Originally published November 10 2005
Pediatricians find prolonged bottle feeding may result in nutrition problems
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Research authored by Dr. Jane Brotanek, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin, reveals that prolonged bottle feeding increases the risk of iron deficiency among infants.
In the UCL study, scientists from the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology trained bumblebees to find artificial flowers of a particular colour using a nectar reward.
They then tested the bees' ability to find the same flowers in scenes that were simultaneously illuminated by four differently coloured lights -- UV-yellow, blue, yellow and green.
To solve this puzzle, the bees had to effectively segment the scene into its different regions of illumination, and then find the correct flowers within each region.
Dr Beau Lotto of the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology says: "Although we knew that bees were able to recognise flowers under different global lights, we didn't know whether they could also do this under more complicated conditions, ones that are in fact more typical in nature, such as dappled light across a woodland floor.
"When all the surfaces in a scene are under the same light, identifying a particular surface when the global illumination changes is in principle an easy problem to solve, since all vision needs to do is adapt itself to the scene's average colour, a bit like adapting to the darkness of a cinema.
Because this same strategy is also used by humans, our work on bees, in conjunction with our work on humans, may enable us to understand the general principles by which any visual system (natural or artificial) can construct useful behaviour from ambiguous sensory information.
'One long-term aim of our research is to exploit this understanding to build seeing robots that, like the bee with its mere one million neurons, can learn to find a simple flower in a meadow, which no machine can do at present.
Our lab has reconstructed our specially designed bee flight arena -- known as the Bee Matrix -- in the virtual world, where virtual autonomous bees are 'evolving' under exactly the same conditions as those experienced by our real bees."
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml