Tech

While we’re not yet close to replicating the complexity and the intricacy of the human brain with anything artificial, scientists are making progress with certain dedicated devices – like a newly developed programmable resistor. Resistors can be used to make up analog neural networks in artificial intelligence systems, based on a structure designed to mimic

Earlier today, reports began emerging Google was down.  While it has since returned, it once again highlights our dependence on technology service providers and shows how reliant many people are on a single operator for daily functions. There are few things we completely rely upon in our modern lives, but for many people, Google is

In the near future, NASA and other space agencies will send astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for the first time in over fifty years. But unlike the Apollo Era, these missions will consist of astronauts spending extended periods on the Moon and traveling to and from Mars (with a few months of surface operations

A newly developed, water-activated disposable paper battery promises to make a big impact on single-use electronics – those temporary gadgets used in medical and industrial fields where electronic waste can quickly start piling up. The battery that has been demonstrated by researchers is biodegradable, made from sustainable materials, and cheap to put together. What’s more,

When mechanical engineering graduate student Faye Yap saw a dead spider curled up in the hallway, it got her thinking about whether it could be used as a robotics component.  Turning dead spiders into mechanical grippers may be some people’s idea of a nightmare scenario, but it could have tangible benefits. Spider legs can grip

When the history of the rise of the robots is written, perhaps this might feature in the opening chapter: a seven-year-old boy has had his finger broken by a robotic opponent during a chess match in Moscow. There’s some debate about exactly what happened, but it seems that the youngster took a move faster than

A digital twin is a copy of a person, product, or process that is created using data. This might sound like science fiction, but some have claimed that you will likely have a digital double within the next decade. As a copy of a person, a digital twin would – ideally – make the same

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are already way ahead of us in certain areas – playing Go, for example, or crunching huge sets of data – but in other aspects AI is still a long way behind human beings, even just a few months after we’re born. For example, even young babies instinctively know know that

The process of freeze drying really is punching above its (very light) weight. It makes for a delicious chocolate-covered strawberry, gives astronauts expanded food options, and now, the technique could be used to store DNA and cell information for cloning purposes. With a success rate as low as 0.2 percent, freeze drying of cells still

Artificial intelligence (AI) can devise methods of wealth distribution that are more popular than systems designed by people, new research suggests. The findings, made by a team of researchers at UK-based AI company DeepMind, show that machine learning systems aren’t just good at solving complex physics and biology problems, but may also help deliver on

For years, computer scientists have warned of the perils artificial intelligence (AI) poses in the future, and not just in the sensational terms of machines overthrowing humanity, but in far more insidious ways too. While this cutting-edge technology is capable of wondrous breakthroughs, researchers have also observed the darker sides of machine learning systems, showing

A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be “sentient”, according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google’s confidentiality policy. “Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call

Deep beneath the waves there’s a source of power quite unlike any other. To tap into it, Japanese engineers have constructed a true leviathan, a beast capable of withstanding the strongest of ocean currents to transform its flow into a virtually limitless supply of electricity. Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries – now known simply as IHI Corporation

From Talos, the giant bronze automaton who guarded the princess Europa in ancient Greek myths, to Cylons and Terminators, the idea of artificial humans has both fascinated and creeped us out for centuries.  Now, we’re closer than ever to making a robot look remarkably like a human, with the development of living robot skin. This icky-looking

The US has succeeded in developing the world’s first ‘true’ exascale supercomputer, honoring a pledge made by President Obama almost seven years ago, and ushering the world into a new era of computational capability. Until now, the most speedy supercomputers in the world were still working in the petascale, achieving a quadrillion calculations per second.

A new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) models can produce “creative” images on-demand based on a text prompt. The likes of Imagen, MidJourney, and DALL-E 2 are beginning to change the way creative content is made with implications for copyright and intellectual property. While the output of these models is often striking, it’s hard to

Even if you’re enjoying gloriously fast broadband at home wherever you live in the world, you’re still going to be a long, long way behind the new record for data transmission: an incredible 1.02 petabits per second. That’s a million gigabits shifted down a line every single second. The record was set by a team

Future fusion reactions inside tokamaks could produce much more energy than previously thought, thanks to groundbreaking new research that found a foundational law for such reactors was wrong. The research, led by physicists from the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EFPL), has determined that the maximum hydrogen fuel density is about

The ocean is swimming in sound, and a new artificial intelligence tool could help scientists sift through all that noise to track and study marine mammals. The tool is called DeepSqueak, not because it measures dolphin calls in the ocean underworld, but because it is based on a deep learning algorithm that was first used

Is your tiny robot really all that small if it’s bigger than the width of a coin? A team of scientists has built what is now the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot, coming in at a mere half a millimeter (less than a fiftieth of an inch) wide. Exceedingly tiny robots have a whole host of

Scientists keep on pushing the efficiency of solar panels higher and higher, and there’s a new record to report: a new solar cell has hit 39.5 percent efficiency under the standard 1-sun global illumination conditions. That 1-sun marker is simply a standardized way of measuring a fixed amount of sunlight, and almost 40 percent of

A plastic container thrown into landfill can take hundreds of years to break down naturally, but a newly discovered enzyme could eat up the waste in less than a day. The highly efficient polyester hydrolase, known as PHL7, was recently found in a German cemetery munching through compost. In the lab, researchers found it was

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin were meant to be used as digital cash. Instead, they’ve become popular as speculative investments. As well as being resource-intensive and inherently wasteful, cryptocurrencies are also incredibly volatile. Prices for the largest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have both dropped by over 55 percent in six months, leading some to suggest that regulation is

Conventional solar technology soaks up rays of incoming sunlight to bump out a voltage. Strange as it seems, some materials are capable of running in reverse, producing power as they radiate heat back into the cold night sky. A team of engineers in Australia has now demonstrated the theory in action, using the kind of

Modern technology pulses with a heartbeat measured in microseconds. From global positioning systems to communications networks, it’s vital every component falls into near-perfect synch. Based on standards determined by a specialized task group, signals sent through optic fiber or down from an orbiting satellite tend to ensure time-sensitive technology matches moments down to the nanosecond.

In a ghastly vision of a future cut off from sunlight, the machine overloads in the Matrix movie series turned to sleeping human bodies as sources of electricity. If they’d had sunlight, algae would undoubtedly have been the better choice. Engineers from the University of Cambridge in the UK have run a microprocessor for more than

The human brain is said to be the most complex biological structure ever to have existed. And while science doesn’t fully understand the brain yet, researchers in the expanding field of neuroscience have been making progress. Neuroscientists have made substantial inroads towards mapping the complex functions of the brain’s 85 billion or so neurons and

A swarm of 10 bright blue drones lifts off in a bamboo forest in China, then swerves its way between cluttered branches, bushes, and over uneven ground as it autonomously navigates the best flight path through the woods. The experiment, led by scientists at Zhejiang University, evokes scenes from science fiction – and the authors

By exchanging a classical material for one with unique quantum properties, scientists have made a superconducting circuit that’s capable of feats long thought to be impossible. The discovery, made by researchers from Germany, the Netherlands, and the US, overturns a century of thought on the nature of superconducting circuits, and how their currents can be

There’s never been a house call quite like this. In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was ‘holoported’ to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of miles above the surface of Earth. If it sounds like Star Trek, you’re not too far

Nearly all of us have wished to be a fly on the wall during a particularly juicy conversation, or disappear into the background after an embarrassing gaffe. It’s not surprising that invisibility cloaks are a mainstay of fantasy fiction. In recent years, there have been many attempts to devise some sort of invisibility tech. Now,

The cutting-edge number-crunching capabilities of artificial intelligence mean that AI systems are able to spot diseases early, manage chemical reactions, and explain some of the mysteries of the Universe. But there’s a downside to this incredible and virtually limitless artificial brainpower. New research emphasizes how easily AI models can be trained for malicious purposes as

Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight –

The catastrophic disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 was caused by an explosion at the Reactor 4 Unit. This expelled a sizeable quantity of radioactive material into the surroundings, alongside a partial meltdown of the reactor core. The last few decades have seen substantial international efforts to safely contain and decontaminate the

Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant and all the facilities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone have been completely disconnected and are now without electricity, Ukraine’s state energy company has announced.  Russian forces attacked the defunct nuclear facility on the very first day of the invasion (Feb. 24), seizing it after heavy fighting and taking its roughly 210 staff hostage, Live Science previously

Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that

There was a time, not so long ago, when computers were so large, they occupied entire rooms. Today, some processing units can come as small as a few specks of dust. Even next to a grain of rice, these stacks of micrometer-sized chips look infinitesimal.  Shrinking computer batteries to fit that size, however, has proved more

The largest plane in the world – Ukraine’s Antonov-225 cargo plane – was destroyed by Russian strikes outside Kyiv on the fourth day of Moscow’s invasion, Ukraine’s state-owned Ukroboronprom group said Sunday. “Russian invaders destroyed the flagship of the Ukrainian aviation, the AN-225” at the Antonov airport in Gostomel near Kyiv, the group said in

Microsoft had big plans when it purchased Minecraft, the immensely popular open-world ‘sandbox’ game, back in 2014 for US$2.5 billion. Among them was to invest heavily in an educational revolution – the gamification of learning. It’s not hard to imagine how the logic-based mechanics of Minecraft’s construction system could help teach knowledge and practical skills in fields of

For centuries, people have dreamed of being driven at speed across the vast oceans of space by winds of light. As whimsical as the idea sounds, nudging reflective sails slowly towards the speed of light using nothing more than the punch of photons might be our only plausible shot at reaching another star inside of

Sony’s Gran Turismo is one of the biggest racing game series of all time, having sold over 80 million copies globally. But none of those millions of players is the fastest. In a new breakthrough, a team led by Sony AI – the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) research division – developed an entirely artificial player

It took nature decades of photosynthesis, followed by eons of intense heat and pressure from geological activity to bake atmospheric carbon dioxide into the long chains of hydrocarbon that make up fossil fuels. We don’t have the luxury of millions of years to mop up the excess carbon from our atmosphere, but advances in chemistry

Late last century, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, churned out 22 megajoules of energy in what was, at the time, a record in fusion power. Now, experimental upgrades have brought the facility into line with the technology anticipated for a major international project, resulting in the production of nearly three times that

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