Technology

OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT and a leading innovator in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), was recently thrown into turmoil when its chief-executive and figurehead, Sam Altman, was fired. As it was revealed that he would be joining Microsoft’s advanced AI research team, more than 730 OpenAI employees threatened to quit. Finally, it was announced […]

husjur02/Shutterstock PFAS chemicals (per-and poly fluoroalkyl substances), also known as forever chemicals, are rarely out of the news at the moment. The latest concern about this chemical group is their presence in drinking water in England. The Royal Society of Chemistry found that the UK’s drinking water standard is not stringent enough to protect us […]

Pablo Carlos Budassi/wikipedia, CC BY-SA One of the biggest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. This can be predicted using the standard model of cosmology, also known as Lambda-cold dark matter (ΛCDM). This model is based on detailed observations of the light left over from the Big Bang – […]

What the Israeli hostages have had to go through is unimaginable. The trauma of that unexpected, barbaric attack by Hamas, the murder of loved ones, then being violently abducted and dragged down into tunnels deep underground in Gaza. We live in a society where we often talk about trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but […]

In March 2020, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, presented to the nation a graph showing “the shape of an epidemic”. The red line depicting the number of predicted COVID cases rose to a steep peak before falling again. Vallance explained that delaying and reducing the height of that peak was essential to […]

Visualising wealth and poverty through AI. Authors, CC BY-SA To most effectively deliver aid to alleviate poverty, you have to know where the people most in need are. In many countries, this is often done with household surveys. But these are usually infrequent and cover limited locations. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have created […]

Smit/Shutterstock Honeybees in man-made hives may have been suffering the cold unnecessarily for over a century because commercial hive designs are based on erroneous science, my new research shows. For 119 years, a belief that the way honeybees cluster together gives them a kind of evolutionary insulation has been fundamental for beekeeping practice, hive design […]

SciePro / Shutterstock Alan Turing might be best know for his work helping to crack Germany’s “Enigma” communications code during the second world war. But he also came up with a theory where patterns can form just through chemical compounds spreading out (diffusing) and reacting with one another. This became known as reaction-diffusion theory for […]

As part of the “Women Against Feminism” campaign that launched in 2014, social media posts have featured young women holding placards with the message “I don’t need feminism because…” listing various reasons ranging from “I respect men” to “I am not a MAN-HATER”. This perception of misandry – a hatred of men – is perhaps […]

UK chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, with his 2023 Autumn Statement. Simon Walker/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND The UK chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, as announced a raft of changes to the tax and benefit system as part of the government’s autumn statement. They included: main employee rate of national insurance cut from 12% to 10% from January […]

The padlock icon which appears in most internet browser address bars. Robert Avgustin/Shutterstock Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance. This is a threat to […]

yhelfman / Shutterstock The unofficial motto of Silicon Valley has long been “move fast and break things”. It relies on the assumption that in order to create cutting edge technology and to be ahead of the competition, companies need to accept that things will get damaged in the process. However, this approach can have implications […]