What did the snowball Earth look like?

By now, it has been firmly established that the Earth went through a series of global glaciations around 600 million to 700 million years ago, shortly before complex animal life exploded in the Cambrian. Climate models have confirmed that, once…

Solar maximum news, features and articles

Solar maximum is the most active phase of the sun’s roughly 11-year solar cycle, which occurs when our home star’s magnetic field weakens and eventually flips completely. During this explosive peak, dark sunspots cover the solar surface and spit out…

CBD shows promise in managing fever and inflammation

A recent study published in Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry suggests that cannabidiol (commonly known as CBD) may have a significant effect in reducing fever. The researchers found that CBD effectively lowered fever in mice by altering certain biological…

Seeking favor with Musk and Trump, advertisers plot return to X

Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump is set to boost X’s flagging business, with some marketers poised for a return to the social media platform in order to seek favor with the incoming administration. Media executives told the Financial Times…

Revisting the Stanford Prison Experiment 50 years later

In 1971, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a notorious experiment in which he randomly divided college students into two groups, guards and prisoners, and set them loose in a simulated prison environment for six days, documenting the guards’ descent…

Research suggests people are getting more bored

A perspective piece published in Communications Psychology by Katy Y.Y. Tam and Michael Inzlicht suggests that digital media use may actually contribute to higher levels of boredom. Despite the growing accessibility of entertainment, people are reporting more frequent experiences of…

New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike

On Friday, research organization Epoch AI released FrontierMath, a new mathematics benchmark that has been turning heads in the AI world because it contains hundreds of expert-level problems that leading AI models solve less than 2 percent of the time,…

This elephant figured out how to use a hose to shower

Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology Mary the elephant shows off her hose-showering skills. Credit: Urban et al./Current Biology An Asian elephant named Mary living at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers by figuring…

What if AI doesn’t just keep getting better forever?

For years now, many AI industry watchers have looked at the quickly growing capabilities of new AI models and mused about exponential performance increases continuing well into the future. Recently, though, some of that AI “scaling law” optimism has been…