AlphaProof can handle math challenges but needs a bit of help right now. Computers are extremely good with numbers, but they haven’t gotten many human mathematicians fired. Until recently, they could barely hold their own in high school-level math competitions. But now Google’s DeepMind team has built AlphaProof, an…
For humans and AI, when something fits the category of “ordinary,” it slips from notice. On a sunny morning on October 19 2025, four men allegedly walked into the world’s most-visited museum and left, minutes later, with crown jewels worth 88 million euros ($101 million). The theft from Paris’…
Government can’t use funding threats to override the First Amendment. On Friday, a US District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the United States government from halting federal funding at UCLA or any other school in the University of California system. The ruling came in response to a suit…
Study identified several trace chemical signatures of opium in ancient Egyptian alabaster vase. Scientists have found traces of ancient opiates in the residue lining an Egyptian alabaster vase, indicating that opiate use was woven into the fabric of the culture. And the Egyptians didn’t just indulge occasionally: according to…
Chimps can take in new evidence, evaluate its strength, and change their minds. When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we…
Exquisitely preserved fossils come from a single site in Wyoming. Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of…
“This does not meet the release conditions for a safe manned return.” Wrapping up 204 days in orbit, three Chinese astronauts flew back to Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft Friday, leaving three crewmates behind on the Tiangong space station with a busted lifeboat. Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third…
Sequencing an ancient creature’s RNA opens up a new window into extinct life. A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists,…
Life with humans changed dogs in some dramatic ways, and it didn’t take long. Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been…
Early warning system being developed by universities may slow the plant pathogen. A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty…
