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AI systems can do amazing things, but they can sometimes suffer from a drawback called “catastrophic forgetting”. Researchers at Arizona State University hope to learn how to solve the problem by probing the brains of sleeping bees. The pay-off could be more reliable, more memory-efficient artificial intelligence. When AI systems learn one task — say, how to recognize dogs — and are later trained on a new task — like identifying cars — they often forget the first thing they learned. This is called ctastrophic forgetting. Ted Pavlic is an associate professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, with a joint appointment in the School of Life Sciences. He leads a unique interdisciplinary research project that blends biology and computer science.

The suffering caused by the war in Gaza has grabbed the world's attention. But that suffering isn't just limited to the enclave's human inhabitants.

A team of researchers say they’ve found fossils that add two new ancestors to our human family tree. While these two creatures appeared to have lived at the same time - and in the same place - they are two distinct, different hominins. The team says one set of fossils appears to be a fit for the genus Homo. That’s the same genus as modern humans. The other seems to fit Australopithecus, the same genus as the famous Lucy fossil. Fossil teeth and bones from both creatures were found at Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia. It’s a desert site about 30 miles from where the famous Lucy fossil was found. But the research team concluded that the Ledi-Geraru Australopithecus teeth are a new species, rather than belonging to Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis. The new Homo teeth also don’t appear to match any known Homo species. These new fossils date between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago, and shed new light on human evolution. They are younger than the Lucy fossil, which is dated as being about 3.2 million years old. In this edition of Weekend One on One we hear from two members of the research team, Chris Campisano and Kaye Reed from Arizona State University in the US.