Technology

By Matthew Hutson How many parks are near the new home you’re thinking of buying? What’s the best dinner-wine pairing at a restaurant? These everyday questions require relational reasoning, an important component of higher thought that has been difficult for artificial intelligence (AI) to master. Now, researchers at Google’s DeepMind have developed a simple algorithm …

By Elizabeth Gibney For half a century, astronomers and physicists have looked at pulsars and asked ‘how’? How can something the size of a city pack in more mass than the Sun? How does matter arrange itself to achieve such mind-boggling densities? Answering these questions in the laboratory is impossible. But a space mission due to …

By Matt Reynolds Countries around the world are still dealing with an ongoing ransomware attack that hit institutions and businesses worldwide, including hospitals in the UK, the Russian interior ministry and universities in China. The outbreak started on Friday and spread quickly across the world, infecting around 200,000 computers in 150 countries. In the UK, …

By Matthew Hutson The words “robotic exoskeleton” probably bring to mind futuristic soldiers and sci-fi flicks like Aliens, Iron Man, or The Wrong Trousers. But despite military efforts to create such technology, it might show up somewhere less glamorous first: nursing homes. Researchers in Italy and Switzerland have developed a prototype device that can detect …

By WILLIAM HARWOOD NASA’s Cassini probe survived its second pass between Saturn and its innermost rings earlier this week, giving scientists increasing confidence the region between the rings and the cloud tops is clear of large particles that might represent a threat to the spacecraft. Virtually out of propellant, Cassini is wrapping up its extended …

By Sally Adee The internet can be a vicious place. The way we can hide behind anonymity online has often been blamed for the web’s abundance of trolls, but an experiment using a fake football website shows it is the behaviour of those we encounter that has the most influence. Until now, anonymity has been …

By Andy Coghlan Big planets come with big surprises. Last week, delegates at the annual European Geosciences Union meeting got the first glimpse of data from the Juno spacecraft now in orbit around Jupiter, and the findings are already challenging assumptions about everything from the planet’s atmosphere to its interior. “The whole inside of Jupiter …

By Moheb Costandi Pain in infants is heartbreaking for new parents, and extremely difficult to treat effectively—if at all. Every year an estimated 15 million babies are born prematurely, most of whom will then undergo numerous lifesaving but painful procedures, such as heel pricking or insertion of a thin tube known as a cannula to …

By Matthew Hutson “See you in the Supreme Court!” President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers …

By Bahar Gholipour Even the most natural-sounding computerized voices—whether it’s Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa—still sound like, well, computers. Montreal-based start-up Lyrebird is looking to change that with an artificially intelligent system that learns to mimic a person’s voice by analyzing speech recordings and the corresponding text transcripts as well as identifying the relationships between …

By Travis M. Andrews Each year in the United States, about 30,000 babies are born before gestating for 26 weeks, which is considered “critically preterm.” The resulting health problems are vast. Half don’t survive, and those who do face a 90 percent risk of lasting health problems. Such premature births are responsible one-third of infant deaths …

By Warren Cornwall A surge in innovation tied to low-carbon energy technologies is showing signs of tapering off in the U.S., at a time when the Trump administration is targeting the field for cuts in government research spending. The number of patents issued in fields related to cutting carbon emissions climbed from 15,970 in 2009 …