Researchers led by Noah Cowan at Johns Hopkins University have secured NIH funding to probe how animals alternate between "explore" (sensing) and "exploit" (task-oriented) behaviors in uncertain environments, using the weakly electric glass knifefish as  a model. The team includes researchers from four universities who will integrate their expertise in neuroscience, math, engineering, and machine learning to build on 2023 findings in  Nature Machine Intelligence that revealed the explore/exploit pattern across species from amoebas to humans. The project aims to decode decision triggers, with implications for robotics and medicine.

How do you program a computer that doesn’t exist yet? In a new project, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are looking into this question and developing software for quantum computers – even though no such computers are working yet and may not be for decades to come. But once the hardware is available, it needs to be usable without further delay; even the most powerful quantum computer will certainly be useless without suitable programs.