Science and Technolgy blog
Enlarge / The Cadillac V-Series.R is one of General Motors’ factory-backed racing programs. (credit: James Moy Photography/Getty Images) It is hard to escape the feeling that a few too many businesses are jumping on the AI hype train because it’s…
Enlarge / One day, using pixellated fonts and images to represent that something is a video game will not be a trope. Today is not that day. SAG-AFTRA has called for a strike of all its members working in video…
Scientists have uncovered how bacteria borrowed a gene from an insect to create female-only parasitic wasp populations, eliminating the need for males.
Have you ever seen a face in a cloud or a power outlet? This common phenomenon, known as face pareidolia, is when we perceive faces in inanimate objects. Recent research published in the journal Emotion reveals that our brains process…
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino) Internet service providers are eager to get money from a $42.45 billion government fund, but are trying to convince the Biden administration to drop demands that Internet service providers offer broadband service for…
Enlarge / A bad update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software crashed millions of Windows PCs last week. (credit: CrowdStrike) CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz said Thursday that 97 percent of all Windows systems running its Falcon sensor software were back online,…
Enlarge / A jet of particles moving at nearly light-speed emerges from a massive star in this artist’s concept of the BOAT. (credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab) Scientists have been all aflutter since several space-based detectors…
Enlarge / An AI-generated image released by xAI during the open-weights launch of Grok-1. (credit: xAI) Elon Musk-led social media platform X is training Grok, its AI chatbot, on users’ data, and that’s opt-out, not opt-in. If you’re an X…
Physically, athletes might reach a point where they can no longer beat sports records — however, innovative techniques and sportswear breakthroughs could potentially help athletes perform better in the future.
As opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. rose dramatically from 2014 to today, both Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, cemented reputations as hotspots of the crisis. In Philadelphia, over 1,170 people died of opioid overdoses in 2022, the last…
Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images) On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony, Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty…
Enlarge / A digital advertisement board displaying a Barbie movie poster is seen in New York on July 24, 2023. (credit: Getty | Selcuk Acar) This post contains spoilers—for the movie and women’s health care. There’s nothing like stirrups and…
Enlarge / The environment you’re eating in can influence what you taste, and space is no exception. (credit: NASA) Astronauts on the ISS tend to favor spicy foods and top other foods with things like tabasco or shrimp cocktail sauce…
Three fossilized snakes that died huddled together 38 million years ago are now called the “winter serpents.”
Doctors are pulling out new techniques and drugs in an effort to cure devastating brain infections.
A now-retired doctor in Texas describes his experience treating a child with a brain-eating amoeba infection.
In the U.S., tap water is generally safe and not a likely source of brain-eating-amoeba infections, experts told Live Science.
Many deadly infections are transmitted via water, including cholera, typhoid and brain-eating amoebas.
Researchers think climate change will soon cause an increase in the incidence of Naegleria fowleri infections, a “brain-eating” disease.
Firefighters are battling a ‘monster’ wildfire in the evacuated town of Jasper and Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada.
A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found that physical activity, combined with healthy lifestyle habits and proper dietary nutrition, is associated with reduced anxiety levels in college students. Anxiety disorders are a common mental health issue among…
By turning period blood into a gel, the pad’s alginate powder filler reduces leakage.
Instead of a gold medal, victors at the ancient Greek Panathenaic Games received terra-cotta pots filled with Athenian olive oil from sacred trees.
When it comes to dating, everyone wants to put their best foot forward. But what if you had to disclose something less flattering? In a study published in Telematics and Informatics, researchers recently investigated this tricky question, exploring how people…
The discovery of 22,000 previously unseen moonquakes, plus a new idea of what causes them, could help us better prepare for trips there.
Humans used the now-destroyed rockshelter throughout the last ice age until just a few decades ago.
Lake Kivu, one of the African Great Lakes, sits along a tectonic plate boundary called the East African Rift, which is dotted with hot springs that feed carbon dioxide and methane into the water.
A recent study has explored the intriguing relationship between dark humor, online trolling, and certain dark personality traits. The findings reveal that individuals who enjoy dark humor often possess traits such as sadism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Furthermore, these traits are…
Enlarge / NASA’s SLS rocket core stage for Artemis II is moved to the VAB. (credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky) Welcome to Edition 7.04 of the Rocket Report! Probably the most striking news this week came from ABL, which said in a…
A new standard for codecs used for haptics could revolutionize tele-health and online gaming.
Olympic-level sporting takes a lot of energy. But which event is the most energetically costly?
New research suggests that prenatal exposure to different levels of testosterone and estrogen, as estimated through 2D:4D finger length ratios, is linked to narcissistic traits in adulthood. The study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, highlights a potential…
Researchers found the 2023 Morocco earthquake was triggered by movement miles below Earth’s surface.
The NASA Mars rover examined a rock containing organic compounds and “leopard spots” that, on Earth, are associated with microbial life.
Enlarge (credit: NASA/Isaac Watson) The central piece of NASA’s second Space Launch System rocket arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. Agency officials intend to start stacking the towering launcher in the next couple of months for a…
Enlarge / An illustration provided by Google. (credit: Google) On Thursday, Google DeepMind announced that AI systems called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 reportedly solved four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving a score equivalent…
Recent research has drawn a link between anxiety, depression and an increased risk of deep vein thrombosis.
A recent study published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE explores how personality traits influence the sharing of false political information on social media. The research reveals that positive schizotypy — a set of traits including paranoia, suspicion, and disrupted…
Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / OpenAI) Arguably, few companies have unintentionally contributed more to the increase of AI-generated noise online than OpenAI. Despite its best intentions—and against its terms of service—its AI language models are often used to compose spam,…
Enlarge / Rembrandt’s The Night Watch underwent many chemical and mechanical alterations over the last 400 years. (credit: Public domain) Since 2019, researchers have been analyzing the chemical composition of the materials used to create Rembrandt’s masterpiece, The Night Watch, as…
Enlarge (credit: Vithun Khamsong) With the plunging price of photovoltaics, the construction of solar plants has boomed in the US. Last year, for example, the US’s Energy Information Agency expected that over half of the new generating capacity would be…
Enlarge / I don’t know how Sonos’ app might have developed during the groovy era their marketing images aim to summon, but it feels like it might not have wanted to rush head-long into disappointing users quite so quickly. (credit:…
The Lego Mario & Yoshi set is an homage to 1990’s Super Mario World. [credit: The Lego Group ] Nintendo and Lego are at it again—they’re announcing another collaboration today as a follow-up to the interactive Mario sets, the replica…
(credit: Chrome) Google is redesigning Chrome malware detections to include password-protected executable files that users can upload for deep scanning, a change the browser maker says will allow it to detect more malicious threats. Google has long allowed users to…
When talking, we commonly use our hands to stress, re-enact, or signal breaks or new information. But is it true that some cultures gesture more than others? A team of researchers has set out to learn if the stereotype that…
Enlarge / NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered “leopard spots” on a reddish rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” in Mars’ Jezero Crater in July 2024. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) NASA’s Perseverance rover has found a very intriguing rock on the surface of Mars. An arrowhead-shaped…
A new simulation shows that an El Niño-like climate pattern begins near New Zealand and Australia, and can trigger temperature changes across the Southern Hemisphere.
Produced by Michael Toriello and Billy Keenly. During our second Ars Live event earlier this month, screenwriter/producer Ed Solomon (Bill & Ted franchise) joined physicists Sean Carroll (Johns Hopkins University) and Jim Kakalios (University of Minnesota) and Ars Senior Reporter…
Enlarge / The VW ID.4 has a new drive motor and infotainment system for model-year 2024. It’s not the sportiest EV you can buy, but it remains one of our favorites to drive. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) Volkswagen didn’t wait the…
Enlarge (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates) In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware…
