Category: Technology

BEFORE HUGH Herr became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a promising rock climber. But after being trapped in a blizzard during a climb at age 17, he lost both his legs below the knee to frostbite. Since then he has worked on creating prosthetic legs that would work and […]

IN EARLY 2021 Micross Components, a designer of highly specialised circuitry in Melville, New York, received an intriguing request. An American aerospace giant wanted components that could protect a military system’s electronics from the radiation generated by a nuclear detonation. Micross signed the contract, and set about doing the work, but was left in the […]

The woolly mammoths of Wrangel island were survivors. Trapped on a hunk of rock in the Arctic Ocean after rising sea levels cut them off from present-day Siberia, they were the last of their species to go extinct. Palaeontology textbooks have explained their eventual demise around 4,000 years ago as a classic case of extinction […]

MPOX IS A viral infection typically found in parts of Africa and spread through contact with infected animals as well as within households. It causes severe fever, flu-like symptoms and a rash of pus-filled blisters across the body. In 2022 the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, spread around the world—cases turned up everywhere from Nigeria […]

That might not be a bad thing

WHAT APPEARS to have been our first article about solar power, in 1955, mostly dealt with water heaters, cooking stoves and the like. But it also noted, “among the more ingenious low powered devices…the Bell Company’s solar battery”—which is to say the first silicon-based solar cell, unveiled by AT&T’s Bell Labs the previous year. Indeed […]

ANY biologically aware parent who has started talking about the birds and the bees will have realised halfway through that what they are really discussing is flowers. Bees carry pollen grains from one plant to another, enabling fertilisation; birds digest and excrete the resulting seeds, allowing new blooms to grow. The role that flowers themselves […]

TODAY’S BEST image-generating artificial-intelligence (AI) models are remarkable. Ask OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, or its counterparts Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, to draw a penguin sipping on a vodka martini on the French Riviera and they will do so with aplomb. Ask them to replicate it in the style of Rembrandt or Caravaggio and they will speedily […]

AT KITT PEAK National Observatory, in Arizona, a telescope has spent three years building a three-dimensional map of the heavens. In examining the light from tens of millions of galaxies, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) may have found something astounding. DESI, as its name suggests, is a tool to investigate the nature of dark […]

Practise with an augmented-reality headset