Tech news stories
A 2,000-year-old Herculaneum scroll buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is filled with lost words that scholars can now decipher thanks to AI and a particle accelerator.
Advanced artificial intelligence is to revolutionise fundamental physics and could open a window on to the fate of the universe, according to Cern’s next director general.
The idea of lightsails is something out of science fiction. As early as the 1950s and ‘60s, science fiction writers John Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke and others were toying with the idea of “solar sails” for spacecraft propulsion…Project researchers report in a paper published in Nature Photonics that they have developed a platform to test the materials that could one day form lightsails.
Our research has revealed that the femur’s contents are arguably the oldest multi-component arrow poison in the world. It’s a complex recipe combining at least two toxic plant ingredients. There’s also evidence of a third toxin.
NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 and more recently has found evidence of ice-free ancient ponds and lakes on the surface. The rover found small undulations like those seen in sandy lakebeds on Earth.
AI promises to accelerate scientific discovery, but if scientists aren’t careful public trust may be left behind.
Around 900,000 years ago stone tech 2.0 was released into Spain. University of Santiago de Compostela anthropologist Diego Lombao and colleagues found the earliest known European example of advanced stone tool techniques. This research was published in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
The team’s detection method, which identified 138 space rocks ranging from bus- to stadium-sized, could aid in tracking potential asteroid impactors. In a paper appearing in the journal Nature, the researchers report that they have used their approach to detect more than 100 new decameter asteroids in the main asteroid belt.
The analysis, which looked at nearly 6 million galaxies and quasars spanning 11 billion years of cosmic time, found that even at colossal scales, the force of gravity behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Ai-Da’s works were “ethereal and haunting” and “continue to question where the power of AI will take us, and the global race to harness its power”…
‘Bricks’ of DNA, some of which have chemical tags, could one day be an alternative to storing information electronically.
Using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) telescope to survey large expanses of sky, a team of researchers led by the University of Maryland investigated a stream of space debris known to drift near Earth called the Taurid swarm.
The existential threat from a large meteor is real, but two next-generation telescopes are about to make us safer.
“By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment,” says senior researcher Rob Shepherd, a materials scientist at Cornell. This research was published in Science Robotics.
Scientists are getting very close to bringing a few iconic species, like woolly mammoths and dodos, back from extinction. That may not be a good thing.
So much is still unknown about consciousness, nevermind whether brain organoids will achieve it, explains a leading neuroscientist.