Tech

Several international airlines recently cancelled flights into certain US airports over concerns the rollout of 5G mobile communication technology could interfere with some planes’ equipment. After warnings about the potential problem from aviation bosses and the Federal Aviation Administration, telecommunications companies AT&T and Verizon delayed activating some 5G masts around US airports. But how could

There’s a major catch to the world’s need for solar panels, a new analysis suggests. The booming solar panel market – which is critical for a clean energy future – could demand close to half the world’s aluminum by 2050. Thankfully, there are ways we can mitigate this.  Unlike more precious metals, such as the lithium

Scientists have built the tiniest antenna ever made – just five nanometers in length. Unlike its much larger counterparts we’re all familiar with, this minuscule thing isn’t made to transmit radio waves, but to glean the secrets of ever-changing proteins. The nanoantenna is made from DNA, the molecules carrying genetic instructions that are around 20,000

Innovators at South Korea’s Ajou University have created a robotic hand that is capable of holding fragile objects like eggs. It can also crush cans and work with tools like tweezers and scissors. An article published in Nature Communications explained all the details of the new technology. It weighs just under two and a half pounds and

Rather than engineering robotic solutions from scratch, some of our most impressive advances have come from copying what nature has already come up with. New research shows how we can extend that approach to robot ‘minds’, in this case by getting a robot to learn the best route out of a maze all by itself – even

We can add suggesting and proving mathematical theorems to the long list of what artificial intelligence is capable of: Mathematicians and AI experts have teamed up to demonstrate how machine learning can open up new avenues to explore in the field. While mathematicians have been using computers to discover patterns for decades, the increasing power

Scientific ingenuity means cameras keep on getting smaller and smaller, and the latest to appear is not only incredibly tiny – the same size as a grain of salt – it’s also able to produce images of much better quality than a lot of other ultra-compact cameras. Using a technology known as a metasurface, which

Scientists have engineered what they say are the first self-replicating ‘robots’ ever made from living cells. At first, these freaky-looking ‘xenobots’ might seem notable for their superficial resemblance to Pac-Man, but their likeness to the video game character is probably the least strange thing about them. These unusual robotic creatures are a spin-off of what

Between music, podcasts, gaming, and the unlimited supply of online content, most people spend hours a week wearing headphones. Perhaps you are considering a new pair for the holidays, but with so many options on the market, it can be hard to know what to choose. I am a professional musician and a professor of

Barely a year after the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) broke one record for fusion, it’s smashed it again, this time holding onto a churning whirlpool of 100 million degree plasma for a whole 30 seconds. Though it’s well short of the 101 seconds set by the Chinese Academy of Sciences earlier this year,

Humans are notoriously woeful lie detectors, even when staring liars straight in the face. A machine learning tool trained to detect tell-tale signs of lying has been found to do better than the average person, using little more than data from wearable sensors that pick up teensy flickers in facial muscles. Developed by researchers at

A man paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2007 has shown he can communicate his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant system that translates his imagined handwriting into actual text. The device – part of a longstanding research collaboration called BrainGate – is a brain-computer interface (BCI),

Smartphone technology has improved rapidly in recent years, giving us more battery life, better performance, and improved photo-taking capabilities – but they still come with screens that have a tendency to crack after being knocked or dropped. Scientists have made encouraging progress in developing lead halide perovskite (LHP) screens that offer top-quality brightness and clarity

The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and in January 2021, scientists delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not. The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that

An astonishing 82 percent decrease in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy since 2010 has given the world a fighting chance to build a zero-emissions energy system which might be less costly than the fossil-fueled system it replaces. The International Energy Agency projects that PV solar generating capacity must grow ten-fold by 2040 if

Even when there’s not a cloud in the sky, there’s always water circulating in the atmosphere. Compared to all the H20 on Earth, there isn’t much up there – only about 0.001 percent – but in areas of high humidity, even that small amount of moisture could be enough to provide safe drinking water for a billion

The standard white cane is an essential aid for getting out and about for many visually impaired people, but to date, it hasn’t offered much in the way of affordable modern updates – which is something that a group of researchers wants to change. Borrowing technology designed for autonomous vehicles, the team has come up

When it comes to the weather report, it’s not just tomorrow’s weather that meteorologists try to discern. As well as long-term forecasts, weather models are often tasked with predicting meteorological conditions over the next hour or so, known as ‘nowcasting’. Over at Google-backed artificial intelligence company DeepMind, researchers have now made a major step forward

It’s something that has long been suspected. Now, we have evidence from a new study – once the Autopilot self-driving tech is enabled on Tesla cars, human drivers tend to pay less attention to what’s happening on the road. The study highlights the awkward in-between phase that we’re now in: Self-driving tech has become good

Our planet and everything that lives on it is buckling under the weight of all the plastic waste we’re producing. The volume of these non-biodegradable materials discarded after use is only increasing, so we need new ways to tackle them, and fast. A new study demonstrates the proof-of-concept of an entirely new approach to plastic recycling, inspired

Now, perhaps more than ever, engineers and scientists have been taking inspiration from nature when developing new technologies. This is also true for the smallest flying structure humans have built to date. Inspired by the way trees like maples disperse their seeds using little more than a stiff breeze, researchers developed a range of tiny flying

Reservoir computing is already one of the most advanced and most powerful types of artificial intelligence that scientists have at their disposal – and now a new study outlines how to make it up to a million times faster on certain tasks. That’s an exciting development when it comes to tackling the most complex computational

It is the elephant in the genomics room: can extinct species be resurrected? One bioscience firm insists they can, announcing Monday its intent to use emerging technology to restore the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra. New company Colossal, capitalizing on a partnership with a Harvard geneticist, said its species “de-extinction” effort has the potential

We live in fake times. Reality is as prevalent as it ever was, of course, but it’s becoming harder to find all the time. Perhaps nowhere is this phenomenon more unsettling than in the weird world of ‘deepfakes’ and other computer-generated faces of people who don’t actually exist (yet look uncannily like the real thing). Scientists

Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor. Predictably, social media filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots

NASA is commonly thought of as America’s space agency, but its name also emphasizes another research area. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is also America’s civilian aerospace research organization.  In that role, it has been instrumental in developing new technologies ranging from rocket engines to aircraft control systems. Part of that role is running

When you know you’re being watched by somebody, it’s hard to pretend they’re not there. It can be difficult to block them out and keep focus, feeling their gaze bearing down upon you. Strangely enough, it doesn’t even seem to really matter whether they’re alive or not. In new research, scientists set up an experiment

You may well have seen sci-fi movies or television shows where the protagonist asks to zoom in on an image and enhance the results – revealing a face, or a number plate, or any other key detail – and Google’s newest artificial intelligence engines, based on what’s known as diffusion models, are able to pull

‘Green steel’ might sound like an oxymoron, but it’s a phrase you’re bound to be hearing a lot more of in the next few years. On Wednesday, the world’s first, carbon-free steel was delivered to the truck-maker AB Volvo in Sweden. It’s only a trial run, and, admittedly, a bit of a media stunt, but

Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer. “The calculation took 108 days and nine hours” using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement. Its efforts were “almost twice as fast as the

If you feel like you’re met with a lot of anger and vitriol every time you open up your social media apps, you’re not imagining it: A new study shows how these online networks are encouraging us to express more moral outrage over time. What seems to be happening is that the likes, shares and

The sexbots are coming – or rather, they’re already here, and they’re becoming ever more sophisticated and life-like. That means official rules and laws around their use are going to be required, according to two law experts. Right now there’s not a huge amount of research into whether using sex robots is a good or

Down on an atomic level, glass is a jumbled mess of atoms, which makes it easily prone to distortion and cracking. Now, chemists have discovered how to arrange the atoms within glass in such a way, the resulting material can even rival the strength of diamonds. A team of materials scientists from Yanshan University in

Lurking in the background of the quest for true quantum supremacy hangs an awkward possibility – hyper-fast number crunching tasks based on quantum trickery might just be a load of hype. Now, a pair of physicists from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and Columbia University in the US have come up with a better

Scientists have created key parts of synthetic brain cells that can hold cellular “memories” for milliseconds. The achievement could one day lead to computers that work like the human brain. These parts, which were used to model an artificial brain cell, use charged particles called ions to produce an electrical signal, in the same way

The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labor, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold. Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace

If you’re wondering just how advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems are getting, then know this: the US military is testing an experimental AI network tasked with identifying likely future events worthy of closer attention, and days before they occur. The series of tests are called the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), and they combine data from a huge

Many fears around transitioning our societies towards a more climate-friendly future understandably revolve around job losses. While it’s true that some forms of work will no longer be available, time and time again the research has shown that such a transition will overall create a lot more work. Now, an international team of researchers has

Artificial intelligence (AI) is proving very adept at certain tasks – like inventing human faces that don’t actually exist, or winning games of poker – but these networks still struggle when it comes to something humans do naturally: imagine. Once human beings know what a cat is, we can easily imagine a cat of a different

New technology developed by Japanese engineers has walloped the heck out of the previous data transmission speed record. Along an optical cable more than 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) long, the team achieved a data transmission speed of 319 terabits per second (Tb/s). This not only smashes the previous record of an already jaw-dropping 178 Tb/s,

The hugely successful Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) video game puts you in a vast, open-world American West setting at the very end of the 19th century. Players can loot trains, shoot rival gang members, steal horses – and, it turns out, learn a lot about nature, too. Researchers surveyed 586 volunteers from 55 different

As the world gets hotter with climate change, one of the ongoing challenges humans will face is simply surviving worsening heat, with projected temperature increases expected to bring increasingly deadly heatwaves, even rendering some parts of the world uninhabitable. Against such harsh heat, a new material developed by scientists in China could have the potential

Scientists have figured out the best forensic technique to get the dirt on criminals. Knowing which technique to use means that a remnant of soil or dust from a suspect or their belongings could substantially narrow down the scene of a crime in a city. When researchers tested their approach in a roughly 250-square-kilometer area –

Some of the best robots are inspired by nature. Now, engineers have developed a small, scurrying bot based on the humble cockroach – with almost as much speed and squashability as its biological equivalent. About the size of a postage stamp, the as-yet-unnamed soft robot is able to move at a speed of 20 body lengths

Have you ever chatted with a friend about buying a certain item and been targeted with an ad for that same item the next day? If so, you may have wondered whether your smartphone was “listening” to you. But is it really? Well, it’s no coincidence the item you’d been interested in was the same

MacArthur Genius and MIT professor Linda Griffith has built an epic career as a scientist and inventor, including growing a human ear on a mouse. She now spends her days unpacking the biological mechanisms underlying endometriosis, a condition in which uterus-like tissue grows outside of the uterus. Endometriosis can be brutally painful, is regularly misdiagnosed

You’ve probably seen images of scientists peering down a microscope, looking at objects invisible to the naked eye. Indeed, microscopes are indispensable to our understanding of life. They are just as indispensable to biotechnology and medicine, for instance in our response to diseases such as COVID-19. However, the best light microscopes have hit a fundamental

The conclusion of a classified US intelligence report on the existence of alien UFOs is… inconclusive, US media reported Friday. US military and intelligence found no evidence that seemingly highly advanced unidentified flying objects sighted by military pilots were alien spacecraft, the report concludes, according to The New York Times and other media briefed on