Category: Technology

A lot of people think of hoarding as something extreme – a home crammed to the ceiling with possessions. But it tends to start gradually, and research has found it can begin in adolescence or even childhood. The information people have about it often comes from documentaries about severe cases, focusing on overflowing piles of […]

Toyota Japan will design, develop, and operate a pressurized Lunar rover for NASA, for crewed and uncrewed exploration on the Moon. NASA’s Administrator Bill Nelson, and Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Masahito Moriyama, shook hands on a deal to help folks sustainably explore the Moon. They want to send a […]

Retirement can be an exciting but also scary prospect for many. How you fill your time is totally up to you, but with so many choices it can be a bit daunting. But it’s important to make sure you keep active, physically and mentally. Hobbies can increase wellbeing by boosting brain function, enhancing social skills […]

A robot is chatting to an elderly British man in his bedroom. The robot has a cheery demeanour and a pleasantly high-pitched voice. The robot – perhaps because of the man’s age – starts asking him about his memories of the second world war: “Please tell me what was the most difficult thing you and […]

Media reports about the biodiversity crisis and what researchers have argued qualifies as a mass extinction event tend to focus on the big ecological effects. Melting ice sheets, severe weather events, droughts, habitat loss and wildfires dominate headlines. So too do the plights of large iconic animals – orangutans, gorillas, polar bears, rhinos, elephants, pangolins. […]

Deepfake pornography – where someone’s likeness is imposed into sexually explicit images with artificial intelligence – is alarmingly common. The most popular website dedicated to sexualised deepfakes, usually created and shared without consent, receives around 17 million hits a month. The content almost exclusively targets women. There has also been an exponential rise in “nudifying” […]

Flowers may look delicate – but flowering plants, what scientists call angiosperms, are one of the most successful evolutionary organisms on the planet. Including more than 350,000 known species, they dominate the ecological system, shape food webs and play a vital role in oxygen production. Plus, many of them are valuable commercial crops – think […]

Credit NASA’s Ames Research Center NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System seeks to advance future space travel and expand our understanding of our Sun and Solar System. Traveling through space using solar sails is no longer just a fantasy from movies or books. In April, a new and improved solar sail technology called the Advanced […]

Separate teams of Chinese and American scientists are reported to be developing body armour using the silk from genetically modified silkworms. The researchers modified the genes of silkworms to make them produce spider silk instead of their own silk. Harnessing the properties of spider silk has been a longstanding aim because the material is as […]

We might soon see AI step up to the next level, with impending upgrades to artificial intelligence (AI) systems developed by OpenAI and Meta. OpenAI’s GPT-5 will be the new “engine” within the AI chatbot ChatGPT, while Meta’s upgrade will be named Llama 3. Among other things, the current version of Llama powers chatbots on […]