Mixedectes Pungens: An Enigmatic Mammal of the Early Ale Holocene with a Knack for Climbing Trees with Its Claws

Posted on March 11, 2025 by Igor Mitreski

Small Mixedectid Mammals Called Mixedectes Pungens Analysis of a remarkably complete skeletal structure discovered in New Mexico shows that the skeletal characteristics that live in the leaves were primarily dieting on the leaves, weighing about 1.3 kg.

Mixedectes Pungens (foreground) lived in the same forest as early primates Torrejonia Wilsoni (background). Image credit: Andrey Atuchin.

Mixedectes Pungens He lived in western North America during the early Ale Holocene period, about 62 million years ago.

First described in 1883 by the drinker Coop of the famous American paleontologist Edward, the species was previously known for its fossilized teeth and jawbone fragments.

In the new study, Professor Eric Salgis of Yale University and his colleagues looked into the new skeleton Mixedectes Pungens – The most complete dental-related skeletal structure still recovered for mixed-cutide mammals from the Nasimiento Formation in the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, USA.

“This 62 million-year-old skeleton of quality and integrity provides novel insights into the mixetide, including a much clearer picture of evolutionary relationships,” Professor Sargis said.

“Our findings show that they are relatives of primates and corgos – flying lemurs native to Southeast Asia – make them a fairly close human relative.”

The researchers determined that the new specimen belongs to a mature adult weighing about 1.3 kg.

The anatomy of the animal's limbs and nails indicates that it is dendritic and can cling perpendicular to the trunks and branches of a tree.

Its molars have a coat of arms to break down abrasive materials, suggesting that they were omnivorous and mostly ate the leaves.

“This fossil skeleton provides new evidence on the way placental mammals have become ecologically diverse following the extinction of dinosaurs,” says Dr. Stephen Chester, a researcher at the City University of New York and Brooklyn University at the Yale Peabody Museum.

“Characteristics such as greater weight and increased dependence on leaves. Mixedectes Pungens To thrive on the same tree that is likely to be shared with other early primate relatives. ”

Mixedectes Pungens Ale In North America during the early Holocene, it was very large for tree-inhabiting mammals.

For example, the new skeleton is significantly larger than the partial skeleton of Torrejonia Wilsonia small arboric mammal from an extinct group of primates called plesiadapiforms, discovered along with it.

meanwhile Mixedectes Pungens Living on the leaves, Torrejonia WilsoniThe meals were mainly made up of fruits.

These distinctions between size and diet suggest that the Mixeodotids occupied a unique ecological niche in the early days of the past, distinguishing them from contemporaries who inhabit their trees.

Two phylogenetic analyses conducted to clarify the evolutionary relationships of species confirmed that the mixed disease is Euarcontan, a mammalian group consisting of Tressue, primates and corgos.

“One analysis supported them as being an archaic primate, while the other wasn't,” Professor Sargis said.

“However, in the latter analysis we confirmed that Mixodectids are Primatomorphans, a group within Euarchonta, made up of primates and corgos, but not Treeshrews.”

“This study does not completely resolve the discussion about where Mixodectids belong to evolutionary trees, but it is significantly narrower.”

Survey results Today I'll be appearing in the journal Scientific Report.

____

SGB Chester et al. 2025. New remarkably complete skeleton of Mixodectes Cretaceous – reveals the argonism of protozoan mammals during the Oxalocene after mass extinction of the secondary genes. Sci Rep 15, 8041; doi:10.1038/s41598-025-90203-z

Source: www.sci.news

The Future of Advertising: Astronauts Climbing and Spelling Mistakes

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

James Blake/Falklands Marine Heritage Trust

Advertisement from hell

Feedback is often confused or intrigued by the tricks advertisers use to try to sell things, but more recent strategies have been tricking them in the wrong direction, such as intentionally weird capitalization or bad grammar. It seems that it is designed to.

While we were fiddling with our smartphones, Feedback kept coming across ads for mobile games that promised “the most difficult levels ever.” We spent several days trying to figure out why it looks that way.

The name of the game in question is Climb! It's a puzzle game in which a group of climbers climbs to the top of a mountain, tangles safety lines, and the player must untie them. So it's essentially the flip side of Feedback TV, except it's gamified and at least somewhat solvable.

Feedback initially wondered if this was a non-English speaking developer skimping on translation costs. There is precedent for this. Dating back to 1991, it's a Japanese space shooter. zero wing It was released in Europe with a notorious translation. As a result, in the introductory cutscene, the alien invaders announced:all your bases are ours” After it was rediscovered in the late 1990s, it became one of the most widely shared internet memes of the time.

However, if you look closely, Climb! It suggests something else is going on. It's made by a company called FOMO Games. Although the company is based in Turkey, its staff clearly have good English skills, as evidenced by the information provided for all of the company's other games. Not to mention, as the company's brilliant corporate text on its website explains, “FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out.” This defines our product vision and culture. ”

Rather, the feedback makes me suspect that the poor English is intentionally designed to get our attention. In line with this, the ad also has other strange features that add to its strangeness. What's notable is that the game's title makes no sense at all, as the game's mountaineers have been replaced by spacesuit-clad astronauts floating against a starry sky. It wasn't until I saw the game in the app store that the mountaineering theme was revealed and things became clear.

This seems like a new and devilish way to promote products online. They intentionally create a perfect hash of their ad, hoping that this will pique people's interest and make them click through.

And on some level it worked. Because we are here. But the feedback is not downloading the game. As a general rule, we do not believe in rewarding intentionally incorrect spellings.

monkey in politics

At the time of this writing, the US presidential election is imminent, and the feedback has fallen into a never-ending cycle of news articles reporting polls, experts endlessly reinterpreting that poll, and then doing more polls. I am. This is a very long-winded way of saying, “I don't know what's going to happen.”

Now, our colleague Alexandra Thompson has highlighted an important new contribution to the field of mimetic prediction: a paper titled “Monkey predicts US election”.

Unfortunately, this doesn't require having countless monkeys in the voting booth. Instead, the researchers showed the monkeys pairs of photos of candidates for the Senate and gubernatorial races.

Monkeys spent more time looking at the losers than the winners. This seems like a unique form of torture for politicians. It says that not only did you lose, but the monkey looked at you with critical eyes.

This study extended previous research showing that children can identify election winners and losers purely based on pictures of candidates. Both children and monkeys made choices based on face shape, and a square jawline was a key indicator of increased chances of victory.

Who would do such research? Three of the researchers are affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, while the fourth is affiliated with a research institution in Portugal. Champalimaud Unknown Center. I don't really know what to make of the feedback.

Unconscious factors seem to influence our voting decisions. It's often said that taller candidates tend to win in American elections, and there appears to be some truth to this.

A 2013 study extracted data on every U.S. presidential election to date and found: tall candidate Although they received more votes in the popular vote, this did not actually make them more likely to be elected. It can only be described as double subject determinism, and one of the authors is a social psychologist. Abraham Bunck.

Readers interested in the outcome of the US election are advised: Whatever you do, don't look up the respective heights of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

One more for the road

In these stressful times, like many people, your feedback is directed toward comforting alternative realities such as: great british bake off (great british baking showif you live in North America).

There are lots of all kinds of fascinating and delicious things to learn about the ingredient science of bread, cakes and biscuits, but the show's home production of all sample biscuits, tarts and desserts to meet the technical challenges economists are called hattie baker.

Have a story for feedback?

You can email your article to Feedback at feedback@newscientist.com. Please enter your home address. This week's and past feedback can be found on our website

Source: www.newscientist.com

Challenging Climbing Game: Cairn Faces the Ultimate Test | Games

Posted on July 22, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

a
Climbers cling to dizzying rock faces, toes digging in, knuckles white, limbs trembling with extreme tension. In this perilous moment, they have a few options: move quickly to regain their balance, rest for a few seconds, or simply let go and hope the belay can support their weight as they succumb to the massif.

Cairn, the new “survival climbing game” from French studio The Game Bakers, is full of dangerous, panic-inducing moments like this. There’s no visible stamina bar, meaning players must derive all their information from the state of their controllable climber, Aava. When under extreme stress, Aava’s breathing becomes intense and rapid and shallow, and her body begins to tremble. “We want you to focus on her posture and the railing in front of her,” says creative director Emeric Thoa.

Beneath this naturalistic presentation lies a huge amount of mathematical calculation. Using only the left analog stick, you control all of Aava’s body and limbs, and lock in handholds and footholds with the press of a button. The system calculates the stress on Aava’s limbs and core in real time, which determines the most physically realistic next movement for Aava. “Limbs are chosen automatically by the system; it predicts which arms and legs will move smoothly and easily,” Thoa explains. “The challenge for the player is to keep Aava balanced.”

This kind of dynamic scrambling is a far cry from Assassin’s Creed’s automated parkour, which has you clinging to stone walls with the pull of a trigger, or the navigation puzzles of recent climbing hit Jusant, which have you clinging to mineral outcrops on a predetermined path up a mountain. Cairn makes even the most dizzying activities even more complex by combining a freeform control system with a meticulously designed mountain, whose intersecting routes even Thoa and his colleagues don’t fully understand.

“It’s 2024, and there are words like ‘procedural’ and ‘AI,’ but we designed this mountain and built it completely by hand, placing every rock and crevice and handhold,” Thoa says. “It’s really hard work, and very iterative. I’m really grateful to our level design team.”

What sights and emotions await the player and Arva on their journey? Tore remains tight-lipped, saying only that he and the studio consulted with renowned mountaineer Elizabeth Revol, who spoke of “the intense freedom you feel when you push yourself past your limits at the top of the Earth.” Another detail that stayed in the game’s creator’s mind was that upon reaching the highest, thinnest mountain air, Revol experienced an almost delirious euphoria, “crying, screaming, going into a kind of strange trance.”

Cairn arrives with multiple game modes: the story sees Aava take on a gruelling, multi-day climb of a single mountain, and there’s an Expedition mode with additional mountains and challenges. Those willing to forgo the safety of the rope can also climb “free solo.” “This is where the real fun begins,” declares Toa, with a devilish glower, who, unlike Joussant, “will definitely die” in Cairn.

So what’s the Dark Souls of climbing games? Probably. But as Thoa stresses, “this isn’t a rage game.” Rather, he says, Cairn aims to convey “what climbing and alpinism is really about.” “You try, you fall, you try again, you fall, and then when you manage to get up, it’s very satisfying.”

Skip Newsletter Promotions

Source: www.theguardian.com

Sticky slime secretions aid snail robot in climbing inclines

Posted on March 9, 2024 by Igor Mitreski

Snails have an unusual way of walking, which has been recreated in robots.

Zuza/Shutterstock

Equipped with one large foot, the mucus-evacuation robot can effectively imitate the way snails crawl across surfaces, even steep ones.

“I always say that snails are like Michael Jackson to me. I don’t know how they move, but somehow the gliding is happening.” Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu at the University of Southern Denmark Presentation at the March General Meeting of the American Physical Society on March 4 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Fascinated by the shelled mollusk, Saravana and colleagues decided to build a large, soft, single-legged version of the snail and use it as the basis for a robot that moves like a snail.

Saravana explained in his presentation that the team chose to make the legs out of a soft material that could be partially inflated with a small pneumatic pump. Although the chemistry of snail mucus has been studied in detail, the way the snail’s legs move has only been hypothesized based on biologists’ observations, he says. These past studies propose that different parts of the snail’s foot impact the ground and leave the ground before impacting the ground again, and that their movements are not synchronized with each other. This creates a wave pattern across the foot, causing the snail to glide forward on the mucus.

Researchers have successfully reproduced this “pedal wave” motion, which can also expel mucus, in an experimental robot, allowing it to move forward and change direction without falling over. Saravana said that in some experiments, the robot was able to climb steep slopes.

Snail robot without shell

Saravana Prashanth Murali Babu/University of Southern Denmark

Although the bot is still in the experimental stage, Saravana hopes it will be the first robot ever to propel itself like a snail. To make it more self-contained, the team is experimenting with placing the pump inside a snail-like shell on top of the robot. A slightly larger plastic replica of a real snail’s shell, the shell contains electronics to remotely control the robot and emits mucus under the robot’s feet to mimic the slimy tracks of a real snail. It can also accommodate a syringe system for use.

But the team’s ultimate goal is to make the robot’s inflatable legs even softer, making it more like a real snail, whose body is mostly made of water. The researchers hope that a robot that successfully navigates on mucus could eventually inform the design of soft medical robots that can navigate inside the mucus-rich human body.

topic: