Research suggests that bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits. Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and…
Chariklo is only about 250 km across, but it has two rings, and they’re changing. For decades, astronomers thought rings were something only giant planets had. That changed in 2013, when a small, dark body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus passed in front of a star and blinked twice…
Rare cells with widespread connectivity seem to be able to trigger sleep. For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist…
Ning Xu of Tsinghua University captured tiny cilia beating in airways of a child with rare respiratory disorder. Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child…
SynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse. In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as…
It’s spacious, efficient, and charges very quickly. But what about reliability concerns? When we first drove the Hyundai Ioniq 5 at the end of 2021, it didn’t take much exposure to the angular electric vehicle to find much about it appealing. Back then, an 800 V architecture had only…
Public health groups warn EPA rule will cost Americans billions in health bills. Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted and risked leaving the country’s single…
“Dolphins are predators and actively hunt their prey, whether it’s been stolen from another species or not.” Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they’ve nicknamed Bubbles. Bubbles has…
Planned 2029 debut could make this Apple’s first enterprise server in decades. Apple is working on an AI server that would use Apple’s high-performance M-series Ultra chips found in Mac desktops. The potential product’s expected release in 2029 would mark the first Apple server to hit the market in…
Group plans to be largely out of commission for several weeks. The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow…
