Deborah Bloomfield

AI has smashed records on a program designed to test “general intelligence”, achieving a score on a level with those of the average person.  Historically, researchers have looked to the Turing Test to measure machine intelligence. To pass, a machine must convince a human that it too is a person. By some accounts, technology has […]

Bird flu has killed 20 big cats at the Wild Felid Advocacy Center in Washington state. The devastation has claimed half of the animals in the sanctuary’s care. Otherwise known as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), bird flu is an infection caused by the Type A H5N1 virus that typically circulates among wild birds, but […]

The European Space Agency (ESA) and Telesat have achieved a world-first by connecting a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite to the ground using 5G Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) technology. This marks a significant step towards establishing space-based communications that are as easy as using a smartphone. The development could revolutionize how emergency responses coordinate, provide better […]

While the average person has 32 teeth, some species of dolphin possess as many as 240. Why so many? Not all species are quite so lucky – Risso’s dolphins only have four to 14 in their lower jaw. However, scientists have suspected dolphins’ teeth are for more than just munching for some time. Now, new […]

Archaeologists have unearthed an incredible ceramic oil lamp from the Late Roman period. Although this isn’t a genie-containing situation, it is decorated with depictions of the Temple menorah, incense shovel, and lulav (date palm branch) used in Jewish religious rituals. The lamp was recovered as part of a dig at a site near the Mount […]

Cheetahs may hold the reputation for being the world’s fastest animal – and with a running speed of up to 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour), the feline is indeed the quickest animal on land. But that pales in comparison to the impressive diving speeds of the peregrine falcon, which, according to the […]

Parker Solar Probe has survived achieving the record-breaking closest pass to the Sun by a human-made spacecraft ever – and phoned home even earlier than expected, confirming it survived “touching the Sun” and reaching the pinnacle of its mission. The already record-breaking probe – the fastest human-made object in the cosmos – carried out its […]

Archaeologists have revealed evidence of a never-before-seen sacrifice of family members belonging to the ancient Andean Moche culture, revealing new insights into their social world, customs, burial practices, and the role of kinship. The Moche culture – who lived along Peru’s North Coast between 300 and 950 CE – is known to have created sophisticated […]

A duo of researchers at Caltech have attempted to quantify the speed of human thought, putting it at a somewhat perplexing 10 bits of information per second. To put that into perspective, one estimate of the slowest average download speed in the USA in 2024 clocked in at 93 megabits per second (Mbps), though the […]

The magnetic field – or magnetosphere – is a giant invisible shield that protects the planet, repelling solar wind and other forms of space weather that could threaten life on Earth. It is essential for the running of our global navigation systems (and those of ants, sharks and other animals), not to mention our ability […]

Though you might think that compasses will always point towards the geographic north pole, the magnetic and geographic poles do not always align. As well as a few temporary reversals, the Earth’s magnetic field – just like the Sun – can flip over long timescales. During the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal, the magnetic north could have been […]

The shortest distance between any two points is a perfectly straight line, and given the brilliant efficiency of the natural universe, it figures that linear flawlessness must be a feature of our reality. Look closely enough, however, and you’ll find that things aren’t that simple, as we are in fact surrounded by glorious imperfection. Of […]

Lucy, our 3.2 million-year-old ancestor of the species Australopithecus afarensis, may not have won gold in the Olympics – but new evidence suggests she was able to run upright. According to digital simulations developed by researchers in the UK and the Netherlands, Lucy would have been able to reach top speeds of 4.97 meters per […]

In 2018, Tahlequah the killer whale made headlines and broke hearts after she was spotted carrying the body of her dead calf for 17 days. This month, sightings of the orca show she has recently given birth again . According to a Facebook post by the Center for Whale Research (CWR), the new calf has […]

Researchers have developed a new groundbreaking technology that can convert some cancer cells into a state that resembles normal cells without killing them. This approach not only represents a new way to potentially treat cancer, but also one that avoids side effects produced by other treatments and the risk of resistance. Cancer reversion, which regresses […]

A team studying the group behavior of ants has found that, in the right circumstances, ants can outsmart humans in collective problem-solving tasks. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science wanted to take a closer look at “collective cognition”, and whether groups can sometimes tackle problems with more ease than when performing the tasks individually, […]

Life has limits that mean that not everything we can imagine is possible, a multidisciplinary team of scientists has argued. The capacity to rule out some forms of life, based on scientific laws, allows us to focus our energies both when it comes to searching for life on other worlds and making it in laboratories. […]

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