Mexican tetras in pitch-black caverns had no use for the energetically costly organs. Time and again, whenever a population was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. “But it’s not that everything has been lost in cavefish,” says…
“The boost kit will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude, starting in September.” SpaceX completed its 33rd cargo delivery to the International Space Station early Monday, when a Dragon supply ship glided to an automated docking with more than 5,000 pounds of scientific experiments and provisions for the lab’s…
Why AI chatbots validate grandiose fantasies about revolutionary discoveries that don’t exist. Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he’d discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with…
SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch after three straight disappointing test flights. STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind…
If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater. When Donald Trump recently claimed, during what was supposed to be a press conference about a European Union trade deal, that wind turbines were a “con job” that drive whales “loco,” kill birds and…
Words you’ll never speak still cause activity in the brain’s speech centers. Most experimental brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that have been used for synthesizing human speech have been implanted in the areas of the brain that translate the intention to speak into the muscle actions that produce it. A patient…
Hobbyist training AI on Victorian texts gets an unexpected history lesson from his own creation. A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t…
The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV. So far this year, electricity use in the US is up nearly 4 percent compared to the same period the year prior. That comes after decades of essentially flat use, a change that…
The X-37B spaceplane is flying missions few would have foreseen when the program began. The US military’s reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS…
Neuroscientists find people who don’t enjoy music, study their brain activity. “I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he…
