Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers, turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 2600 km² in size.

Magic: The Gathering, the card game where you build your own deck from over 19,000 unique cards and then battle this deck against other people, is not what you would call simple.   But a pre-print paper first published in March turns this already complex game up a notch, showing that a specific set of

The data from all those Instagram pictures you’re posting needs to be stored somewhere, and the increasing amount of digital information we’re all producing means we also need an increasing amount of energy just to store it all.   Now scientists have come up with a working example of what’s known as universal memory, a

When it comes to supersonic aircraft, engineers aren’t afraid to go with a weird design if it will get them a faster plane. In the latest instalment of such feats, NASA’s X-59 QueSST has taken the shape of a pencil with wings.   The aircraft’s shape brings with it some interesting questions. For example, if the

It’s official, Facebook’s making its own currency. The social network on Tuesday unveiled Libra, the secretive cryptocurrency it’s been working on for more than a year. The currency is being backed by investment from big payment companies like Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal, as well as tech giants including Uber and Spotify.   Facebook has high

The reminder to not believe everything we see has never been more relevant than now. In the latest video manipulation advance, researchers have worked out how to turn written text into a realistic video of someone saying those very words.   We’ve seen this sort of deepfake trickery before, where clips of famous people are

Earth’s temperatures are on track to blow past the objectives set in the Paris climate agreement. Last year was the fourth warmest on record for surface temperatures and the hottest ever for oceans.   A recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that nations around the globe must implement

Smartphone addiction does not seem like a questionable thing to believe in. It exists. Surely it does, doesn’t it? After all, there’s a Wikipedia page on it. The New York Times writes about it. There are even claims it’s killing us, that smartphones are destroying an entire generation.   But while nobody is saying we should be

Scientists have demonstrated a lightweight type of foam made of hollow metallic spheres that can withstand the incredible impact of .50 calibre rounds: the kinds of bullets fired by heavy machine guns and sniper rifles.   While weighing only about half as much as conventional steel armour, this engineered material – called composite metal foam

Electric car motors, iPhones, military jet engines, batteries, and satellites all have something in common: They require rare-earth elements to function. Rare-earth elements are a group of 17 metals that – as their name suggests – form under the Earth’s surface and are difficult to find and extract.   But they are crucial to the

The Dutch airline KLM is funding the development of a V-shaped aeroplane designed to seat passengers in its wings to make it more fuel-efficient, the company announced Monday. Its futuristic shape will make the “Flying V” lighter and more aerodynamic, KLM said. Its designers say it will need 20 percent less fuel than an Airbus

Solar panels are fantastic pieces of technology, but we need to work out how to make them even more efficient – and scientists just solved a 40-year-old mystery around one of the key obstacles to increased efficiency.   A new study outlines a material defect in silicon used to produce solar cells that has previously

Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate. But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.

A new artificial intelligence created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulls off a staggering feat: by analyzing only a short audio clip of a person’s voice, it reconstructs what they might look like in real life.   The AI’s results aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good – a remarkable and somewhat terrifying

You wouldn’t ordinarily want to seek out a computer with viruses installed, but that’s exactly what the winner of a US$1.345 million auction just did – picking up a laptop crammed with the deadliest malware of our time in return for their cash.   The buyer remains anonymous but we know much more about the

A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company’s smart speaker systems. This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence.   Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant system that runs on the company’s Echo

An Australian teenager and self-proclaimed Apple fanboy – who can’t be identified for legal reasons – has been found guilty of hacking into Apple’s systems in 2015 and 2017. The 17-year-old teen from Adelaide in South Australia, along with another teenager, hacked into the tech giant’s mainframe for the first time when he was 13

Our deepfake problem is about to get worse: Samsung engineers have now developed realistic talking heads that can be generated from a single image, so AI can even put words in the mouth of the Mona Lisa.   The new algorithms, developed by a team from the Samsung AI Center and the Skolkovo Institute of

Scientists have developed a new way of achieving artificial photosynthesis, producing high-energy hydrocarbons by leveraging electron-rich gold nanoparticles as a catalyst. In photosynthesis, plants convert energy from sunlight into glucose by rearranging molecules of water and carbon dioxide. The new process mimics this natural ability via chemical manipulations that create liquid fuel, without requiring chlorophyll.

The city of Baltimore is under attack, but not by someone armed with guns or bombs. Two weeks ago, cybercriminals used ransomware known as RobinHood to seize control of about 10,000 of the city’s computers, saying they won’t relinquish access unless Baltimore hands over about US$100,000 worth of bitcoin.   Baltimore is refusing the meet

Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years.   Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the

Most people are familiar with optical lasers through their experience with laser pointers. But what about a laser made from sound waves? What makes optical laser light different from a light bulb or the sun is that all the light waves emerging from it are moving in the same direction and are pretty much in

Millions of cryptocurrency investors have been scammed out of massive sums of real money. In 2018, losses from cryptocurrency-related crimes amounted to US$1.7 billion. The criminals use both old-fashioned and new-technology tactics to swindle their marks in schemes based on digital currencies exchanged through online databases called blockchains.   From researching blockchain, cryptocurrency and cybercrime,

Scientists have reworked the DNA of Escherichia coli to help us understand apparent redundancies in its genetic code. At four million base pairs in size, they now have the results of the most ambitious attempt at a completely synthetic form of life.   For all its immense variation, life on Earth all shares a common language in

Global messaging app WhatsApp, which boasts over 1 billion users, was targeted by hackers last month in a breach that saw mobile devices attacked through the voice-calling functionality of the app.   The security flaw potentially gave hackers access to private messages, location data and other personal user information. While WhatsApp hasn’t specifically stated who or how

San Francisco on Tuesday became the first city in the United States to ban the use of facial-recognition software by city agencies and the police, dealing a swift symbolic blow to a key technology rapidly being deployed by law enforcement nationwide.   The 8-to-1 vote by the city’s Board of Supervisors will forbid public agencies

A new ‘biological glue’ developed by Chinese researchers could one day stop hearts and arteries from uncontrollably bleeding. Placed on an open wound and activated through UV light, this life-saving sealant rapidly morphs into a non-toxic hydrogel, capable of withstanding both slippery surfaces and the pulsing of heart tissue.   The adhesive sealant hasn’t been

Scientists have measured the accuracy of two-qubit operations for the first time in silicon, bringing the world a big step closer to reliable quantum computing. The great promise of quantum computers is that they will enable a vastly more powerful and faster way of making calculations than the computing power we’ve had until now.  

Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second.   Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers

It’s been 33 years since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant tragically blew apart in a meltdown, spreading nuclear fallout across the land. A lot has changed, but the surroundings still contain some of the most radioactive patches of soil on the planet.   Last month, researchers from the University of Bristol mapped that radioactivity in

In a perfect world, plastic would never be on a one-way trip into landfill – it’s a vision we’ve strived to realise for decades. Unfortunately, some plastics just don’t recycle as easily as others, limiting how well we can reuse them in new products. But a new kind of plastic might help change all that.

A perplexing riddle affecting dozens of families in the Cleveland area has finally been solved, but not before weeks of wreaking havoc on people who – bizarre as it sounds – were unable to open their car and garage doors.   In late April, residents of the town of North Olmsted, Ohio began finding that

A man in Taiwan found that his AirPod was still functional after he had accidentally swallowed it, according to a report from the Daily Mail. Ben Hsu reportedly fell asleep while wearing Apple’s wireless earbuds and found that he was missing one headphone when he woke up.   He then used Apple’s tracking feature to

Personal gadgets known as “hearables,” which communicate with the neural signals passing through our ears in order to monitor and interact with our brains, are on their way.   Hearables could help us focus on specific conversations, like smart hearing aids, or monitor our brain activity to treat tinnitus. That’s according to Poppy Crum, the Stanford University neuroscientist and chief

Armed with CRISPR gene-editing technology, scientists are trying to move away from performing experiments on common model organisms, like fruit flies and zebrafish, which have long defined biological research – by crafting new ones at the genetic level.   But scientists who are gene hacking new animals for their research are running into logistical problems,

The widespread adoption of pasteurisation and refrigeration means we’re now used to a shelf life of two to three weeks for milk, but scientists working at Australian company Naturo just announced they’ve extended that to more than 60 days.   Allegedly, Naturo’s technique doesn’t involve the heat treatment that comes with pasteurisation, and apparently “retains

Mark Zuckerberg has a new mantra: “The future is private”. It’s an extraordinary statement, given the messenger. Facebook has been mired in one privacy scandal or another almost its entire life, and the past two years have been a nonstop rollercoaster of red-hot crises.   But the 34-year-old billionaire is leaning hard into a so-called

All the way back in 1999, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science was celebrating its 35th year of research, it gave itself an unusual birthday present: a large lead container, shaped like a paper bag, sculpted by legendary architect Frank Gehry.   It was sealed away behind a cryptographic puzzle, specifically

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted at what could be the announcement of a brain-machine interface that could one day hook human brains up to computers on Sunday. In response to a question asking for an update on Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup he founded in 2016, Musk replied that new information would be “coming soon”.   A “direct cortical interface,” according

The spoken word is a powerful tool, but not all of us have the ability to use it, either due to biology or circumstances. In such cases, technology can bridge the gap – and now that gap is looking shorter than ever, with a new algorithm that turns messages meant for your muscles into legible

Even if death metal isn’t a perfect fit for you as far as music genres go, you have to admire the AI smarts behind Relentless Doppelganger – a non-stop, 24/7 YouTube livestream churning out heavy death metal generated completely by algorithms.   And this is by no means a one-off trick by Dadabots, the neural

We know that self-driving cars are promising to make the roads safer and give us more time to relax, but the energy-saving and pollution-cutting benefits are also important. Now a new study suggests those benefits might not be as big as we thought.   The problem, according to researchers from the University of Michigan, is

The line between human-made materials and living organisms just got more blurred. Researchers have created a new biomaterial that isn’t alive, but which exhibits three key traits for life: metabolism, self-assembly, and organisation.   The new material can crawl forward like a slime mould, growing new strands from the front as the old ones at

After years of chastising us for failing to safely eject USB drives from computers, Microsoft has done the unthinkable: finally acknowledging it’s okay to yank that sucker out and live your best life.   Ever since USB drives became a thing, the Windows maker has warned and admonished computer users for not safely removing external

The world watched in horror Monday night while flames tore through the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. As fire consumed the roof and toppled its iconic central spire, it seemed as though the historic church could be lost forever – but it’s possible, thanks to cutting-edge imagining technology, that all hope may not be lost.

The dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics are back with another video, albeit this time the video is less focused on virality and more a demonstration of raw power. Behold, 10 robot dogs pulling a large truck: (Boston Dynamics/YouTube) Pretty intense, no?   Don’t get too worried – these little guys aren’t coming to pull your

Scientists have developed a first-of-its-kind device that generates electricity from nothing other than the natural phenomenon of snowfall. Based upon the principles of the triboelectric effect, in which electrical charge is generated after two materials come into contact with one another, the researchers’ new technology exploits the fact that snow particles carry a positive electrical

In what the Israeli media is calling a “world’s first,” scientists at Tel Aviv University have 3D printed a small heart using human tissue that includes vessels, collagen, and biological molecules – a breakthrough, according to Haaretz, that they hope could one day render organ donation obsolete.   The technology is still many years out