- Conservationists think tweaking pandas’ diets might shift their gut microbiomes in a way that could encourage them to mate
- The hatching of the 250th California condor chick at the San Diego Zoo marks a notable milestone for a species that narrowly evaded extinction
- Bonobos have long been regarded as the peaceful ape, in sharp contrast with violent chimpanzees, but a study based on thousands of hours of observations suggests the real story is more nuanced
- Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for...
- An Arctic-wide survey has found that the permafrost region is emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than it absorbs, causing the planet to heat even further
- We tend to think about hopping robots from the ground up. That is, they start on the ground, and then, by hopping, incorporate a aerial phase into their locomotion. But there’s no reason why aerial robots can’t approach hopping from the...
- After a short conversation with an artificial intelligence, people’s belief in a conspiracy theory dropped by about 20 per cent
- Five years ago, a fossil found in the Philippines was determined to be from a new species of hominin called Homo luzonensis. Since then, we’ve learned a bit more about the newest member of the human family
- A 10-minute walk can build up enough static electricity to power a battery-free water purifier, which could be especially helpful during disasters or in regions that lack access to clean water and stable power supplies
- Not long after the last world war, the historian William L. Shirer had this to say about the next world war. It “will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever...
- In this terrifying extract from Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, the author lays out what would happen in the first seconds after a nuclear missile hits the Pentagon
- Embryos seem to have a sensor that picks up when nutrients are scarce, prompting them to pause their development until resources become more abundant again
- Last December, the AI Institute announced that it was opening an office in Zurich as a European counterpart to its Boston headquarters and recruited Marco Hutter to helm the office. Hutter also runs the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich...
- A once-independent bacterium has evolved into an organelle that provides nitrogen to algal cells – an event so rare that there are only three other known cases
- About 1.5 billion people worldwide carry a risk of conditions including malnutrition because of parasitic infection, and AI could help identify those affected
- We can’t stir ordinary solids, but one research team now claims to have stirred an extraordinary quantum “supersolid”, generating tiny vortices
- Star Trek's Holodeck is no longer just science fiction. Using AI, engineers have created a tool that can generate 3D environments, prompted by everyday language.
- Talking to a robot often feels stilted or delayed, thanks to computer software trying to keep up with the conversation. However, new research from the University of Waterloo has improved the ability for humans to communicate naturally...
- The physicist Peter Higgs quietly revolutionised quantum field theory, then lived long enough to see the discovery of the Higgs boson he theorised. Despite receiving a Nobel prize, he remained in some ways as elusive as the particle that...
- A team of biomedical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers from City University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has developed a hopping robot by attaching a spring-loaded telescopic leg to the underside of...
- A team of AI specialists at Google's DeepMind has used machine learning to teach tiny robots to play soccer. They describe the process for developing the robots in Science Robotics.
- A small early-stage trial of the approach, which involves testing dozens of drug combinations on thousands of dishes of cells, may help people with cancer live for longer
- Ground-level ozone, a product of pollution from cars, degrades insect pheromones, and this can result in mismatched mating and sterile offspring
- We don’t know what alien life might look like, but if other civilisations can colonise multiple worlds, we might see planets that look unusually similar
- These soccer-playing robots can respond faster than ones trained in a standard way because they improved their skills via an artificial intelligence-based technique called deep reinforcement learning
- Our favourite sad songs seem to become less enjoyable when we try to take the emotion out of them
- The skin microbiome may be a bigger cause of post-operative wound infections than bacteria contaminating hospital equipment
- Feedback finds that despite close investigation, more research is needed to "better quantify tail wagging in general"
- Nutrition must be as essential as maths or science at our educational institutions to solve the US obesity crisis, says Aman Majmudar
- It's tough turning neuroimmunology into a gripping read, but Monty Lyman's excellent book provides a delightful overview of the connection between the brain, immune system and gut microbiome
- Inequality is a major obstacle to sustainability. The super-rich are an environmental horror story that we can't ignore, says Graham Lawton
- My column about the spiritual side of science has seen many of you sharing your own awe-inspiring experiences, says David Robson
- The prolific Adrian Tchaikovsky has two terrific sci-fi offerings out this year, one the story of a scientist turned prisoner shipped to a faraway planet, the other a light-hearted tale of robotic murder, says Emily H. Wilson
- Since 2012, Mary Jo Hoffman has taken one snap a day of the natural objects around her. She explains what lies behind two of them - and what the "art of noticing" has brought to her life
- From the Book of Revelation to extinction fiction, we just love end times. A new guide by Dorian Lynskey is full of gems
- To capture the clearest and most direct images of a “Wigner crystal”, a structure made entirely of electrons, researchers used a special kind of microscope and two pieces of graphene unusually free of imperfections
- An enzyme in a cyanobacterium can take the unusual form a triangle containing ever-smaller triangular gaps, making a fractal pattern
- Artificial intelligence is taking on some of the hardest problems in pure maths, arguably demonstrating sophisticated reasoning and creativity – and a big step forward for AI
- Researchers applied artificial intelligence (AI) to a technique that produces high-resolution images of cells in the eye. They report that with AI, imaging is 100 times faster and improves image contrast 3.5-fold. The advance, they say,...
- Rapid and resourceful technological improvisation has long been a mainstay of warfare, but the war in Ukraine is taking it to a new level. This improvisation is most conspicuous in the ceaselessly evolving struggle between weaponized...
- Inflamed gum tissue may allow bacteria in the mouth to enter the bloodstream, which could affect the heart
- Avi Wigderson has won the 2023 Turing award for his work on understanding how randomness can shape and improve computer algorithms
- Adding more masts could reduce the overall energy use of phone networks by two-thirds and boost handset battery life by 50 per cent
- Nobel prizewinning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs has died aged 94. He proposed the particle that gives other particles mass – now named the Higgs boson and discovered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012
- An oral vaccine in the form of a pineapple-flavoured spray prevented recurrent urinary tract infections in 53.9 per cent of clinical trial participants
- An excavation on an island in the Coral Sea shows that Indigenous Australians were producing ceramics long before the arrival of Europeans
- Smaller batch sizes instead of mass production, more complex production lines, increasing competitive pressure, unstable supply chains: Against this background, the Franco-German research project GreenBotAI addresses robotics.
- The expansion rate of the universe, measured by the Hubble constant, has been one of the most controversial numbers in cosmology for years, and we seem at last to be close to nailing it down
- If your life feels aimless and joyless, you may be languishing, says psychologist Corey Keyes — who reveals how it differs from depression and what you can do to flourish instead
- An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own.