all of this relatively quickly: Many Cooper's hawks spotted in cities come to urban areas only for the winter, which hints that this one may have conjured its plan of attack as a recent immigrant to the area. Generally speaking, the faster a creature learns something new, the more cognitively adept it is likely to be, Joshua Plotnik, a comparative-cognition expert at Hunter College, told me. And this hawk managed all that as a juvenile, Ng pointed out—still in the first couple of years of its life, when most Cooper's hawks 'are just not good at hunting yet.' A common cause for mortality at this age, she said, is starvation. But maybe the most endearing part of this hawk's tale is the idea that it took advantage of a crosswalk signal at all—an environmental cue that, under most circumstances, is totally useless to birds and perhaps a nuisance. To see any animal blur the line between what we consider the human and non-human spheres is eerie, but also humbling: Most other creatures, Plotnik said, are simply more flexible than we'd ever think. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
23-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Most Ingenious Hawk in New Jersey
In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk. The bird—a young Cooper's hawk, to be exact—wasn't using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey. The crossing signal—a loud, rhythmic click audible from at least half a block away—was more of a pre-attack cue, or so the hawk had realized, Dinets, a zoologist now at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me. On weekday mornings, when pedestrians would activate the signal during rush hour, roughly 10 cars would usually be backed up down a side street. This jam turned out to be the perfect cover for a stealth attack: Once the cars had assembled, the bird would swoop down from its perch in a nearby tree, fly low to the ground along the line of vehicles, then veer abruptly into a residential yard, where a small flock of sparrows, doves, and starlings would often gather to eat crumbs—blissfully unaware of their impending doom. The hawk had masterminded a strategy, Dinets told me: To pull off the attacks, the bird had to create a mental map of the neighborhood—and, maybe even more important, understand that the rhythmic ticktock of the crossing signal would prompt a pileup of cars long enough to facilitate its assaults. The hawk, in other words, appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is, with all due respect, more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk. Cooper's hawks are known for their speedy sneak attacks in the wild, Janet Ng, a senior wildlife biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told me. Zipping alongside bushes and branches for cover, they'll conceal themselves from prey until the very last moment of a planned ambush. 'They're really fantastic hunters that way,' Ng said. Those skills apparently translate fairly easily into urban environments, where Cooper's hawks flit amid trees and concrete landscapes, stalking city pigeons and doves. That sort of urban buffet seems to have been a major incentive for this particular Cooper's hawk, Dinets, who published his observations of the bird in Frontiers in Ethology, told me. One of the (human) families in the neighborhood regularly dined outdoors in the evening, leaving a scattering of food scraps on their front lawn that would routinely attract a group of small birds the next morning. But the hawk needed perfect conditions to successfully dive-bomb that flock: enough cover, from a long-enough line of cars, to attack unseen. That scenario would play out only on weekday mornings, when both foot and car traffic were heavy enough that the crosswalk signal would stall lines of cars down the streets. Over several months, Dinets noticed that the bird seemed to have figured out this complex system of if s, and s, or but s. The hawk appeared only when the necessary degree of congestion was possible. And only after the pedestrian-crossing signal was activated would it ready itself for an attack—perching in a nearby tree to wait for the backlog of cars that it knew would soon manifest. Then, only after the queue stretched long enough to totally conceal its path, the bird would head toward its prey. The crosswalk signal seems to have been key to this plan: The hawk could predict with startling accuracy how well cloaked it would be—and, thus, the success of its attack. 'The hawk understood the connection,' Dinets told me. That's hard to prove without experimentation, beyond Dinets's observation of this single bird—but that this hawk figured out the chain reaction that this signal could set off, under weekday-morning conditions, is definitely plausible, several researchers told me. Plenty of animals, including other types of birds, have proved themselves savvy in human environments. Pigeons, for instance, wait for humans to turn on drinking fountains, then sip the water. Ng has spoken with farmers and ranchers in Alberta and Saskatchewan who have seen hawks use the sounds of gunshots during gopher hunts as a cue that a feast is impending. And crows have been spotted dropping hard-shelled nuts into roads so that cars will crack them open. Still, Ng, who wasn't involved in the observations, told me that this hawk's feat is impressive, even if no other bird ever replicates it. The hawk clued into a human signal, in a human system, that was multiple steps removed from its target. Managing these attacks required a degree of foresight, a mental map of the neighborhood, even a sense of a human week's rhythm—understanding, for instance, the difference between weekday rush hours and weekend lulls. The bird also appears to have picked up on all of this relatively quickly: Many Cooper's hawks spotted in cities come to urban areas only for the winter, which hints that this one may have conjured its plan of attack as a recent immigrant to the area. Generally speaking, the faster a creature learns something new, the more cognitively adept it is likely to be, Joshua Plotnik, a comparative-cognition expert at Hunter College, told me. And this hawk managed all that as a juvenile, Ng pointed out—still in the first couple of years of its life, when most Cooper's hawks 'are just not good at hunting yet.' A common cause for mortality at this age, she said, is starvation. But maybe the most endearing part of this hawk's tale is the idea that it took advantage of a crosswalk signal at all—an environmental cue that, under most circumstances, is totally useless to birds and perhaps a nuisance. To see any animal blur the line between what we consider the human and non-human spheres is eerie, but also humbling: Most other creatures, Plotnik said, are simply more flexible than we'd ever think.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
New Jersey Hawk Develops Clever Hunting Strategy Using Traffic Signals
A hawk in New Jersey has been seen using a clever, urban hunting strategy: taking sound cues from traffic signals to exploit cars for cover, before striking prey. The hawk first crossed paths with zoologist Vladimir Dinets on a crisp, late-Autumn morning in West Orange, New Jersey. Dinets was stopped at a traffic light on the way to drop his daughter off at school, and the raptor, a young Cooper's hawk (Astur cooperii), was on the hunt for breakfast. After a few more mornings caught at this red light, watching the hawk in action, Dinets began to figure out its technique: it was waiting for the sound of the pedestrian crossing before making its move. "It emerged from that small tree, flew very low above the sidewalk along the line of cars, made a sharp turn, crossed the street between the cars, and dove onto something near one of the houses," Dinets describes in an editorial for Frontiers in Ethology. "It turned out that the house targeted by the hawk's attacks was inhabited by a nice, big family that liked to eat dinner in the front yard. Next morning, their breadcrumbs and other leftovers attracted a small flock of birds – sparrows, doves, and sometimes starlings. That's what the hawk was after." Birds of prey are an uncommon, but not unheard-of, sight in the city, and Dinets suspected this one was new in town: most hawks that come to urban areas like West Orange for the winter come from forested breeding and nesting grounds in search of food. The Cooper's hawk is an agile stealth hunter, capable of tight swerves and rapid acceleration to catch prey. These skills make it a formidable predator in its natural habitat, where it will use the cover of a forest or woodland edge to patrol adjacent open spaces, before launching a sneak attack on exposed prey. "To hunt this way, they must be able to plan ahead, to know and understand the prey's behavior, particularly its movement patterns, and to be highly observant – in short, they need remarkable cognitive abilities," Dinets writes. He was fascinated to see the city-dwelling hawk adapt this strategy for an environment where coverage from cars comes and goes depending on the red light. He returned to the intersection to stake out the bird 18 times that winter, parking his car on the street as a kind of mobile bird hide. "The hawk always showed up at the starting point of his attack route when the sound signal for the pedestrian crossing went on… but before the car queue actually formed," Dinets told ScienceAlert. "The probability of that happening by chance was very close to zero." On weekends, there were no car queues, and no Cooper's hawk to be seen. On rainy days, the neighborhood family would not eat dinner outside, and the next morning, there was no flock, and again, no hawk. Many factors, it seemed, had to line up for the hawk to make a perfect attack. "The sound signal meant that the red light would last longer, so the queue of cars waiting for the green light would be long enough to provide the hawk with cover for the entire approach to the place where his prey was feeding," Dinets explained. Without that pedestrian crossing sound, the hawk seemed to know not to bother. This cue guaranteed the hawk could swoop low along the footpath, concealed by the backed-up traffic, before making a 90-degree turn across the street to plunge into the feeding flock of prey. Dinets couldn't actually see the climax of these attacks from his makeshift hide, but once, he saw the hawk fly off with a house sparrow (Passer domesticus) in its talons, and on another occasion, he saw it eating a mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) on the ground nearby. "It shows the ability to understand connections between events and to plan in advance," Dinets said. "It also shows that they have a mental map of their hunting area and know it intimately, so they don't need to see their prey to know where it is and how best to sneak up on it." Few other scientific observations capture these abilities, probably because it's so difficult to watch these stealth hunters at work in their natural environment. "A city is a difficult and very dangerous habitat for any bird, but particularly for a large raptor specializing in live prey: you have to avoid windows, cars, utility wires, and countless other dangers while catching something to eat every day," Dinets writes in his editorial. "I think my observations show that Cooper's hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart." The research was published in Frontiers in Ethology. Your Sensitive Teeth May Exist So Ancient Fish Could Avoid Danger Expert Explains Why We Need to Stop Giving Milk to Cats 9 Glorious Mysteries of Nature Continue to Attract Curiosity
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Like a Tom Cruise stunt: hawk uses traffic patterns to target prey
It is a tactic worthy of Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt: wait until a beeping pedestrian crossing indicates a traffic queue has formed then use the line of cars as cover to reach your target. But this isn't a scene from Mission: Impossible – it's the behaviour of a young hawk. The discovery is not the first time birds have been found to make use of an urban environment. Crows, for example, are known to drop foods such as walnuts on to roads for cars to crush them open. However, the researcher behind a new study says it is the most advanced case so far of raptors making use of traffic patterns. 'When I figured out what was going on, I was really impressed. I didn't expect that,' said Vladimir Dinets, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee and author of the study. 'On the other hand, every time I study some animal species it proves smarter than I expect.' Dinets made the discovery during the school run in West Orange, New Jersey, when he spotted a young Cooper's hawk emerge from a tree near a road junction. The bird flew close to the pavement behind a queue of traffic that had stopped at a red light before crossing the road and taking a dive near one of the houses. After seeing the behaviour for a second time, Dinets realised the hawk was pouncing on a flock of birds that had gathered in front of a house where a family often ate dinner outdoors. Writing in the journal Frontiers in Ethology, Dinets describes how he then carried out 12 hours of observations from his car over 18 days during the winter of 2021-22. These were made on weekday mornings and only when the flock was present and there was no rain or snow the day before – weather that would prevent the residents of the house from eating alfresco. Dinets recorded six attempted attacks by the same hawk, identifiable by its plumage, and on one occasion saw it fly away with a house sparrow in its grip. He found the hawk only emerged from the tree when a long queue of traffic had built up, offering sufficient cover for its approach – something that depended on the pedestrian crossing being activated. Dinets also noticed the bird took up its position in the tree when the crossing's sound signal began, suggesting the hawk used the sound as an indication that a longer traffic queue was to form and that it was time to prepare for attack. 'This behaviour required having a mental map of the area and understanding the connection between the sound signals and the change in traffic pattern – a remarkable intellectual feat for a young bird that likely had just moved into the city,' Dinets writes, noting Cooper's hawks tend to be winter visitors to urban areas. Related: California town investigates mystery of 'exploding' bird deaths The following winter he twice saw an adult hawk, possibly the same bird, hunting in the same way. But the following summer the sound signals stopped working and the residents that ate alfresco moved out of their house. 'No hawks were ever observed at the intersection after that,' he wrote. Dinets added that while it is known social birds such as crows and parrots can be very clever, intelligence in more solitary species is more difficult for humans to recognise and so probably underestimated. 'Cities are extremely dangerous places for wild animals,' he added. 'Anything that can survive here must have some special abilities and deserves our respect.'
