Deborah Bloomfield

Rejoice, fans of typing in a prompt and having artificial intelligence (AI) paint what you wrote, for DALLE-2 is now open to the general public.  There has been a lot of excitement recently about image-generating algorithms, particularly Imagen by Google Research, Midjourney, and Open AI’s DALL-E 2. Advertisement All these systems use a blend of […]

Death from the skies may not come in an isolated event. Instead, major asteroid impacts may be accompanied by smaller objects hitting the Earth – and the Moon too. The ages of lunar glass collected by the Chang’e-5 mission indicate clusters of craters coinciding with the Chicxulub event, plus two other periods associated with large […]

The accident at reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 generated the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history. The impact of the acute exposure to high doses of radiation was severe for the environment and the human population. But more than three decades after the accident, Chernobyl […]

Your dog can tell when you’re feeling stressed because you smell different, new research has revealed. So strong is the stench of human worry that the dogs in the study could correctly distinguish between relaxed and stressed odors in 93.75 percent of trials, even when the person involved was a complete stranger. Researchers recruited four […]

Natural disasters can trigger depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, but research has found they barely seem to alter the personality traits psychologists refer to as the “big five”, at least among adults. However, a comparison of these traits conducted before and after the pandemic has shown a noticeable shift in ways usually considered undesirable […]

Hurricane Ian is forecasted to hit the coast of Florida later today, Wednesday, September 28. Following fears of winds of over 250 kilometers per hour (155 miles per hour), the National Weather Service (NWS) has updated its storm warning to a strong category 4. They also warned of life-threatening storm surges, catastrophic floods due to intense […]

Elon Musk is getting ready to show off a prototype of Tesla’s humanoid robot on Friday, with the company claiming that they will soon set the robots to work on the factory floor. Last time the company unveiled plans for the robot in August 2021, Musk was joined on stage by a strikingly-realistic human-looking robot, […]

Even medicine may be making way for our robot overlords, albeit in a microscopic form, as researchers have demonstrated a swarm of micro-robots clearing mice’s lungs of a pneumonia infection. A form of microscopic cyborg made from algae cells and antibiotic nanoparticles, the microscopic robots swim towards the pneumonia bacterial cells before delivering the drug […]

The two big guns of the space telescope world – Hubble and JWST – have both captured a new image of the spiral galaxy IC 5332. While Hubble’s image shows the galaxy’s beautifully glowing spiraling arms, JWST is able to reveal its deeper underlying structure of glowing gas, like staring into another dimension.  IC 5332 […]

After surprising and delighting the city of Beverly, Massachusetts, a grey seal that took up residence in a pond and evaded capture for days finally handed himself in to the police in the early hours of Friday. No, really – there’s even video evidence. “Over the past couple days the department has received numerous calls […]

An ancient shark with paired spines and bony armor is our earliest jawed ancestor, dating back to 439 million years. It surprised scientists with its incredibly advanced age, toppling the previously oldest known acanthodian by 15 million years. The Paleozoic fossil was retrieved from bone bed samples of the Rongxi Formation at a site in […]

A gene therapy infused directly into the brain has been used to treat a rare genetic condition in children, showing promise in clinical trials. Upstaza, as the therapy is called, improved the symptoms of all participants in the small trial – even giving some children the ability to walk and talk for the first time. […]

A large trial of an experimental Alzheimer’s disease drug has shown promise in slowing cognitive decline over a period of 18 months, marking one of the first successful human trials of an anti-amyloid treatment.  Biogen and Eisai released their results in an announcement on Tuesday, which showed a 27 percent reduction in the progress of […]

A robot created by the Oregon State University College of Engineering has set a new world record for the fastest 100-meter sprint by a bipedal robot. Cassie, which was developed using a $1 million grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), used knees that are designed to bend like an ostrich to achieve a […]

Fresh satellite images have been released showing before and after shots of NASA’s DART mission that successfully crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid over 11 million kilometers (6.8 million miles) deep into space.  The Italian Space Agency has released its first images from the tiny Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids (LICIACube) spacecraft – […]

For a longer time than you’d expect – by some years – one of science’s most remarkable brains was kept inside a box labeled “Costa Cider” underneath a beer cooler in the corner of one man’s lab. On April 17, 1955, aged 76, Albert Einstein was rushed to Princeton Hospital with internal bleeding caused by […]

A talented AI researcher and artist has brought an array of late celebrities back to life in photo form, as if they were still with us and aging for all these years. Celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger, and Princess Diana are among those masterfully recreated by Alper Yesiltas, who believes AI can bring […]

Following reports of a large leak near Nord Stream, the two key pipelines that hook natural gas from Russia to Europe, seismologists have also reported unusual activity occurring on the same day.  Even beyond the geopolitical fallout of this leak, the impact on the ecosystem and climate could be substantial, environmentalists have warned.  Advertisement A […]