Thunderstorms churn up a ‘boiling pot’ of high-energy gamma rays
terrestrial gamma-ray flash: A brief burst of gamma rays, a high-energy type of radiation, that can be produced in Earth’s atmosphere (usually due to thunderstorms).
Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot can now ‘play fetch’ — thanks to MIT breakthrough
The researchers achieved this level of granularity with Clio by combining large language models (LLMs) — multiple virtual neural networks that underpin artificial intelligence tools, systems and services — that have been trained to identify all manner of objects, with computer vision.
AI can use tourist photos to help track Antarctica’s penguins
This transformation of ground photos into a bird’s-eye view allows researchers to track how penguin colonies change in location and population size over time – which could prove especially helpful in remote regions of the world where aerial drone or aircraft surveys are done infrequently.
Using AI, historians track how astronomy ideas spread in the 16th century
“When you deal with the scientific revolution, the triumph of the Copernican worldview, we know the big names,” says computational scientist Jürgen Renn of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the new work.
Lasers reveal Maya city, including thousands of structures, hidden in Mexico
” Consistently, everywhere that this type of job is done, there’s more settlement [found],” Thomas Fort, an archaeologist at the College of Texas at Austin that was not associated with the research study, told Live Scientific research. “It all gives even more pieces for this massive problem, and every problem piece matters.” The following action...
Scientists Say: Dialect
It also can refer just to England and Wales, the territories conquered by the ancient Romans who named the land Britannia.
How insects can help catch rhino poachers
Their analysis of the cases, which occurred between 2014 and 2021, involved tallying the various insect species present at each stage of decomposition, comparing the minimum postmortem interval estimates and factoring in the average ambient temperature during each time period.
Our brains can understand written sentences in the ‘blink of an eye,’ study reveals
Participants performed their best when the sentences contained a subject, verb and object, with the fastest brain activity being seen for phrases such as "nurses clean wounds," compared to noun lists like "hearts lungs livers."
Scientists have dated the moon’s oldest, and largest, impact site
Get in touch with me with news and uses from various other Future brandsReceive email from us in behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy sending your details you consent to the Terms & Problems and Personal privacy Plan and are aged 16 or over. You don’t require a telescope to see that the moon...
Tech companies want small nuclear reactors. Here’s how they’d work
Some small modular reactor designs make use of advanced types of fuel, such as TRISO, tiny particles of uranium that are surrounded by multiple layers of encapsulation (shown).Idaho National Laboratory
The U.S. empire was built on bird dung
That act gave the country “permission” to claim sovereignty over any allegedly uninhabited or unclaimed territory to secure access to guano, a prized fertilizer for American tobacco, cotton and wheat fields.
Solving Stephen Hawking’s black hole paradox has raised new mysteries
Hawking’s calculations showed that the radiation should be random, offering no way to predict what types of particles will emerge.
All your questions about Marburg virus answered
Genetic sequencing of cases in Rwanda has revealed that the virus jumped from an animal, like an Egyptian fruit bat or an African green monkey, to a person just once in the ongoing outbreak, the country’s health minister tweeted on 20 October.
The ‘Does It Fly?’ podcast separates fact from science fiction
That’s the premise — and tone — of the entertaining podcast Does It Fly?, hosted by astrophysicist and “mad scientist” (his words) Hakeem Oluseyi and actress, writer and “pop culture expert” Tamara Krinsky.
Fresh insights into how we doze off may help tackle sleep conditions
A better understanding of the SOP could lead to new treatments for these sleep conditions, while also helping anyone who wants to be more alert or creative – so “pretty much everybody”, says Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sorbonne University in Paris, France.
Saving Mexico’s fir forests could help monarch butterflies
Local foresters from the Indigenous community in Calimaya planted oyamel fir seedlings on the Nevado de Toluca volcano in central Mexico as part of an experiment to see if the trees crucial to monarch butterflies’ survival can thrive in new locations.
All the action from New Scientist Live – in photographs
The speakers included Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan on why we die, TV anthropologist Alice Roberts on ancient epidemics, psychologist Kimberley Wilson on eating for better brain health and statistician David Spiegelhalter on how chance rules our lives.