Right now, your brain is recognizing the shapes of these letters, analysing their meaning, and holding a stream of thought together—all on about 20 watts of power. That’s roughly what it takes to run a lightbulb. Yet reproducing even a small fraction of the brain’s capabilities using today’s AI systems can require vast computing infrastructure […]
Ask any mathematician where artificial intelligence stands in their field, and you’ll hear it moved into the office down the hall, knocked off a few open problems and is elbowing in on the credit. Ask a biologist or chemist, and you’ll hear it’s still circling the parking lot. People have spent years expecting AI to […]
New videos reveal how a male dolphin has perfected a never-before-seen hunting technique for his species: he terrorizes fish until they vomit—and then feeds on their regurgitated food. The observations, aside from being gross, offer some of the most compelling evidence of kleptoparasitism—the act of stealing food from other animals—in a cetacean. New videos reveal […]
Deep in the Bolivian Yungas cloud forests, there stalks an utterly adorable beast: smaller than a house cat and spotted like a leopard, the creature has long been known to local communities as a tilcayo. Scientists, however, have only just formally discovered it—marking the first new wildcat species to be identified in more than a […]
Humans are living longer and longer. Now Japan has broken a new record for longevity: more than 100,000 people in the country are centenarians—some 107,677 of them are at least 100 years old. Japan has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. Researchers believe this national longevity is likely linked to low rates […]
A 600-year-old book that once belonged to a personal attendant of King Henry VIII is helping to reveal the shifting allegiances and religious ferment that captured the Tudor court, shaping world history along the way. The book in question is a copy of Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, a religious tract that […]
The most complicated result to date in the field of number theory looks deceptively simple: it’s essentially a curve and a line. More technically speaking, it’s an elliptic curve with a rank of at least 31—meaning it’s a special mathematical curve with at least 31 independent starting points for meaningful patterns. The higher the rank, […]
Calls to slow the development of frontier artificial intelligence, the industry’s most powerful models, have grown much louder in the past week. One idea keeps coming up as a way to break the glass in case of emergency: an AI kill switch. The concept of a kill switch is straightforward enough when you’re talking about […]
Hang a picture on three nails so that removing any two will cause the picture to fall but removing just one will not. Hint: See the solution for two nails in the graphic below: clockwise around a, clockwise around b, counterclockwise around a, counterclockwise around b, also notated +a+b−a−b. (Read more about picture-hanging problems here.) […]
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved to lift all rules putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas–fueled power plants, a move that climate scientists and activists say will harm public health and contribute to climate change. The rules required fossil fuel–based power plants to capture 90 percent of […]
