Video timeline: 0:00 Autonomous systems 0:40 The need for next-generation drones 1:49 Scaling up 4:07 Keeping up with China
It’s a race against the clock, as Beijing has militarized islands in the South China Sea, and President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Some experts are skeptical the U.S. military can work fast enough to meet its goals.
8000 years ago—long before farming arrived—people in Siberia built defensive structures
AI-powered discovery could lead to revolutions in electronics, batteries, and solar cells
Chinstrap penguins fall asleep thousands of times per day in the wild
The extra ingredient would explain why the Universe is expanding so fast now — but conflicts with data from ancient quasars.
Smoke from record-breaking fires in 2020 travelled all the way to Cyprus, where it helped to trigger cloud formation.
A bird of prey called the striated caracara can figure out puzzles that are a struggle for Goffin’s cockatoos, which are known for their intelligence.
The appearance of a “tropical” mosquito-borne illness in southeastern Australia has unsettled researchers
In mice, pregnancy results in new neurons that support recognition of pups
B 8G4L/ChimeraX
Around 7.3 billion people faced temperatures strongly influenced by global warming over the past year.
The landmark decision could transform the treatment of sickle-cell disease and β-thalassaemia — but the technology is expensive.
From identifying disputed artworks to reconstructing lost masterpieces, artificial intelligence is enriching how we interpret our cultural heritage.
Cheap and fast algorithms are matching—and surpassing—the world’s top models
NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked
Verve Therapeutics says its base-editing approach may help prevent heart disease in many people
Seinfeld episodes help scientists to distinguish between the brain regions involved in understanding and appreciating humour.
Electrical stimulation improved his mobility, although researchers say that a larger study is needed to assess the device.
Nataly Castelblanco Martínez works to raise awareness of the perils faced by the much-loved marine mammals.
A quarter of a century after detecting dark energy, scientists are still trying to figure out what it is
One afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntzeff, an associate astronomer at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and Brian Schmidt, who had recently completed his doctoral thesis at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, were specialists in supernovae—exploding stars. Suntzeff and Schmidt decided that the time had finally come to use their expertise to tackle one of the fundamental questions in cosmology: What is the fate of the universe?
A road trip through the communities shouldering the U.S.’s nuclear missile revival
BY ABE STREEP
The point of the thing was to forever change our concept of power. When the U.S. military assembled a team of scientists, led by physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, to build a nuclear bomb during World War II with the hope of beating the Nazis to such a terrible creation, many of those involved saw their efforts as a strange kind of civic destiny. The Manhattan Project, wrote Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, was “compelled from the beginning not by malice or hatred but by hope for a better world.” Oppenheimer himself once said, “The atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.”
In thinking about the challenge of getting artificial intelligence (AI) to understand our complex world, I recalled a Twitter post from a user of Tesla’s self-driving system. The user tweeted that his car kept stopping abruptly at a particular location for no apparent reason. Then he noticed a billboard advertisement on the side of the road, featuring a sheriff holding up a stop sign. The car’s vision system had interpreted this as an actual stop sign, and slammed on the brakes.
After 2000 years of isolation, a few decades of interbreeding have rendered the animal “genomically extinct”
BY DAVID GRIMM
Though it lies in ruins on the northeast coast of England, Kilton Castle was once an imposing stone fortress, home to several noble families, and—it appears—at least eight cats. Archaeological excavations in the 1960s uncovered a well, at the bottom of which lay the bones of several felines dating back to the 14th century. The animals were an odd mix: Some were domestic cats, but other, larger specimens appeared to be European wildcats, a fierce, burly species that has inhabited the continent for hundreds of thousands of years.
A host of disorders once thought to be nothing to do with the brain are, in fact, tightly coupled to nervous-system activity.
Device can wield tools inside one of the heart’s chambers while bracing itself against a stabilizer fitted into a major cardiac vein.
Dried brine from a subsurface ocean speckles the surface of Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter.
Boomers Daily 