Category: Technology

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Audi Introducing the Audi electric mountain bike, powered by Fantic, with a Dakar-inspired design and a frame built to last. The new Audi e-bike is built light, taking inspiration from the sleek design of the Audi RS Q e-tron Dakar racer, promising an exciting ride. Audi Ready for any terrain, its strong motor effortlessly pushes […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you have walked on a dune surface after windy conditions have settled, you may have been privileged to recognise one of Nature’s wonders: scratch circles. These are structures formed when the end of a tethered object is passively rotated into the surrounding sediment. In other words, a flimsy frond or blade of grass that […]