sci-tech
out of 425,000 e-buses worldwide at the end of last year,
421,000 were in China, a bloomberg report found. the
e-fleet is projected to rise to over 600,000 buses by 2025.
electric buses have become the norm in many Chinese
cities. Shenzhlen, a city of 13 million people, has a fleet
of over 16,000 electric buses, and it’s making a huge
difference. China’s electric buses save more diesel than all
the world’s electric cars combined.
Billed as “one of the most
exciting artists of our time”, Ai-Da
is the brainchild of Aidan Meller,
who claims she is the world’s first
ultra-realistic humanoid artist,
able to draw creatively thanks to
artificial intelligence (AI).
Ai-Da is named after
Ada Lovelace, the English
mathematician and writer often
called the world’s first computer
coder.
Ai-Da uses her camera “eyes”
to capture what is in front of
her, which an internal computer
translates into coordinates of the image to be plotted on
paper. She can currently hold only hard tools like pencils,
Researchers from Nature
Conservation Foundation, Mysore,
in a study carried out in Pakke Tiger
Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh noted
that hornbills, one among the large-
sized frugivores (fruit-eaters), are
the most effective seed
dispersers.
“They were found to
swallow and disperse
most of the fruits they
handled. They also
removed maximum
number of fruits —
and therefore seeds
— in every visit to a
fruiting tree,” explains Dr Rohit
Naniwadekar, author of the study.
“They swallow the fruit as a whole
causing no damage to the seed. They
are known to disperse seeds far
away from the parent plant and ourprevious studies have shown that
they can disperse up to 13 kms.”Sadly, hornbills are also the most
threatened because they are hunted
for meat, and tribal communities use
their feathers for headdresses.“Seeds that fall under the parent tree
face heavy competition, predation
by rodents and insects, and fungal
infections. So their chances of survival
are very low. Plants depend on
frugivorous birds to disperse the
seeds at favourable sites. And so the
decline of frugivores could severely
affect the ecosystem,” he added.not brushes. Her paint works
are printed onto canvas with
a human painting it over. Her
works of art include abstract
images and pencil sketches of
historical figures from Leonardo
da Vinci to Alan Turing.Ai-Da can move, allowing
what Meller calls “performance
art”. He hopes that she will
eventually be able to intuitively
communicate and describe her
own artwork. For the moment
she is given voice by a human
helper.Art work created by Ai-Da for her first exhibition has
already sold for over £1 million.