Quick Links for Friday, February 17

A beautiful film showing the evolution of Theo Jansen's Strandbeests, including their latest trick: flight. [yankodesign.com]

Bugs across the globe are evolving to eat plastic. [theguardian.com]

What if we just stopped being so available? "Having multiple obligations and priorities means that we are, all of us, in a perpetual state of delay on something, and apologizing for that fact feels like having to apologize for your standard mode of being." My advice: set expectations from jump. [theatlantic.com]

Brains might sync as people interact—and that could upend consciousness research. [discovermagazine.com]

Milestones in the history of artificial intelligence (AI). "Sixty-five years ago, 10 computer scientists convened for a workshop on artificial intelligence, defined a year earlier in the proposal for the workshop as ‘making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.’ It was the event that ‘initiated AI as a research discipline,’ which grew to encompass multiple approaches, from the symbolic AI of the 1950s and 1960s to the statistical analysis and machine learning of the 1970s and 1980s to today’s deep learning, the statistical analysis of ‘big data.’ But the preoccupation with developing practical methods for making machines behave as if they were humans emerged already 700 years ago.” [forbes.com]