Food scientists on Tuesday unveiled a giant meatball made from lab-grown flesh of an extinct woolly mammoth, saying the protein from the past showed the way for future foods. The glistening meatball was displayed under a glass bell jar by Australian-based cultivated meat firm Vow at the NEMO science museum in the Dutch capital Amsterdam.
Tech
The AI chatbot known as ChatGPT, developed by the company OpenAI, has caught the public’s attention and imagination. Some applications of the technology are truly impressive, such as its ability to summarize complex topics or to engage in long conversations. It’s no surprise that other AI companies have been rushing to release their own large
The company behind the ChatGPT app that churns out essays, poems or computing code on command released Tuesday a long-awaited update of its artificial intelligence (AI) technology that it said would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor. GPT-4 has been widely awaited ever since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November, wowing
Advances in artificial intelligence are coming so hard and fast that a museum in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, has imagined a memorial to the demise of humanity. “Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache,” says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the “Misalignment Museum“, a
After 12 years of work, a huge team of researchers from the UK, US, and Germany have completed the largest and most complex brain map to date, describing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly. Though nowhere near the size and complexity of a human brain, it still covers a respectable
It may sound surprising, but when times are tough and there is no other food available, some soil bacteria can consume traces of hydrogen in the air as an energy source. In fact, bacteria remove a staggering 70 million tonnes of hydrogen yearly from the atmosphere, a process that literally shapes the composition of the
Cheaper to produce and better at absorbing higher energy forms of light, perovskite materials have the potential to replace silicon in solar panel technology. Unfortunately scientists are still figuring out how to make these perovskites more stable and longer-lasting. In a new study, scientists have been able to significantly improve the efficiency of a particular
Google scientists said Wednesday they have passed a major milestone in their quest to develop effective quantum computing, with a new study showing they reduced the rate of errors – long an obstacle for the much-hyped technology. Quantum computing has been touted as a revolutionary advance that uses our growing scientific understanding of the subatomic
The US military is intensifying its commitment to the development and use of autonomous weapons, as confirmed by an update to a Department of Defense directive. The update, released 25 January 2023, is the first in a decade to focus on artificial intelligence autonomous weapons. It follows a related implementation plan released by NATO on
In a hypothetical future where autonomous cars trundle up and down our busy roads, traffic lights might have a fourth color installed, one added for the benefit of those self-driving vehicles. Researchers at North Carolina State University are proposing an additional white traffic light that would signal to drivers autonomous vehicles (AVs) are managing the
Microsoft’s fledgling Bing chatbot can go off the rails at times, denying obvious facts and chiding users, according to exchanges being shared online by developers testing the AI creation. A forum at Reddit devoted to the artificial intelligence-enhanced version of the Bing search engine was rife on Wednesday with tales of being scolded, lied to,
Elon Musk wants to put a computer chip in your brain. Well, maybe not in your brain, but in the brain of some human somewhere. Musk’s neurotech startup, Neuralink, has been working toward implanting its skull-embedded brain chip in a human since it was founded in 2016. After years of testing on animal subjects, Musk
One of the challenges of reaching the full potential of quantum computing is figuring out how to get millions of qubits working together – those quantum equivalents of the classic bits that store 1s or 0s in traditional computers. Scientists at the University of Sussex in the UK have now been able to get qubits
The conversational AI bot ChatGPT is having a moment, promising to transform the ways in which we produce written text, search the web, and educate ourselves. The latest ChatGPT achievement? Almost passing the US Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). We’re talking about an exam known for its difficulty here, one that usually requires some 300 to
Above the islands of Hawaii on January 28, a green laser was seen piercing the night sky, silently tracing a path towards the horizon like a stutter in the Matrix’s code. The scene was caught on camera from a telescope atop Hawaii’s tallest peak. You can check out the scanning laser in the footage below.
The US military shot down what US officials called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 Feb 2023. Officials said that the US Navy planned to recover the debris, which is in shallow water. The US and Canada tracked the balloon as it crossed the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western
Scientists have found a clever way to generate hydrogen straight from salty seawater. This could be another step towards a clean energy future, if renewables power the process. The new device makes a few chemical modifications to existing technologies, making it possible to extract hydrogen from untreated, unpurified seawater – which could alleviate concerns about
Billion-dollar startup Colossal Biosciences claims it has come a step closer to reviving the dodo, a flightless bird that has been extinct since the 17th century. The futuristic plan is only possible now that the Dallas-based company has decrypted the dodo’s entire genome, according to a press release. The bird is the latest in the
Weighing in at just 1.2 milligrams, a new robot called FAIRY – that’s short for Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly – is the first flying bot we’ve seen based on soft materials that respond to light. The robot was inspired by dandelion seeds, and ultimately it could be used in the same
Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase