June 01, 2016 at 04:04AM

Today I Learned: 1) There are now a number of companies offering "robots as a service". In particular, there's something of a booming industry in renting robots to small farms. For example, one company (whose name I've lost track of) rents out drones that monitor growth and look for problems, like rust or irrigation problems. Another company rents out tiny drones about the size of a cat or dog that dart between rows of plants, depositing small amounts of fertilizer where it's needed. This model makes a lot of sense to me. We desperately need more efficient agriculture if we're going to keep using this planet (right now, we're using 40% of the arable land on the planet for farms. That leaves 60% for cities, residencies, industrial areas, and the wild). Robots are a good way to do that, but robots usually require a heavy initial investment and plenty of specialty to maintain. Companies offering robots as a service can absorb that upfront cost and specialize in maintenance, making the robots affordable to small farmers... and they make money while they're at it! 2) The human ear is a funny thing. Have you looked at an ear lately? Pretty weird-looking. It turns out that the shape of the ear distorts incoming sounds in a manner that depends on the direction from which the sound comes. The brain can identify the underlying sound, and based on the kind of distortion it detects, can figure out to some degree which direction the sound came from. Experimental evidence for this was published in a 1998 Nature Neuroscience paper by the title "Relearning sound localization with new ears". Scientists added a mold to subjects' ears to change their shape. The subjects immediately got worse at localizing sound, though they re-calibrated their hearing over the course of several weeks. 3) All references to the Great Barrier Reef, which has been doing quite poorly according to recent oceanographic surveys (as in, about a third of it is severaly bleached and/or dead), were removed from a recent Unesco report on tourism and climate change. Why? Because the Australian government asked them to, claiming that it might cause "confusion" and might hurt tourism. You know what else is bad for tourism? Losing your country's greatest natural treasure. Will politicians ever listen to the scientific community? I don't have high hopes.