Artist’s impression of the seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 systemNASA A search for aliens communicating between planets in one of the most promising systems to look for life has come up empty. Discovered in 2017, TRAPPIST-1 is a system of...
Genetically modified maizeNick Gregory/Alamy I have never been a supporter of Brexit, except for one thing: it has allowed the UK to break free from the damaging straitjacket of European Union agricultural policy, including its prohibition on genetically modified crops....
It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen Source link...
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake has been shortlisted for the Booker prize Creation LakeRachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape (UK, 5 September); Scribner (US, 3 September)) Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is a thriller, a spy caper, a comedy and also a poetic...
The northern sea robin uses its legs to find food in the seabedAnik Grearson A striking fish that lives at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean has evolved legs – but not just for walking. These appendages are a novel...
September 26, 20245 min readMilgram’s Infamous Shock Studies Still Hold Lessons for Confronting AuthoritarianismWhy ordinary people will follow orders to the point of hurting others remains a critical question for scientists—though some answers have emergedBy Laura Niemi, Edouard Machery &...
A camellia farm in Jiangxi province, ChinaWan Xiang/Xinhua/Alamy Replacing some existing vegetable oil crops with camellia plants could boost cooking oil production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, water use and pesticide use, according to a modelling study. That is because...
Hairy situation Yes, when someone pulls your hair – if you have enough hair that someone can pull it – it hurts. But the truth of why that is, and some of the how much and some of the how,...
Maths phobia is older than you might think. A hundred years ago, German physicist Felix Auerbach, lamenting the phenomenon and hoping to find ways to address it, wrote a little book called The Fear of Mathematics and How to Overcome...
Industrial smoke rises near New Zealand’s Kaikoura mountainsColin Monteath/Minden Pictures/Alamy The Burning EarthSunil Amrith (Allen Lane (UK); W. W. Norton (US)) So much has been written about the environmental crisis that it is difficult to say anything new. It is...
