Category: Technology

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

Few students go into medical research dreaming of one day giving a mouse a tumour or heart disease to a rabbit. But animal experimentation of this kind has become fundamental to modern medicine. For regulatory bodies around the world, treatments that might save human lives must be proven safe and effective in animals with similar […]

In the atrium of a research building at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing is a wall of patents. Around five metres wide and two storeys high, the wall displays 192 certificates, positioned in neat rows and tastefully lit from behind. At ground level, behind a velvet rope, an array of glass jars […]

ONE ROLE of science, history suggests, is to wipe that smug grin off humanity’s face. It has moved Earth from the centre of the universe and relocated it in an astronomical backwater. It has downgraded Homo sapiens from being the pinnacle of God’s creation to just another species shaped by Darwinian evolution. And it has […]

“ONE OF THE key questions is—does that seal work? We think it will work, but it may not work,” said Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, on June 5th, as his company’s Starship rocket was being prepared for its fourth test flight the following day. He was referring to one particular component of the rocket: […]

Globally, sea levels have risen by somewhere between 21cm and 24cm since 1880. Most of this rise is a consequence of water physically expanding as it warms, but in recent decades meltwater flowing off Greenland and Antarctica has significantly contributed too. These rises in sea levels threaten coastal properties and the livelihoods and lifestyles of […]

“WHAT DO YOU see right now?” a man asks a humanoid robot standing behind a table. “I see a red apple on a plate in the centre of the table, a drying rack with cups and a plate, and you standing nearby, with your hand on the table,” the robot replies. “Great—can I have something […]

IF THE CANON of science-fiction cinema is in broad agreement on one thing, it is that a robot is supposed to look like a human being. It is not only casting directors and special-effects technicians who are on board: engineers can also see the appeal. Pras Velagapudi, the chief technology officer at Agility Robotics, a […]