Fourteen years after receiving the official go-ahead, scientists on Tuesday began assembling a giant machine in southern France designed to demonstrate that nuclear fusion, the process which powers the Sun, can be a safe and viable energy source on Earth.   The groundbreaking multinational experiment, known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), has seen components arrive

We have developed four-winged bird-like robots, called ornithopters, that can take off and fly with the agility of swifts, hummingbirds and insects. We did this by reverse engineering the aerodynamics and biomechanics of these creatures.   Our ornithopters have the potential to outperform and outmanoeuvre existing drone configurations with static wings or propellers. What are

US officials and scientists have begun laying the groundwork for a more secure “virtually unhackable” internet based on quantum computing technology. At a presentation Thursday, Department of Energy (DOE) officials issued a report that lays out a blueprint strategy for the development of a national quantum internet, using laws of quantum mechanics to transmit information

If doomsday comes, know this: precautions have been taken. On an isolated Arctic archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – aka Norway’s ‘Doomsday Vault’ – holds over 1 million seed samples in a fortress-like bunker designed to be the most invulnerable seed bank in the world.   Svalbard protects more than just seeds, though. On

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram started out as a way to connect with friends, family and people of interest. But anyone on social media these days knows it’s increasingly a divisive landscape.   Undoubtedly you’ve heard reports that hackers and even foreign governments are using social media to manipulate and attack you.

While artificial intelligence systems continue to make huge strides forward, they’re still not particularly good at dealing with chaos or unpredictability. Now researchers think they have found a way to fix this, by teaching AI about physics.   To be more specific, teaching them about the Hamiltonian function, which gives the AI information about the

By making use of the ‘spooky’ laws behind quantum entanglement, physicists think have found a way to make information leap between a pair of electrons separated by distance. Teleporting fundamental states between photons – massless particles of light – is quickly becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications

The list of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world just got updated again, and there’s a new number one: the Fugaku supercomputer built by the RIKEN Institute and the Fujitsu tech company in Japan.   IBM’s Summit supercomputer has been comprehensively pushed into second place, because Fugaku can crunch through 415.5 quadrillion computations per second

Stripped of any fancy circuitry and complex layers of higher order thinking, the nervous system is little more than a calculator for making smart choices. Food is good, but what if it’s toxic? Empty calories won’t give you energy, but what if they’re satisfying?   To better study how a rudimentary brain deals with decisions

For the first time, US doctors can prescribe a video game. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved EndeavorRX as an effective treatment for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.   Children aged 8-12 years old can now be prescribed gaming sessions on EndeavorRX, in which players pilot a small aircraft

Artificial intelligence networks have learnt a new trick: being able to create photo-realistic faces from just a few pixelated dots, adding in features such as eyelashes and wrinkles that can’t even be found in the original.   Before you freak out, it’s good to note this is not some kind of creepy reverse pixelation that

Synthetic gas, or syngas for short, is a crucial building block in the chemical manufacturing industry. Most people may never have heard of syngas, but every day it is used in the production of drugs, fertiliser, plastic, and biofuels.   Unfortunately, even when syngas – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – is fermented to

So much of our everyday tech runs on batteries, the importance of lithium-ion rechargeables cannot be overstated. But they are expensive to produce, with difficult-to-source materials.   There is an alternative – sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be cheaper and more easily produced, if we can get past the problem of getting these batteries to

This summer, the clean energy company SINN Power is showcasing “the world’s first floating ocean hybrid platform” – a high-tech buoy that produces electricity from not one, not two, but three sources of renewable energy.    Using waves, wind, and the sun, the SINN Power floating structure, which can supposedly withstand waves up to six

A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a “solid state laser” in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday. The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the

Our neurons talk in melodies; understanding their rhythms has proved key to creating a new device that could join their conversations. Just as glasses can aid our struggling eyes, the hope is that artificial brain matter could one day aid our brain bits that aren’t working as well as they could be.   An international

A tiny device called a micro-comb could one day replace existing internet infrastructure to hit crazy new highs in download speeds, providing millions with ample data at the same time, even during the busiest periods.   The lightweight technology has recently been put to the test in a field trial that measured data rates of

Here’s something you might not have expected to see Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot doing any time soon: herding sheep on a rugged New Zealand mountainside. The slightly bizarre sequence is part of a promotional video demonstrating Spot’s potential in the agricultural industry; it also includes footage of Spot checking on crops and clambering over

Cell phone towers across New Zealand are being set on fire and authorities believe the attacks are linked to the increasing proliferation of conspiracy theories connecting 5G networks to the coronavirus pandemic.   As of May 18, 17 cell towers had been attacked in Auckland, Wellington, and Northland, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in

The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic have claimed an unlikely victim: the machine learning systems that are programmed to make sense of our online behavior.   The algorithms that recommend products on Amazon, for instance, are struggling to interpret our new lifestyles, MIT Technology Review reports. And while machine learning tools are built

Scientists have developed a new type of self-assembling silver membrane that could be used to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions before they have a chance to spread in the atmosphere.   Using a technique the team says has never been attempted before, the researchers seeded their gas separation membrane with only a tiny deposit of

Scientists are very keen to find effective ways of getting hydrogen from water, thus unlocking hydrogen’s potential as a clean fuel. A newly developed device manages the feat, using only sunlight as a power source.   Using catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells fused together in a single unit, the clever contraption can hit sunlight-to-hydrogen

Wireless charging is already a thing (in smartphones, for example), but scientists are working on the next level of this technology that could deliver power over greater distances and to moving objects, such as cars.   Imagine cruising down the road while your electric vehicle gets charged, or having a robot that doesn’t lose battery

The US military’s X-37B space plane is heading back into space in mid-May, and while the Air Force doesn’t often say much about the mysterious aircraft, the service’s top civilian outlined what it will be doing this time around.   “The Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office has combined forces with the Air Force Reserve Research

A type of rocket engine once thought impossible has just been fired up in the lab. Engineers have built and successfully tested what is known as a rotating detonation engine, which generates thrust via a self-sustaining wave of detonations that travel around a circular channel.   As this engine requires far less fuel than the

A prototype jet engine can propel itself without using any fossil fuels, potentially paving the way for carbon-neutral air travel. The device compresses air and ionizes it with microwaves, generating plasma that thrusts it forward, according to research published Tuesday in the journal AIP Advances. That means planes may someday fly using just electricity and

You may not think of plants as needing life-saving medicine, but that’s sometimes the case when bugs and disease strike. Now, scientists have developed a super-accurate, highly delicate way of delivering drugs, and right where plants need them.   At the moment, plants can be sprayed with pesticides, which doesn’t really penetrate to the roots,

NASA engineers have designed a mass-producible ventilator tailored to coronavirus patients, and it could get emergency approval from the Food and Drug Administration by the weekend.   A team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, designed and built the ventilator in just 37 days. The device, called VITAL as an acronym

Whether you use Zoom, Skype or Microsoft Teams, the webcam on your home PC or laptop device has probably never been as active as it is during this pandemic. Most of us have a camera built into our phone, tablet, laptop, or a desktop webcam we use for work, study or virtual socialising.   Unfortunately,

Today, the world is grappling with more than just the climate crisis, and yet even now, in the face of a global pandemic, scientists are marching on with renewable solutions. Just this month, no less than three records have been broken in solar panel efficiency. The first and the second were achieved by scientists in

Much of the work undertaken by artificial intelligence involves a training process known as machine learning, where AI gets better at a task such as recognising a cat or mapping a route the more it does it. Now that same technique is being use to create new AI systems, without any human intervention.   For

As quantum computers continue to grow in size and complexity, engineers are hitting a major obstacle. All of that added machinery means higher temperatures – and if anything can ruin a perfectly good quantum bit, it’s heat.   There are a few possible solutions, but any fix needs to be small and compatible with existing

You may have heard of Folding @ home, the number-crunching app you can run on your computer to help researchers tackle certain medical problems, including the new coronavirus. In the past month, the network of volunteers who’ve installed it has become so vast, the platform is outperforming the most powerful supercomputers in the world.  

They found it buried in the muddy shores of the Potomac River more than three decades ago: a strange “sediment organism” that could do things nobody had ever seen before in bacteria.   This unusual microbe, belonging to the Geobacter genus, was first noted for its ability to produce magnetite in the absence of oxygen, but with

Physics experts are working at Europe’s CERN lab to create a basic ventilator for mild coronavirus sufferers and recovering patients, the facility said on Wednesday. The Swiss-based lab says a model that could run on batteries should be ready for testing in hospitals within weeks and could eventually free up heavy-duty machines for use on

Researchers working for industrial development company Carbios have created a mutant bacterial enzyme that can break down plastic bottles for recycling in only a couple of hours, according to The Guardian.   The enyzme can break down PET plastic bottles into their individual chemical composites, which could later be reused to make brand new bottles. Conventional

A conspiracy theory claiming 5G can spread the coronavirus is making the rounds on social media. The myth supposedly gained traction when a Belgian doctor linked the “dangers” of 5G technology to the virus during an interview in January.   Closer to home, Facebook group Stop5G Australia (with more than 31,700 members) has various posts

“Zoombombing” in case you haven’t heard, is the unsavoury practice of posting distressing comments, pictures or videos after gatecrashing virtual meetings hosted by the videoconferencing app Zoom.   With hundreds of millions around the world now reliant on the app for work, this unfortunate trend is becoming more common, often involving a bombardment of pornographic

Scientists have developed a prototype system that could hypothetically see data transfer rates hit 10 terabits per second – or many thousands of times faster than your average broadband speed, in other words.   This radical jump could be made possible by switching to an extremely high frequency for the data transfer, allowing for more

With #StayAtHome and social distancing now becoming a way of life, an increasing number of people are relying on the internet for work, education and entertainment. This has placed greater demand on our network infrastructure, reducing the bandwidth available for each user, and is leaving people frustrated at seemingly slow internet speeds.   While internet

Recently Facebook, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube committed to removing coronavirus-related misinformation from their platforms. COVID-19 is being described as the first major pandemic of the social media age. In troubling times, social media helps distribute vital knowledge to the masses. Unfortunately, this comes with myriad misinformation, much of which is spread through

The world is only just getting used to the power and sophistication of virtual assistants made by companies like Amazon and Google, which can decode our spoken speech with eerie precision compared to what the technology was capable of only a few short years ago.   In truth, however, a far more impressive and mind-boggling

With the right mechanical contraption attached, human running speeds could rival those of cyclists, according to new research – getting runners up to 20.9 metres per second, or more than 46 miles per hour.   It’s worth noting that these are theoretical calculations for now, and the team responsible is hoping to have their prototype

Electric cars absolutely do produce less CO2 than gas guzzlers, a new study has confirmed – countering claims that carbon emissions from the manufacture of electric cars and the production of electricity outweighed the savings on the road.   Crunching the numbers on data collected from 59 different regions in the world that represent 95

The zero-emissions option of hydrogen fuel holds a lot of promise for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels – if only we could find a way to produce it cheaply and without needing insane amounts of energy input. Now, scientists have found a way to efficiently produce hydrogen fuel by using rust and a light

We may not be as lucky as birds, but the human eye does pretty well when it comes to colour perception; typically, we can distinguish around 1 million colours. A new type of contact lens could now restore some of that range in people with colour blindness, whose colour perception is limited in some parts of

Recent reports from scientists pursuing a new kind of nuclear fusion technology are encouraging, but we are still some distance away from the “holy grail of clean energy”. The technology developed by Heinrich Hora and his colleagues at the University of NSW uses powerful lasers to fuse together hydrogen and boron atoms, releasing high-energy particles

The effect that fossil fuels are having on the climate emergency is driving an international push to use low-carbon sources of energy. At the moment, the best options for producing low-carbon energy on a large scale are wind and solar power.   But despite improvements over the last few years to both their performance and