Secat Amphibious Transport Vehicle | WordlessTech

The groundbreaking Secat amphibious transport vehicle is tailor-made for tricky maritime missions in challenging areas. With the Navy and Marines handling various tasks worldwide, Textron Systems’ Secat steps in with rapid cargo and troop transport, both on water and land. It’s all about speed, flexibility, and toughness. In dicey environments, the Secat’s design outshines regular […]

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Cement is a big carbon emitter and quality is costly: a civil engineer explains

Every year the world uses 4 billion tonnes of cement to make the concrete that goes into buildings and other infrastructure. It leaves a huge carbon footprint, and comes with other costs too. Civil engineering professor Elsabe Kearsley, who researches cement and concrete, tells us more about this basic ingredient of modern life and explains […]

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UK universities enter next-gen international physics experiment – UKRI

The Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor (MAGIS-100) experiment is led by, and currently under construction at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). In a new agreement, the UK has agreed to provide vital expertise and support to help the experiment probe the mysteries of quantum physics, dark matter and more. Ingenious […]

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Why evolution often favours small animals and other organisms

Small really does seem to be beautiful in evolutionary terms. The largest dinosaurs, pterosaurs and mammals may look impressive but these giants are vastly outnumbered by microscopic bacteria and single-celled algae and fungi. Small organisms are also ancient and incredibly resilient. The first evidence of single-cell organisms dates from around 3.8 billion years ago, soon […]

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New research facilities to be created, thanks to flagship scheme – UKRI

The universities of Strathclyde, Birmingham and King’s College London will create four leading research facilities with the help of a £52 million investment from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund (UKRPIF). The new facilities will build on the universities’ track record of excellent research capability. UKRPIF is a flagship scheme managed by UK Research and […]

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Is dark matter’s main rival theory dead? There’s bad news from the Cassini spacecraft and other recent tests

One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton’s law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System. To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity […]

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Humans rate ChatGPT responses as more ‘moral’ than other people

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots based on huge collections of internet knowledge answer questions so quickly and in such detail (but not always without serious errors) that one could think they were human. Now, a new study from Georgia State University has found that when people are presented with two answers to an […]

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OpenAI’s content deal with the FT is an attempt to avoid more legal challenges – and an AI ‘data apocalypse’

OpenAI’s new “strategic partnership” and licensing agreement with the Financial Times (FT) follows similar deals between the US tech company and publishers such as Associated Press, German media giant Axel Springer and French newspaper Le Monde. OpenAI will licence the FT’s content to use as training data for its products, including successors to its AI […]

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Update on UKRI doctoral funding and training – UKRI

UKRI research councils are preparing to commit over £500 million in 2024 to support doctoral studentships through our new doctoral landscape awards. Doctoral award update In November we announced that as part of our new Doctoral Training Investment Framework, from 2024, all UKRI-funded doctoral training will be delivered through two new types of awards. The […]

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