Category: Technology

Earth may not be the only planet with sun dogs, as shown here in a wintry landscape. Guozongxia/Shutterstock Every once in a while, you may look up towards the Sun and see strange bright lights on either side of it. Or perhaps you’ll be sitting in an aircraft, looking out the window at its shadow […]

The African Union has endorsed the #CorrectTheMap Campaign, a call for the United Nations and the wider global community to use a different kind of world map. The campaign currently has over 4,500 signatures. The map most commonly used is called the Mercator projection. Map projections are how cartographers (map makers) “flatten” the three-dimensional Earth […]

The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Bristol and the Central Laser Facility at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The finding explains why 2,4-Dinitrophenol (DNP), a chemical compound toxic to plants, animals and humans, can remain active in the atmosphere for longer periods than previously understood. This persistence may […]

Picture this: you’re out for dinner with your partner. The food arrives, the conversation flows – and then their phone buzzes. They glance down, smile faintly and start typing. You sit there, fork in hand, suddenly invisible. That moment has a name: phubbing, a mash-up of “phone” and “snubbing.” It’s become an almost inevitable feature […]

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled unprecedented details of one of the galaxy’s most spectacular stellar phenomena, revealing the hidden heart of the Butterfly Nebula for the first time. Located 3,400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, the famous Butterfly Nebula has captivated astronomers with its distinctive wing-like structure. However, its ancient central […]

Lake Iro in Chad was in the news in early August 2025 after a picture taken by a NASA astronaut was published showing it looking like a large, circular silver mirror as sunlight reflected off its surface and into space. The phenomenon is known as a sunglint and can happen to any water surface under […]

fran_kie/Shutterstock For some people, sleep brings a peculiar kind of wakefulness. Not a dream, but a quiet awareness with no content. This lesser-known state of consciousness may hold clues to one of science’s biggest mysteries: what it means to be conscious. The state of conscious sleep has been widely described for centuries by different Eastern […]

In today’s world, huge amounts of data are being created all the time, yet more than half of it is never used. It stays in silos, or isn’t managed, or can’t be accessed because systems change, or isn’t needed because business priorities change. This “dark data” accumulates in servers and storage devices, consuming electricity and […]

How is an animal feeling at a given moment? Humans have long recognised certain well-known behaviour like a cat hissing as a warning, but in many cases we’ve had little clue of what’s going on inside an animal’s head. Now we have a better idea, thanks to a Milan-based researcher who has developed an AI […]

Beijing, China — Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has released an updated version of its flagship model, DeepSeek V3.1, marking a notable evolution in its open-source large language model (LLM) lineup. The new model builds on the original DeepSeek V3 architecture, which also serves as the foundation for its reasoning-focused R1 model, and introduces a hybrid […]