For robots to get 'smart', they have to learn to adapt.   University of Vermont roboticist Josh Bongard has created both simulated and actual robots that, like tadpoles becoming frogs, change their body forms while learning how to walk.

Over generations, his simulated robots also 'evolved', spending less time in infant tadpole-like forms and more time in adult four-legged forms.

These evolving populations of robots were able to learn to walk more rapidly than those with fixed body forms and, in their final form, the changing robots had developed a sturdier gait,  better able to withstand being knocked with a stick, than the ones that had learned to walk using upright legs from the beginning.

Was the fall of the Roman Empire or, as often predicted, the coming fall of the American Empire, numerically predictable?

It is, according to research led by Sergey Gavrilets, associate director for scientific activities at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis and a professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville published in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History.

How can a man who writes an article noting the many positive strides made in eliminating gender discrimination be sexist?    Well, he isn't, but men who go out of their way to help women can be considered sexist, thought it is a more benevolent sexism than the real kind.

New research from the University of Granada warns about the negative effects of "benevolent sexism", a term used for apparently positive ideas and attitudes of men towards women, which are based on the assumption that men must take care of and sacrifice themselves for women.