In an era where businesses and households depend on the internet for everything from marketing to banking and shopping, the lack of adequate digital access can be a significant hurdle. And our recent research shows that many homes and businesses in the UK are being left stranded in the digitalContinue Reading
Nasa Is there life beyond Earth? The question has turned out to be one of the hardest to answer in science. Despite the seemingly boundless expanse of the universe, which implies there’s potential for abundant life, the vast distances between stars render the search akin to locating a needle inContinue Reading
OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT and a leading innovator in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), was recently thrown into turmoil when its chief-executive and figurehead, Sam Altman, was fired. As it was revealed that he would be joining Microsoft’s advanced AI research team, more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened toContinue Reading
Steel production in an electric arc furnace. Norenko Andrey/Shutterstock In a move to embrace sustainable steelmaking, British Steel has unveiled a £1.25 billion plan to replace two blast furnaces at its Scunthorpe plant with electric arc furnaces. This follows the UK government’s commitment in September to invest up to £500Continue Reading
Pablo Carlos Budassi/wikipedia, CC BY-SA One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. This can be predicted using the standard model of cosmology, also known as Lambda-cold dark matter (ΛCDM). This model is based on detailed observations of the light left overContinue Reading
In March 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, presented to the nation a graph showing “the shape of an epidemic”. The red line depicting the number of predicted COVID cases rose to a steep peak before falling again. Vallance explained that delaying and reducing the height ofContinue Reading
Visualising wealth and poverty through AI. Authors, CC BY-SA To most effectively deliver aid to alleviate poverty, you have to know where the people most in need are. In many countries, this is often done with household surveys. But these are usually infrequent and cover limited locations. Recent advances inContinue Reading
SciePro / Shutterstock Alan Turing might be best known for his work helping to crack Germany’s “Enigma” communications code during the second world war. But he also came up with a theory where patterns can form just through chemical compounds spreading out (diffusing) and reacting with one another. This becameContinue Reading
Smit/Shutterstock Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows. For 119 years, a belief that the way honeybees cluster together gives them a kind of evolutionary insulation has been fundamentalContinue Reading
The padlock icon which appears in most internet browser address bars. Robert Avgustin/Shutterstock Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance.Continue Reading
