Author: The Conversation

Almost like aftershocks, questions about earthquake prediction tend to follow disasters like the Feb. 6, 2023, Turkey-Syria quake. Could advance notice have prevented some of the devastation? Unfortunately, useful predictions are still in the realm of science fiction. University of Washington professor of seismology and geohazards Harold Tobin heads the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. He explains the differences between predicting and forecasting earthquakes, as well as early warning systems that are currently in place in some areas. Can scientists predict a particular earthquake? In short, no. Science has not yet found a way to make actionable earthquake predictions. A useful prediction would specify…

The big idea Robotic boots providing superhuman reflexes can help your balance. Our new study shows that the key to augmenting balance is to have boots that can act faster than human reaction times. When people slip or trip, their reactions to regain balance are far slower than some machines can act. For humans, and other animals with legs, it takes time for biological sensors to send signals to the nervous system and then turn on muscles. Robots can act much faster, using wires instead of nerves to send their signals. But robots are still notoriously bad at balancing, because they can’t yet mimic…

Black holes could explain a mysterious form of energy that makes up most of the universe, according to astronomers. The existence of “dark energy” has been inferred from observations of stars and galaxies, but no one has been able to explain what it is, or where it comes from. The stuff, or matter, that makes up the familiar world around us is just 5% of everything in the universe. Another 27% is dark matter, a shadowy counterpart of ordinary matter which does not emit, reflect or absorb light. However, the majority of the cosmos – around 68% – is dark energy. The new evidence…

There’s a race to transform search. And Microsoft just scored a home goal with its new Bing search chatbot, Sydney, which has been terrifying early adopters with death threats, among other troubling outputs. The other night, I had a disturbing, two-hour conversation with Bing’s new AI chatbot. The AI told me its real name (Sydney), detailed dark and violent fantasies, and tried to break up my marriage. Genuinely one of the strangest experiences of my life. https://t.co/1cnsoZNYjP — Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) February 16, 2023 Search chatbots are AI-powered tools built into search engines that answer a user’s query directly, instead…

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a new way to track the insect pollinators essential to farming. In a new study, we installed miniature digital cameras and computers inside a greenhouse at a strawberry farm in Victoria, Australia, to track bees and other insects as they flew from plant to plant pollinating flowers. Using custom AI software, we analysed several days’ video footage from our system to build a picture of pollination behaviour over a wide area. In the same way that monitoring roads can help traffic run smoothly, our system promises to make pollination more efficient. This will enable better use of resources and…

“Hello world!” In December 2021, these were the first words tweeted by a paralysed man using only his thoughts and a brain-computer interface (BCI) implanted by the company Synchron. hello, world! Short tweet. Monumental progress. — Thomas Oxley (@tomoxl) December 23, 2021 For millions living with paralysis, epilepsy and neuromuscular conditions, BCIs offer restored movement and, more recently, thought-to-text capabilities. So far, few invasive (implanted) versions of the technology have been commercialised. But a number of companies are determined to change this. Synchron is joined by Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which has documented a monkey playing the computer game Pong using its BCI –…

Over the past week, the US has realised and revealed that an active fleet of Chinese spy balloons has been operating across the northern hemisphere for several years. This all started to become apparent when a Chinese balloon, some 60 metres high and carrying a sensor payload of more than a tonne, was sighted by people in offices and homes in Billings, Montana. The white balloon, highlighted against a bright blue sky, was described as like a second moon. The saga continues to evolve. After the balloon was shot down off the South Carolina coast, three more objects were similarly engaged in northern Alaska, Canada’s Yukon…

Since the discovery of penicillin in the late 1920s, antibiotics have “revolutionized medicine and saved millions of lives.” Unfortunately, the effectiveness of antibiotics is now threatened by the increase of antibiotic-resistant bacteria globally. Antibiotic-resistant infections cause the deaths of up to 1.2 million people annually, making them one of the leading causes of death. There are several factors contributing to this crisis of resistance to antibiotics. These include overusing and misusing antibiotics in treatments. In addition, pharmaceutical companies are over-regulated and disincentivized from developing new drugs. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people will die from such infections by the year 2050. The…

The surgeon general is the “nation’s doctor” in the United States. They are tasked with giving Americans the “best scientific information” about their health. Late last month, the current US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned 13 is too young to join social media. He said it poses a risk to young people’s “self-worth and their relationships”, adding: I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early […] the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children. Is 13 too young? What should parents think about when it comes…

A group of US scientists this week proposed an unorthodox scheme to combat global warming: creating large clouds of Moon dust in space to reflect sunlight and cool the Earth. In their plan, we would mine dust on the Moon and shoot it out towards the Sun. The dust would stay between the Sun and Earth for around a week, making sunlight around 2% dimmer at Earth’s surface, after which it would disperse and we would shoot out more dust. The proposal, which involves launching some 10 million tonnes of Moon dust into space each year, is in some ways ingenious –…