It’s not Black Swan or The Wrestler. Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth is visually stunning with ultra high-res canyons and wildlife but as a movie, it is cheesy and simplistic | Continue reading
In the future, some industrial processes may be powered by hydrogen instead of fossil fuels. If the hydrogen leaks into the atmosphere before it is burned it can contribute to climate change – but not much | Continue reading
A chat about AI between US tech mogul Elon Musk and UK prime minister Rishi Sunak focused heavily on utopian futures and theoretical risks of superhuman intelligence instead of actual harms caused by AI systems already deployed by tech companies | Continue reading
NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew past its first asteroid, Dinkinesh, on 1 November, and the first images have shown that Dinkinesh has a second, even tinier, asteroid orbiting it | Continue reading
If a rat has walked through a location before, it can imagine that place, with the help of virtual reality. Some now expect all mammals to be capable of such thoughts | Continue reading
Groups of chimpanzees patrol the edges of their territory and pause on hilltops to listen out for rivals, judging whether it is safe to venture further | Continue reading
Speaking at the end of the UK's AI Safety Summit, prime minister Rishi Sunak said that we don't yet understand enough about AI models to regulate them properly, but work to do so must happen faster | Continue reading
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak's much-publicised AI summit at Bletchley Park has come to an end, and the result seems to be a promise to hold more summits. At this rate, legislation will struggle to keep pace with the development of AI | Continue reading
The replacement of cow pastures with soya plantations in parts of Brazil has corresponded with an increase in leukaemia deaths among children, possibly due to pesticide exposure | Continue reading
Hundreds of human remains from one burial site hint at a prolonged conflict between Stone Age people, long before the formation of powerful states | Continue reading
The UK prime minister and US tech mogul are set to discuss the future of artificial intelligence, in a conversation streamed on Musk's X platform. Here are some topics they might touch on | Continue reading
Nations are vying to see who can sign up the most countries to their AI safety agreements, with a surprise US announcement threatening to overshadow the UK's declaration | Continue reading
A growing number of heavy cannabis users – especially young people – are showing up in emergency rooms with prolonged vomiting due to cannabis hyperemesis syndrome | Continue reading
There is a revolution taking place in our understanding of healthcare, and it is shifting priorities towards maintaining health before we ever need to wrestle with illness | Continue reading
Maite Alberdi's moving documentary spotlights Chilean journalist Augusto GÓngora, who helped his country retrieve its identity but lost his to Alzheimer's disease, says Simon Ings | Continue reading
The Mars Sample Return mission aims to retrieve samples of Martian rock and soil to look for signs of life – but a rethink is needed to ensure Earth’s biosecurity, says Paul Marks | Continue reading
Covid-19 sick days were 20 per cent lower in schools with air-cleaning HEPA filter machines, researchers on an eagerly-awaited study have found. But why has it taken so long to discover how well they work, asks Clare Wilson | Continue reading
From Brazil to the Netherlands, motorway builders are starting to take wildlife into account, but the effort must be global. Ben Goldfarb's beautifully crafted Crossings is a wake-up call | Continue reading
We are all told to mist our houseplants if we want them to thrive. But botanist James Wong failed to find a single study backing this up, so he did his own home-grown experiment | Continue reading
From Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface to the first US spacewalk by Ed White, Tim Peake updates the story of “ordinary people doing extraordinary jobs” | Continue reading
Caleb Everett's A Myriad of Tongues is an assured guide to new thinking about how language shapes the way we see the world – at a time when thousands of languages are vanishing | Continue reading
The strongest winds from Storm Ciaran are expected to hit south England on the morning of 2 November, and the storm may set a record for the lowest air pressure recorded in 200 years | Continue reading
Tall 10-year-olds may be more at risk of developing an irregular heart rate in later life than their shorter counterparts, but less at risk of having a stroke | Continue reading
A spike in wildfires across the globe is stalling and even reversing improvements on air pollution, raising the risk of lung, heart and neurological problems | Continue reading
Two strange, high-density blobs buried more than a kilometre underground may have come from the ancient world Theia, which is thought to have slammed into Earth to create the moon | Continue reading
Gene expression patterns in starfish reveal a surprising answer to the question of how they evolved their unusual body shape | Continue reading
Conventional measures like blood pressure and body mass index only tell you so much. Testing your microbiome and metabolites, or even discovering your “immune grade”, can offer a clearer picture of your health | Continue reading
Bull sperm move their tails up and down with a larger range of motion when the fluid around them is more viscous, which could help them reach an egg | Continue reading
A meeting at Bletchley Park in the UK on the future of artificial intelligence kicked off with an agreement among 28 countries on the need for global action | Continue reading
The AI Safety Summit, hosted by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, has been criticised for a lack of diverse perspectives, focusing on the wrong problems and being dominated by powerful technology company executives | Continue reading
Wildfires can deposit large amounts of ash into the oceans, and experiments suggest that this material could boosts the growth of phytoplankton in seawater - but the impact on other wildlife is not yet known | Continue reading
A fresh vision of the Culture universe from Iain M. Banks plus new books from Brandon Sanderson and Naomi Alderman are among the science fiction treats in store this November | Continue reading
The quantum behaviours of extremely cold rubidium atoms can be used to detect forces smaller than a tenth of what is needed to lift a single electron | Continue reading
Large language models such as GPT-4 were able to identify people’s personal information by analysing their posts on social media | Continue reading
People with ADHD may need to search for their medicines at multiple pharmacies or see their doctor to get their prescription altered | Continue reading
The Lucy spacecraft will visit its first of ten asteroids on 1 November – a small rock called Dinkinesh that will be used to test the scientific instruments for its mission to the Trojan asteroids | Continue reading
Suzie Edge is a medical historian who frequently surprises (and sometimes shocks) her TikTok followers with health stories of famous people from the past. Here are some of her favourites | Continue reading
The way AI systems work means that we can’t easily delete what they have learned. Now, researchers are seeking ways to remove sensitive information without having to retrain them from scratch | Continue reading
The most recent review into the effectiveness of face masks has confirmed that they do help to prevent covid-19, but the intervention remains a controversial issue | Continue reading
Water containing a cheap lithium bromide salt can deliver longer-lasting cooling for computers while improving their performance | Continue reading
Ahead of a meeting at Bletchley Park on the future of artificial intelligence hosted by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, international agreements on AI are coming together | Continue reading
Researchers recently identified the chemical source of marijuana's distinctive scent. The finding could help lead to less pungent pot or strains with new flavours | Continue reading
An evergreen desert shrub common in the Middle East excretes salt crystals onto its leaves that may help it draw moisture from nighttime air | Continue reading
US president Joe Biden has announced an executive order that establishes ambitious guidelines on safety and security for artificial intelligence, but it will still need political will to put regulatory teeth and resources behind it | Continue reading
Ahead of a meeting at Bletchley Park on the future of artificial intelligence hosted by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, a lot is happening in the world of AI | Continue reading
The Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago filled the sky with fine silicate dust, which blocked out sunlight and lingered for 15 years | Continue reading
The amount of carbon dioxide we can still emit to have just a 50 per cent chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C is even smaller than previously thought | Continue reading
Seventy years ago, three discoveries propelled our understanding of how life on Earth began. But has the biggest clue to life's origins been staring biologists in the face all along? | Continue reading