Science (Page 2)

Bartlomiej K. Wroblewski / Shutterstock Google and the XPrize Foundation have launched a competition worth US$5 million (£4 million) to develop real-world applications for quantum computers that benefit society – by speeding up progress on one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, for example. The principles of quantum physics suggest quantum computers could perform very fast calculations on particular problems, so this competition may expand the range of applications where they have an advantage over conventional computers. In our everyday lives, the way nature works can generally be described by what we call classical physics. But nature behaves very differently at tiny quantum scales – below the size of an atom. The race to harness quantum technology can be viewedContinue Reading

Popular social media platform TikTok stands accused of holding US data in China, fostering censorship, and spreading disinformation. Its popularity poses a dilemma for US politicians, but especially Democrats who have heavily relied on the app to reach its core base of young voters. Is it “time up” for TikTok in the US? And will it be the Democrats’ own leader, President Joe Biden, who ultimately decides to close down the platform heading into the 2024 elections? On March 13 the US House of Representatives voted 352 to 65 to order TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell the app (which is believed to have 150 million US users) or else face prohibition in the US over its alleged linksContinue Reading

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Distinctive Collections archive is quiet while the blizzard blows outside. Silence seems to be accumulating with the falling snow. I am the only researcher in the archive, but there is a voice that I am straining to hear. I am searching for someone – let’s call her the missing secretary. She played a crucial role in the history of computing, but she has never been named. I’m at MIT as part of my research into the history of talking machines. You might know them as “chatbots” – computer programmes and interfaces that use dialogue as the major means of interaction between human and machine. Perhaps you have talked with Alexa, Siri or ChatGPT. DespiteContinue Reading

NASA/CXC/M.Weiss Our Sun is both our best friend and our worst enemy. On the one hand, we owe our very existence to our star. Earth and the other planets in the Solar System formed out of the same cloud of gas and dust as the Sun. And without its light, there could be no life on this planet. On the other hand, there will come a day when the Sun ends all life on Earth and, eventually, destroys Earth itself. The risks that stars can pose to their planets are highlighted by a new study published in Nature. The authors looked at stars similar to our Sun and found that at least one in 12 stars exhibits traces of metalsContinue Reading

SuperBIT waiting for launch while its giant helium balloon is inflated. Bill Rodman/NASA An astronomical telescope designed to complement the ageing Hubble Space Telescope lifted off from New Zealand’s south island on April 16 2023. But as a sphere the size of a football stadium rose silently and slowly over the Tauhinukorokio mountains, calls started coming in from residents. Local police and radio stations, however, had been briefed by Nasa that the giant helium balloon would lift the two-ton SuperBIT telescope to 40km above sea level, over the next three hours. The mission, in which we were involved, was to test whether a balloon-borne telescope could capture deep space images with high enough resolution to study the unknown substance, dubbedContinue Reading

Richard Branson, next to White Knight Spaceship 2. Jared Ortega/Shutterstock In a decade or two, journeys into space could become as normal as transatlantic flights. In particular, the number of humans travelling into space with the help of commercial companies, such as Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, will increase significantly. But such travel comes with huge radiation risks. Sudden changes in space weather, such as solar flares, for example, could have significant health implications for crew and passengers. Now our recent paper, from the University of Surrey, Foot Anstey LLP Space and Satellite Team, has found that current legislation and regulation don’t do enough to protect space tourists and crew. Changes in space weather could expose space tourists to radiationContinue Reading

A recent study by Indian scientists outlined cases of elephant burials. worradirek/Shutterstock The myth of elephant graveyards has pervaded popular culture, and recent observations of buried Asian elephant calves may finally give that legend some credence. In the research published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, two scientists describe five instances where elephant calves have been found buried in a legs-upright position within irrigation trenches of tea plantations in northern Bengal, India. The authors argue that the unusual positioning, the surrounding ground being compacted by the feet of several elephants and injuries suggestive of dragging after death, all point to intentional burial practices. If this conclusion is accurate, these observations could indicate an understanding of death and grief potentially unlikeContinue Reading

Elon Musk’s company called Neuralink, launched in 2016, aims to implant a piece of technology in people’s brains that would allow them to control a computer or phone by thought alone. This is otherwise known as a brain-computer interface. After years of experimenting on animals, Neuralink recently announced the implantation of one of their devices in the brain of a person. Yet “neurotechnology”, of which this is a form, holds the promise of alleviating human suffering and allowing people with disabilities to regain lost capacities. And it raises further questions. Would people without disabilities also embrace technology that directly connects with their brains and nervous systems? What would happen in future if people were able to link themselves to devices,Continue Reading

Lysenko Andrii/Shutterstock If you’re in your 20s and 30s, you probably watch pornography. Millennials and gen Z are watching more pornography than any other age group and are also more likely than any other demographic to experiment with AI pornography. As technology advances, AI-generated tools and techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated and accessible. This can lead to unethical content, including deepfakes – videos in which a person’s face is replaced with someone else’s likeness, without their consent. Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) recently faced a scandal when it became awash with deepfakes of Taylor Swift. But what about other kinds of AI pornographic content? How can consuming it affect you, and how can you make sure that you’re consumingContinue Reading

Males are bigger than females, right? Generally, this is true of humans – imagine the extremes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and singer Kylie Minogue. It is also true of other familiar mammals including pets, such as cats and dogs, and livestock such as sheep and cows. But a new study by US scientist Kaia Tombak and colleagues found that, in many mammal species, males are not larger than females. In fact, in a comparison of 429 species in the wild, 50% of species including rodents and some bats – which make up a large proportion of all mammal species – showed no difference in body size between the sexes. Male-biased size dimorphism (where males are larger than females) wasContinue Reading