Cock-a-doodle-who?
Who decides when it鈥檚 time to get up? For chickens, it鈥檚 the top-ranking cockerel, who announces the break of dawn based on his biological clock. If he sleeps in, subordinate cockerels will still patiently wait for his call before they start crowing (Scientific Reports, ).
No to robot weapons
Are we on the brink of an AI war? Artificial intelligence experts, scientists and engineers, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, have signed an open letter calling for a ban on autonomous weapons. 鈥淭he key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,鈥� the letter says.
Stem-cell setback
A pioneering stem-cell trial has been halted after a mutation that could cause cancer was found. The trial, led by Masayo Takahashi at the Riken Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, was exploring whether skin cells changed into eye cells could reverse blindness. One patient was treated, but cells from a second patient are now being tested to determine when the mutation arose.
Advertisement
Winds of change in US
Construction of the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the US . The developer, Deepwater Wind, hopes to finish the five-turbine farm in 2016. The US wind-farm industry has been lagging behind Europe鈥檚.
SpaceShipTwo crash
Virgin Galactic鈥檚 SpaceShipTwo crashed because co-pilot Michael Alsbury unlocked the spacecraft鈥檚 descent system too early, not because of a fault with the craft, a review has found. But the US National Transportation Safety Board also said that Virgin Galactic did not do enough to mitigate the risks, which the Federal Aviation Administration should have spotted.