Tech

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

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

China has achieved a new milestone in humanity’s experiments to harness the power of the stars. On Friday, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine reached 120 million degrees Celsius (216 million degrees Fahrenheit) and clung onto this for 101 seconds. The last time EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak or HT-7U) held onto a writhing

An online game developed by a team of social psychologists could be a useful tool in the fight against misinformation, helping internet users spot misinformation and call it out for what it is: manipulative. Misinformation – often spread by automated bots, but also unsuspecting people – worms its way into our heads by appealing to a

We have developed and tested a secure new computer processor that thwarts hackers by randomly changing its underlying structure, thus making it virtually impossible to hack. Last summer, 525 security researchers spent three months trying to hack our Morpheus processor as well as others. All attempts against Morpheus failed. This study was part of a program

When you think of micro- or nanotechnology, you likely think of small electronics like your phone, a tiny robot or a microchip. But COVID-19 tests – which have proven to be central to controlling the pandemic – are also a form of miniaturized technology. Many COVID-19 tests can give results within hours without the need

Australia, one of the world-leaders in household rooftop solar panel uptake, has once again broken its own record for the number of solar panels installed in a year. In 2020, installations were up nearly 30 percent from the year before, according to an analysis from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO. The data, compiled by energy

The United States’ offshore wind industry is tiny, with just seven wind turbines operating off Rhode Island and Virginia. The few attempts to build large-scale wind farms like Europe’s have run into long delays, but that may be about to change. On 11 May 2021, the US government issued the final federal approval for the

If you’re struggling to handle the long line of tabs open in your browser right now, you’re not alone. A small new study has found many people who browse the internet experience tab overload, saving articles to read later, leaving tasks as reminders, or burrowing down an internet hole until the stack of open web

In our efforts to rein in our overwhelming burden upon Earth’s living biosphere, every little thing adds up. Even the shape of pasta (of all things!) can make a difference in our consumption of resources. Which is why scientists have now created flat-packed pasta that’s more efficient to package and transport, but can then unfurl

Scientists have gotten one step closer to a quantum internet by creating the world’s first multinode quantum network.  Researchers at the QuTech research center in the Netherlands created the system, which is made up of three quantum nodes entangled by the spooky laws of quantum mechanics that govern subatomic particles. It is the first time that more than two

The online world is continuously expanding – always aggregating more services, more users, and more activity. Last year, the number of websites registered on the “.com” domain surpassed 150,000,000. However, more than a quarter of a century since its first commercial use, the growth of the online world is now slowing down in some key

Perovskite has a lot going for it in our search for a cheap, efficient way to harvest solar energy. With a dusting of organic molecules, these crystalline structures have been able to convert more than a quarter of the light falling onto them into electricity. Theoretically, perovskite crystals made with the right mix of materials

Algorithms can help us with everything, from choosing what music to listen to next to finding the cheapest flight online. Now, new research reveals one of the tipping points that tend to make us trust a computer’s judgment rather than a human’s. The findings offer an interesting insight into how ready we’ve become to let

A new formula for white paint has given us the whitest white yet. It reflects a jaw-dropping 98.1 percent of all light that hits it, remaining significantly cooler than the ambient temperature, even when sitting in full sunlight. If used to coat buildings, its inventors say, the paint could help in the fight against global

A series of newly surfaced images and videos of unidentified flying objects filmed by the US Navy have now been confirmed as authentic by the Pentagon. While many in the public generally refer to such mysterious sightings as UFOs, the more modern term used in defense circles is ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena‘ (UAPs) – and they’re

Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk released a video showing how his company Neuralink – a brain-computer-interface company – had advanced its technology to the point that the chip could allow a monkey to play video games with its mind. Neuralink could transition from operating on monkeys to human trials within the year, if the startup meets

We encounter artificial intelligence (AI) every day. AI describes computer systems that are able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. When you search something on the internet, the top results you see are decided by AI. Any recommendations you get from your favorite shopping or streaming websites will also be based on an AI algorithm.

Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are basically everywhere, powering everything from smartphones to notebooks, earbuds to gaming devices, and so much more. But while the convenience of this ubiquitous (and Nobel Prize-winning) battery chemistry has radically changed the way we use and charge portable technology, lithium-ion is far from perfect. The performance of lithium-ion batteries degrades over

If you’ve ever gotten your phone wet in the rain, dropped it in water or spilt liquid over it, you’re not alone. One study suggests 25 percent of smartphone users have damaged their smartphone with water or some other kind of liquid. Liquid penetrating a smartphone can affect the device in several ways. It could

Scientists have isolated and harnessed that rarest of things – an organic blue food coloring found in nature – and figured out a way to produce it at scale. The discovery, made by an international team of scientists working across different fields, means that for the first time blue and other-colored foods may not have