NASA/JPL-Caltech The award of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez will be greeted with enormous pleasure by physicists and astronomers worldwide. It recognises the central importance of black holes in modern astrophysics, and the unique contributions of these three scientists in establishingContinue Reading
TeodorLazarev/Shutterstock When the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, first said the country would develop a £12 billion “world-beating” system for testing and tracing cases of COVID-19, few people probably imagined that it would be based around a £120 generic spreadsheet program. Yet the news that the details of 16,000 positiveContinue Reading
The ice-covered Grímsvötn volcano on Iceland produced an unusually large and powerful eruption in 2011, sending ash 20km into the atmosphere, causing the cancellation of about 900 passenger flights. In comparison, the much smaller 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull led to the cancellation of about 100,000 flights. Understandably, any mention ofContinue Reading
XiXinXing/Shutterstock Depending on what you read, speaking more than one language may or may not make your smarter. These mixed messages are understandably confusing, and they’re due to the fact that nothing is quite as simple as it’s typically portrayed when it comes to neuroscience. We can’t give a simpleContinue Reading
EPSRC prize winning photograph by Alexander James Spence, Author provided Artificial intelligence seems to be making enormous advances. It has become the key technology behind self-driving cars, automatic translation systems, speech and textual analysis, image processing and all kinds of diagnosis and recognition systems. In many cases, AI can surpassContinue Reading
It normally takes ten years to produce a vaccine. Mongkolchon Akesin/Shutterstock To bring COVID-19 under control a vaccine needs to be available to every nation, rich and poor – and it needs to happen quickly. But pharmaceutical breakthroughs are usually the result a slow process involving competition, secrecy, risky investmentsContinue Reading
There seems to be a network of underground bodies of liquid water at Mars' south pole. NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems Venus may harbour life some 50km above its surface, we learned a couple of weeks ago. Now a new paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the best place forContinue Reading
Many children have busy and rigid schedules. VGstockstudio/Shutterstock As a mother of three grown-up children, I vividly recall the panic I felt when the annual six-week summer school holidays approached. Weeks of potential chaos loomed ahead as the regular routines were disrupted. My psychological knowledge just added to the stress.Continue Reading
© Paul Breeze, Author provided Humanity originated on the African continent at least 300,000 years ago. We know from fossil evidence in southern Greece and the Levant (modern-day Israel) that some early members of our species expanded beyond Africa around 200,000 years ago, and again between 120,000 to 90,000 yearsContinue Reading
Bas Nastassia/Shutterstock Since it was unveiled earlier this year, the new AI-based language generating software GPT-3 has attracted much attention for its ability to produce passages of writing that are convincingly human-like. Some have even suggested that the program, created by Elon Musk’s OpenAI, may be considered or appears toContinue Reading
