Science (Page 192)

Macronatura.es/Shutterstock You lift a stone and staring up at you is a little insect with its tail curled and pincers ready to inflict who knows what. Then you see its attendants – tiny white insects, huddled underneath. Should you drop the stone and quash them, or leave them be? WhatContinue Reading

The giant bird Genyornis went extinct in Australia around 50,000 years ago. Peter Trusler, Author provided It’s a long-running Australian detective story. From the 1980s onwards, researchers found eggshell fragments, and on rare occasions whole eggs, exposed in eroding sand dunes within the country’s arid zone (which covers most ofContinue Reading

shutterstock Some of the world’s biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot, ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarised work could enter the pages ofContinue Reading

Antidepressants can help people function in daily life. fizkes/Shutterstock Reinforcement sensitivity is an important behavioural process that allows us to learn from our environment through either positive/rewarding or negative feedback. When we get together with friends or go for a run, chemicals in our brains send us signals that inContinue Reading

It's hard to tell whether or not snow is on its way in the UK RTimages/Shutterstock Cold winter weather in the UK almost always brings with it talk of snow. British people tend to approach weather forecasts of snow with a combination of excitement and trepidation. Who doesn’t like theContinue Reading

Beautiful landscape/Shutterstock If 1,500 captive mammals suffocated to death in a zoo, their suffering would spark an outcry. So when a Berlin hotel aquarium exploded at the end of 2022, why did so few people comment on the welfare of the fish? Aquatic species don’t seem to induce the sameContinue Reading

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has the ability to generate human-like text, making it capable of engaging in natural language conversations. This technology has the potential to revolutionise the way we interact with computers, and it has already begun to be integrated into various industries.Continue Reading

Triff/Shutterstock Lightning may look beautiful but every year it kills thousands of people, does huge amounts of damage to buildings and infrastructure, and causes power outages. The only protection we have is lightning rods, which were invented 300 years ago and only protect a small area. The cost of damageContinue Reading

Malware is designed to hide in your device Jaiz Anuar/Shutterstock You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet – could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back door. They could have infected your device withContinue Reading