Around 41,000 years ago, the very last Neanderthal took their final breath. At that moment, we became the only remaining hominins, the sole survivors of the once diverse family of bipedal apes. We will never know exactly when or where this...
Copies of the same artificial intelligence model can work togetherEugene Mymrin/Getty Images We can struggle to maintain working relationships when our social group grows too large, but it seems that artificial intelligence models may not face the same limitation, suggesting...
How will your brain react to that hot sauce?Ihor Butko/Alamy Anticipating pleasure or pain before tasting hot sauce appears to influence how the brain responds to the spicy flavour. “This has broader implications beyond spicy food,” says Yi Luo at...
October 8, 20243 min readEurope’s Hera Mission Launches to Visit an Asteroid Smacked by NASAHera will arrive in 2026 at Dimorphos, an asteroid deliberately struck by NASA’s DART spacecraftBy Elizabeth Howell & SPACE.comESA’s Hera mission lifted off on a SpaceX...
A wildfire burns in California on 30 July 2024David McNew/Getty Images A growing number of the planet’s “vital signs” have reached record levels due to climate change and other environmental threats, according to a stark report by a group of...
John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton share the 2024 Nobel prize in physicsChristine Olsson/TT/Shutterstock The 2024 Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks and the fundamental algorithms that...
Gears about 10 micrometres wide made from etched silicon, viewed with an electron microscopeGan Wang / Myfab Chalmers Minuscule gears that are thinner than a human hair and powered by light could be used to study human cells or power...
October 8, 20243 min readNobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Breakthroughs in Machine LearningThe 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was given to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for development of techniques that laid the foundation for revolutionary advances in artificial...
Some quantum systems may resist an effect of entropy called thermalisationGiroscience / Science Photo Library The fundamental laws of physics insist that no patterns can permanently survive nature’s steady course towards disorder – or can they? A new proof offers...
Dairy cows in CaliforniaMarmaduke St. John / Alamy Stock Photo The US has ramped up influenza surveillance amid an ongoing outbreak of the bird flu virus H5N1 in dairy cattle. Public health officials hope more robust monitoring will help catch...
