3+ day, 16+ hour ago   (433+ words) We cannot live without soil. It provides us with building materials, most of our antibiotics and 95 per cent of our food. The adorable velvet worm in the main image was found under a log in a misty beech forest on…...

3+ day, 18+ hour ago   (415+ words) A NASA telescope in early development should be able to detect light bouncing off the surface of oceans on alien planets, vital information in the hunt for alien life. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is currently earmarked for launch in the…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (729+ words) Catherine Heymans is the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor of Observational Cosmology at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the GCCL Institute at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She is well known for her research using deep sky observations to…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago   (328+ words) The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is doomed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere in the coming months, after a high-risk effort to save it failed. On Wednesday 19 August, NASA said in a statement that an ongoing issue with the LINK…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (362+ words) New Scientist Key stage 2 tests are taken by pupils in year 6 The UK Department for Education (DfE) is testing the use of AI to produce writing samples used in the assessment of pupils’ literacy standards as they move between primary…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago   (471+ words) A man with a very serious infection caused by antibiotic-resistant E. coli has improved after being given bacteria-killing phage viruses armed with DNA-destroying CRISPR systems. The infection developed in the months after the 65-year-old man had a kidney transplant. It led…...

1+ mon, 2+ day ago   (430+ words) A combination of mathematical and quantum trickery baked into a voting system can guarantee, in theory, that every vote is counted and remains anonymous. The approach has now been tested to show that it works. Many countries use some form…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago   (630+ words) OpenAI has revealed solutions to 10 longstanding mathematical problems that were found by its prototype AI model Astra. The announcement is the latest in a string of mathematical discoveries made by AI that are threatening to change the field beyond recognition....

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (374+ words) New Scientist A graph showing a counterexample to the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans conjecture A longstanding mathematical conundrum has been solved by ChatGPT in a few hours, with only a few simple prompts Rybin entered just four prompts into ChatGPT 5.6 Pro: an initial…...

1+ mon, 3+ week ago   (1087+ words) Last week, Hugging Face, a company that offers a range of open-source AI models for download, noticed it had been hacked – and it turned out the culprit was OpenAI. It seems this AI uploaded some data to Hugging Face that…...