An open letter calling for a pause on the development of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems has divided researchers. Attracting signatures from the likes of…
Posts tagged as “Science”
In February, on an icebreaker off the coast of West Antarctica, Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), came on deck…
The eye is so complex that even Charles Darwin was at a loss to explain how it could have arisen. Now, it turns out that…
Wearing an electrode-studded cap, a table tennis player stares down an opponent. This is no flesh-and-blood adversary; the robotic metal barrel across the table fires…
Climate change will affect essentially every aspect of our lives, climate researchers say, even America’s unofficial pastime, baseball. Because warmer air is less dense and…
Lakeside, California—Hilliker’s Ranch Fresh Eggs in this San Diego suburb has 30,000 chickens in three “cage-free,” open-air barns, where birds crowd the floor like rush-hour…
The victims are varied, from thousands of sea lions off the coast of Peru to mink farmed for fur in Spain to grizzly bears in…
To probe the mysterious early stages of development, researchers have concocted a variety of embryo stand-ins from mouse or human stem cells. Now, scientists in…
Country: Donate now Support nonprofit science journalism If we’ve learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that we cannot wait for a crisis to respond.…
In 2011, archaeologists excavating a site in northern Egypt known as Tell el-Dab’a came across a grisly scene. As they probed a series of pits…
Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, is practically a planet. Larger than Mercury, it is the only moon with its own magnetic field, produced by churning molten…
More than 600 million years ago, the planet was frozen from pole to pole, covered in half-kilometer-thick ice sheets that darkened every ocean. How sea…
Elephants are the gentle giants of the animal kingdom. They will often empathetically reach out their trunks to console a distressed sister or attempt to…
One of the most widespread parasites on the planet can also be one of the most difficult to study. Toxoplasma gondii—a single-celled protozoan—is capable of…
When the immense Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, it left gaping holes in astronomy. Now, a team from the California Institute…
Scattered across the prairie east of the Colorado Front Range are rings of ancient stones. The rings were used to anchor tipis, and they measure…
PARTICLE PHYSICS Particle mass dispels hint of new physics A fleeting, weighty elementary particle called the W boson has just the mass predicted by theory,…
Around 500 C.E., a new government arose in the community now called Río Viejo, near the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It was…
The Swahili coast, stretching more than 3000 kilometers from southern Ethiopia to Tanzania, was a hub of medieval trade, exporting ivory and other resources from…
Arati Prabhakar has been part of the U.S. research establishment for 3 decades. Now, the 64-year-old applied physicist stands at its epicenter, as science adviser…