Category: Technology

As is their tradition at this time of year, Apple announced a new line of iPhones last week. The promised centrepiece that would make us want to buy these new devices was AI – or Apple Intelligence, as they branded it. Yet the reaction from the collective world of consumer technology has been muted. The […]

Given how unfathomably large the universe is, it is perhaps understandable that we haven’t yet cracked all its secrets. But there are actually some pretty basic features, ones we used to think we could explain, that cosmologists are increasingly struggling to make sense of. Recent measurements of the distribution of matter in the universe (so-called […]

The Fyre music festival and its well-publicised failure are widely seen as a mixture of incompetence and fraud, embodied in Billy McFarland, its chief architect. People paid thousands of dollars for what was advertised as a luxury music festival but they were served simple cheese sandwiches and the entertainment was cancelled. McFarland spent almost four […]

Meta supremo Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Orion smart glasses, a new augmented reality (AR) prototype, at the annual Meta Connect developer conference. Ten years in the making, and still not expected on high streets until 2027, these will be a new way to meld the real and digital worlds. They will be controlled by the eyes […]

Over the course of 13 years, the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) survey and its extension, the VVV eXtended survey (VVVX), observed the central regions of the Milky Way. Beginning in 2010, these surveys required 420 nights of observation to: capture approximately 200,000 images monitor over 1.5 billion celestial objects generate 500 terabytes […]

Imagine being able to see right through your skin to watch your muscles or organs in action. It sounds like science fiction, but a group of scientists at Stanford University were recently able to make the skin of live mice appear transparent – at least under certain light conditions. This breakthrough has unquestionably opened up […]

Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Daresbury Laboratory on 22 September 2024, where they took a firsthand look at the groundbreaking work taking place in quantum computing. During the visit, they toured US company PsiQuantum’s state-of-the-art research and development facility, where they spoke to staff […]

In late November 2020, I was one of those people standing in line – or rather, refreshing my browser – hoping to snag a PlayStation 5 during a restock. The pandemic was in full swing, and with most of the world locked indoors, there weren’t many better things to do. The original PS5 promised to […]

The actor Gillian Anderson has just released a book of sexual fantasies. Titled Want, it catalogues a diverse range of fantasies submitted anonymously by women from around the world. It is not the first to do so. In 1973, American author Nancy Friday published My Secret Garden, a volume that provoked fierce debate at the […]

OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called Strawberry. It is designed not just to provide quick responses to questions, like ChatGPT, but to think or “reason”. This raises several major concerns. If Strawberry really is capable of some form of reasoning, could this AI system cheat and […]