https://twitter.com/ChadPergram

A message/veiled threat to anons? Lots of bee stuff lately in the news and twitter

The oval-shaped brain of a honeybee is roughly the size of a single sesame seed. It contains fewer than 1 million neurons, while the human brain contains 100 billion.

A team of entomologists is asking what all those extra nerve cells are good for after finding that bees can do the kind of fundamental mathematics once thought to distinguish humans and the primate animals they most closely resemble.

Many animals display some degree of quantitative understanding as they forage and fight, hoard and hide and find their way back home. Counting, for instance, is pervasive.

But bees can do something more, according to a paper published earlier this month in the peer-reviewed Science Advances journal. They can add and subtract, placing one of the world’s leading pollinators in the venerable company of monkeys, parrots and, yes, spiders — the cognitive A-list of the animal kingdom.

The findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that the brains of insects are more powerful than once thought — capable not just of a vague numerical sense but of the sort of learning and complex memory tasks that make arithmetic possible. It also sheds light on the evolution of quantitative abilities in other species, decoupling numerical understanding from human language.

“A small biological processing system can perform quite complex things,” said Scarlett Howard, the paper’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

The small neural network employed by bees, she said in an interview with The Washington Post, points to a possible alternative to high-energy computing, suggesting that artificial intelligence should seek to model natural systems “that have evolved in complex and challenging environments.”

More here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/02/26/hello-hive-mind-bees-can-do-basic-arithmetic-new-study-finds/?utm_term=.66723091cc14

Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday echoed Bill Maher's call for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to appear on the network.

“Bill, thank you. He needs to come. We invited him," Hannity said after Maher said on his HBO program on Friday that Schiff needed to go on Fox News more often.

"I agree with Bill Maher. You know what? Congressman Schiff, an hour. Mano a mano. Let’s go. And I will point out all the lies, all the misinformation and propaganda you have been pushing for two years.”

Maher told Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, he should appear on Fox News to “get in the bubble” and reach a different audience.

“No one who needs to hear this is hearing you. That’s the problem,” Maher said on his show “Real Time with Bill Maher.”

“You should go. That’s who needs to hear your message,” Maher said of the Fox News audience. “I thought you weren’t invited … Please go.”

Schiff noted that he had been on Fox News before, but had been going less frequently recently.

At the end of the conversation, Schiff said he did intend to make an appearance on Fox News again at some point.

The California lawmaker has been one of President Trump's most vocal critics in Congress. He opened a sweeping committee probe into Trump’s personal finances and his ties to Russia earlier this month.

Last week, Schiff wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post where we called on GOP colleagues who he says have expressed concerns about Trump in private to go public with those concerns.

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/431547-hannity-seconds-bill-mahers-call-for-adam-schiff-to-go-on-his-show