November 22, 20243 min readWorld's Oldest Alphabet Found on an Ancient Clay Gift TagA finger-sized clay cylinder from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the oldest example of writing using an alphabet rather than hieroglyphs or cuneiformBy Stephanie...
Mathematicians explore ideas by proposing conjectures and proving them with theorems. For centuries, they built these proofs line by careful line, and most math researchers still work like that today. But artificial intelligence is poised to fundamentally change this process....
The Kongsbreen and Kronebreen glaciers in Svalbard, Norway,Åslund/Norwegian Polar Institute/Greenpeace The mighty collision of two glaciers – Kongsbreen and Kronebreen – in Svalbard, Norway, is captured in a woven patchwork of black and white images taken by the Norwegian Polar...
Your phone isn’t listeningmiodrag ignjatovic/Getty Images Most people believe that they have received an online advert as a result of their devices covertly listening to an offline conversation, despite there being no evidence that this takes place. Joanna Strycharz at...
Mars – the kind of place to raise your kids?ESA /MPS/OSIRIS/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA As a kind of living embodiment of the dangers of techno-optimism, Elon Musk recently declared he means to create a self-sustaining settlement of 1 million people on Mars in...
Kathy (Nell Barlow, left) and Ruth (Matilda Bailes) in Never Let Me GoHugo Glendinning/Bristol Old Vic Written by Suzanne HeathcoteBased on the novel by Kazuo IshiguroDirected by Christopher Haydon Bristol Old Vic until Saturday 23 November, then Chichester Festival Theatre from 26 to...
Spreading crushed basalt rock dust on fieldsUNDO Projects that spread rock dust on farms are removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than competing technologies – but CO2 removal efforts remain far short of what is needed to avoid dangerous...
Checking on patients at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, ArizonaJesse Rieser/New York The Future Loves YouAriel Zeleznikow-Johnston (Penguin, 28 November) Much of medicine today focuses on extending life by no more than several months. Drugs for cancer and Alzheimer’s disease...
Creatine supplements are commonly available in powder formShutterstock/RHJPhtotos Creatine is one of the most widely studied performance-enhancing substances in the world. Once dismissed as just a bodybuilding supplement, its public popularity has grown hand-in-hand with interest from scientists. The supplement...
The minke whale is a smaller species of baleen whaleKerstin Meyer/Getty Images Brainwave testing of two young baleen whales has revealed they can hear higher frequency sounds than previously thought, forcing researchers to rethink how the ocean’s largest animals respond...
