Science

A humpback whale breaching Zack Metcalfe Human musicians must practise for thousands of hours to perfect their performance skills, and the same may be true for humpback whales. It is widely believed that male humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing to attract mates, but zoologists have recently come to realise that they also sing at high-latitude feeding

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, snapped by the Perseverance rover NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS A little helicopter finally met its end this year. NASA’s Ingenuity drone made its 72nd and final flight on Mars in January, damaging one of its rotors on landing, concluding one of the most unusual space exploration experiments in recent decades. Having reached the

Could we build a secure quantum internet with the cables we already use? Shutterstock/Connect world Caught in a traffic jam with the internet, quantum teleportation persists. An experiment demonstrating that the two can share an optical fibre may point towards an easier way to build an unhackable quantum internet. “For many years, I’ve had the

TikTok is a video-sharing social media platform Anatolii Babii / Alamy A US law banning the popular video-sharing app TikTok is set to take effect at the start of 2025 – but the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok’s legal challenge to this. Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump has hinted he might take action

Particles in ship exhaust inadvertently cause cloud brightening – some geoengineering projects would try to recreate this effect NASA’s Earth Obervatory How would the world react if one country launched a solar geoengineering project to cool the planet without the permission of others? Would the sky change colour based on the type of particles injected

OpenAI announced a breakthrough achievement for its new o3 AI model Rokas Tenys / Alamy OpenAI’s new o3 artificial intelligence model has achieved a breakthrough high score on a prestigious AI reasoning test called the ARC Challenge, inspiring some AI fans to speculate that o3 has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). But even as ARC

Transmission electron micrograph of parts of the norovirus pathogen BSIP SA/Alamy A global international trial of an mRNA vaccine against norovirus is getting underway with the aim of reducing the health burden caused by the infamous “winter vomiting” bug. The trial has been complicated by the emergence of a new norovirus strain that is causing

The stones that make up Stonehenge came from all over Britain Heritage Image Partnership Ltd /Alamy Stonehenge may have been built to symbolise a unification in Stone Age Britain. The idea could explain why so many of the stones making up the monument were brought in over huge distances. Located on Salisbury plain in southern

A Guam kingfisher chick Thomas Manglona KUAM Amid a torrent of gloomy news about the decline of nature, there have been a handful of inspiring success stories from the world of wildlife this year, including positive developments for frogs, tigers and pangolins. Conservation managers should cherish these moments, says Jayson Semmens at the University of

The sand-grain-sized robots work cooperatively, similar to ants Jeong Jae Wie et al. Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate to act like ants, from packing together to form a floating raft to lifting objects hundreds of times their weight. About the size of a grain of sand, the microrobots could someday

Tree planting projects help tackle the climate crisis, but they can also impact water supplies Costfoto/NurPhoto/Getty Images The major environmental, social and economic crises facing the world today – involving biodiversity, climate change, health, food and water – are inextricably interlinked, and tackling them together has many benefits. Focusing on one issue alone, however, can

Molecular testing can be used to assess drink quality Evgenii Parilov/Alamy Drinks manufacturers and consumers may soon have a small, portable kit, not much bigger than a covid test, to check the quality and safety of alcoholic beverages. The device is being described as an “artificial tongue” because it can detect additives, toxins and the

Many AI models are trained on copyrighted material Metamorworks/Getty Images The UK government has announced plans to allow artificial intelligence models to be trained on copyrighted content, settling one of the big uncertainties of the current AI revolution – but the proposal has been criticised by campaigners who worry about the way AI companies already

Plastic food packaging can expose people to chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA) Shutterstock/Trong Nguyen Hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of heart disease worldwide may be linked to chemicals in common plastic products, suggesting that more stringent regulations on such toxins could benefit public health. Maureen Cropper at the University of

How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won’t) There is no doubt that the latest advances in artificial intelligence from OpenAI, Google, Baidu and others are more impressive than what came before, but are we in just another bubble of AI hype? View Source Here

The vampire-like Hylomys macarong hedgehog Alexei V. Abramov An extraordinary 234 new species were described by scientists in the Greater Mekong region of South-East Asia in 2023. The finds, announced in a report from conservation organisation WWF, include 173 species of plants, 26 reptiles, 17 amphibians, 15 fish and three mammals. Since 1997, more than

Many children in the US seem to be using chatbots to help them with their schoolwork Photononstop/Alamy Seven in 10 secondary school students have used large language models (LLMs) for their studies, according to a survey of more than 300 US pupils. “I realised that a lot of the people around me were using large

The ability to admit ignorance could be a sign of truly intelligent AI, and a new quiz of unsolved or perhaps even unsolvable questions aims to put this idea to the test View Source Here

A Red Cross worker spraying chlorine-based disinfectant in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 2024 MOISE KASEREKA/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock Mpox surged in parts of East, West and Central Africa in 2024, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a public health emergency of international concern in August. This was just over