Category: Technology

An image of 3I/Atlas from the Hubble telescope shows the teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust emanating from its solid, icy nucleus. NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) Astronomers have revealed new details about the make-up and age of a visiting comet that was born around a distant star. They conclude that the […]

UK astronomers are celebrating the launch of the Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began last night from a mountaintop in Chile. A milestone that the UK astronomy community has spent more than a decade preparing for, it’s the start of one of the most ambitious studies of the cosmos ever undertaken. […]

Museums are supposed to be havens for the collective cultural and scientific heritage of the planet, but specimens sometimes go missing. Happily, they can also be rediscovered, as a new study shows, with the vertebrae of the legendary predatory shark known to the world under its old name of Megalodon (now properly Otodus megalodon) turning […]

Earthquakes still arrive without warning. That is the hard truth scientists have been forced to accept, despite a decade of advances in artificial intelligence, satellite monitoring and dense seismic networks. We are getting better at detecting earthquakes once they start. We are now better at estimating the damage they may cause. But we still can’t […]

You know that feeling when you walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in? Maybe you were there to fetch your keys. On your way to the room, you were thinking about grabbing your keys. But once you arrive, your keys have completely disappeared from your mind. This is sometimes known as […]

The world’s food systems face real and urgent challenges. These include climate change, nutrition insecurity, food safety, and unequal access to markets. Research has produced practical solutions to each of these that could benefit hundreds of millions of people. Too few are moved into widespread use. For years, the development sector has flattered itself with […]

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A.  You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check […]

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois […]

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.   The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have […]

Generative artificial intelligence (AI), and especially large language models deployed as chatbots and digital assistants, are now part of everyday digital life. These models are being framed as a helpful assistant, a patient tutor, a customer service agent and even a source of emotional support. But what happens when even more human encounters are mediated […]