Interdisciplinary Research

It’s an enduring enigma in paleoanthropology: when and where did modern human behavior arise? The fossil record suggests that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa sometime between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago. Yet the earliest convincing indications of behavioral modernity in our species, archaeologists have argued, date to tens of thousands of years later and have turned up in Europe, not Africa. With that in mind, some theorists posited that modern behavior blossomed late and rather sudd

Our brains use angular measurements to decide how far away objects are.

Even if trigonometry wasn’t your strong suit in school, your brain uses it constantly. You judge distance by measuring the angle between the ground and your line of sight to an object, a new study shows. The finding could improve the design of robots and artificial vision systems 1 .

Volunteers who looked through prisms that increased this angle thought objects were closer than they reall

Paying attention isn’t the only way to learn.

You must pay attention to learn, teachers say. Not necessarily, US psychologists now argue: sights we are unaware of can have a lasting impact on our brains.

Subliminal training can improve our ability to see moving dots, Takeo Watanabe and his co-workers at Boston University, Massachusetts, have found. “Without noticing, we are unconsciously learning,” Watanabe says. Repeated exposure to objects we are oblivious to “could have

Mathematician Ian Stewart talks to Nature Science Update about snowflakes, sticklebacks and a new kind of science.

Ian Stewart was turned on to mathematics at the age of seven. A broken collarbone freed him from an uninspiring teacher allowing his mother to ignite his interest in numbers while he was laid up at home.

His writing career began with a series of how-to manuals for now-defunct early 1980s microcomputers. It has since broadened into popular science and science fi

Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Applied Electronics IIS,the world leader in audio compression technology and Home of MP3 unveilsadvanced signal
processing technology: Advanced Watermarking technologyhelps content providers to keep track of their content and protect theirintellectual property.

Fraunhofer Bitstream Watermarking technologybundles Fraunhofer´s robust watermarking scheme with their famous suiteof high-performance audio coders by allowing direct embedding of wa