Pure Science

Singularity Hub

Compared to other primates, our brains are exceptionally large. Why? A new study comparing neurons from different primates pinpointed several genetic changes unique to humans that buffer our brains’ ability to handle everyday wear and...

Singularity Hub

Water is ubiquitous on Earth—about 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by the stuff. Water is in the air, on the surface, and inside rocks. Geologic evidence suggests water has been stable on Earth since about 4.3 billion years ago....

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI Can Now Create a Replica of Your Personality James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review “Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that...

Singularity Hub

As a medical doctor, my mother isn’t afraid of needles. But when she recently began injecting insulin daily for her newly diagnosed diabetes, the shots became a frustrating nuisance. A jab is a standard way to deliver insulin, antibodies,...

Singularity Hub

Getting AIs to work together could be a powerful force multiplier for the technology. Now, Microsoft researchers have invented a new language to help their models talk to each other faster and more efficiently. AI agents are the latest...

Singularity Hub

Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote: The air is thick with tension, My mind is a tangled mess, The weight of my emotions Is heavy on my chest. This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT-3.5 in response to the prompt...

Singularity Hub

All life on Earth is written with four DNA “letters.” An AI just used those letters to dream up a completely new genome from scratch. Called Evo, the AI was inspired by the large language models, or LLMs, underlying popular chatbots such...

Singularity Hub

COMPUTING IBM Boosts the Amount of Computation You Can Get Done on Quantum Hardware John Timmer | Ars Technica “There’s a general consensus that we won’t be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the...

Singularity Hub

A big challenge when training AI models to control robots is gathering enough realistic data. Now, researchers at MIT have shown they can train a robot dog using 100 percent synthetic data. Traditionally, robots have been hand-coded to...

Singularity Hub

When I was a young kid, our neighborhood didn’t have any grocery stores. The only place to buy fruits and vegetables was at our local farmer’s market. My mom would pick out the freshest tomatoes and sauté them with eggs into a simple dish...

Singularity Hub

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As...

Singularity Hub

“We’re only just beginning to understand the full majesty of life on Earth,” wrote the founding members of the Earth BioGenome Project in 2018. The ambitious project raised eyebrows when first announced. It seeks to genetically profile...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Why AI Could Eat Quantum Computing’s Lunch Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review “The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of...

Singularity Hub

The ability of plants to convert sunlight into food is an enviable superpower. Now, researchers have shown they can get animal cells to do the same thing. Photosynthesis in plants and algae is performed by tiny organelles known as...

Singularity Hub

The first spark of cellular life on Earth likely needed gift packaging. Let me explain. With the holidays around the corner, we’re all beginning to order presents. Each is carefully packaged inside a box or bubble-wrapped envelope and...

Singularity Hub

The European Space Agency has given the go-ahead for initial work on a mission to visit an asteroid called Apophis. If approved at a key meeting next year, the robotic spacecraft, known as the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety...

Singularity Hub

One of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots has been all play and no work. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is famous for backflips, parkour, and dance mobs. These require extremely impressive robotic control, but they’re also mostly fun...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Google CEO Says Over 25% of New Google Code Is Generated by AI Benj Edwards | Ars Technica “We’ve always used tools to build new tools, and developers are using AI to continue that tradition. On Tuesday, Google’s...

Singularity Hub

In 2014, the British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a book about the future of artificial intelligence with the ominous title Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It proved highly influential in promoting the idea that...

Singularity Hub

Electric air taxis have seen rapid technological advances in recent years, but the industry has had a regulatory question mark hanging over its head. Now, the US Federal Aviation Authority has published rules governing the operation of...

Singularity Hub

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful “microscope,” the Large Hadron Collider,...

Singularity Hub

Seeing is believing. Our perception of the world heavily relies on vision. What we see depends on cells in the retina, which sit behind the eyes. These delicate cells transform light into electrical pulses that go to the brain for further...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer Will Knight | Wired “It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may...

Singularity Hub

Finding ways to connect the human body to technology could have broad applications in health and entertainment. A new “electric plastic” could make self-powered wearables, real-time neural interfaces, and medical implants that merge with...

Singularity Hub

Farming immediately sparks images of lush fields of leafy greens under a blue sky, corn blowing in the wind, or majestic terraced rice paddies carved into mountainsides. Agriculture changed societies and our food habits roughly 12,000...

Singularity Hub

Viruses are everywhere. They’re in the air; in sewage, lakes, and oceans; in grasslands and decaying wood. Some thrive in extreme conditions, like hydrothermal vents, Antarctic ice, and potentially even outer space. They’re also ancient....

Singularity Hub

SPACE SpaceX Catches Returning Rocket in Mid-Air, Turning a Fanciful Idea Into Reality Stephen Clark | Ars Technica “This achievement is the first of its kind, and it’s crucial for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket,...

Singularity Hub

In our polarized times, finding ways to get people to agree with each other is more important than ever. New research suggests AI can help people with different views find common ground. The ability to effectively make collective decisions...

Singularity Hub

For the first time, an off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy has been used to treat potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorders in three people. With a single shot, the treatment rapidly reversed their debilitating symptoms for up to a...

Singularity Hub

Two of San Francisco’s leading players in artificial intelligence have challenged the public to come up with questions capable of testing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and OpenAI’s o1. Scale AI, which...

Singularity Hub

Human life expectancy dramatically increased last century. Compared to babies born in 1900, those born at the turn of the 21st century could live, on average, three decades longer—with many living to celebrate their 100th birthdays. In...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AI’s Penicillin and X-Ray Moment Matteo Wong | The Atlantic “When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to...

Singularity Hub

Humans are social animals, but there appear to be hard limits to the number of relationships we can maintain at once. New research suggests AI may be capable of collaborating in much larger groups. In the 1990s, British anthropologist...

Singularity Hub

The first 3D-printed house in the US was unveiled just over six years ago. Since then, homes have been printed all over the country and the world, from Virginia to California and Mexico to Kenya. If you’re intrigued by the concept but not...

Singularity Hub

The 25-year-old woman had suffered through decades of medical nightmares. A native of Tianjin, a city roughly two hours west of Beijing, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 11 years ago. A chronic autoimmune disease, her body’s immune...

Singularity Hub

Using information from inside the rocks on Earth’s surface, my colleagues and I have reconstructed the plate tectonics of the planet over the last 1.8 billion years. It is the first time Earth’s geological record has been used like this,...

Singularity Hub

There has long been hope that AI could help accelerate scientific progress. Now, companies are betting the latest generation of chatbots could make useful research assistants. Most efforts to accelerate scientific progress using AI have...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MIT Spinoff Liquid Debuts Non-Transformer AI Models and They’re Already State-of-the-Art Carl Franzen | VentureBeat “Unlike most others of the current generative AI wave, these models are not based around the...

Singularity Hub

The artificial intelligence industry is obsessed with size. Bigger algorithms. More data. Sprawling data centers that could, in a few years, consume enough electricity to power whole cities. This insatiable appetite is why OpenAI—which is...

Singularity Hub

With a brain the size of a sesame seed, the lowly fruit fly is often considered a kitchen pest. But to neuroscientists, the flies are a treasure trove of information detailing how the brain’s intricate connections guide thoughts,...

Singularity Hub

Humans are increasingly engaging with wearable technology as it becomes more adaptable and interactive. One of the most intimate ways gaining acceptance is through augmented reality glasses. Last week, Meta debuted a prototype of the most...

Singularity Hub

In a tiny laboratory pond, a robotic stingray flaps its fins and swims around. Roughly the width of a dime, the bot dashes distances multiple times its body size. It easily navigates around corners and swims far longer than previous...

Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A Tiny New Open-Source AI Model Performs as Well as Powerful Big Ones Melissa Heikkiläarchive page | MIT Technology Review “[The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2)] claims that its biggest Molmo...

Singularity Hub

Scientific breakthroughs rely on decades of diligent work and expertise, sprinkled with flashes of ingenuity and, sometimes, serendipity. What if we could speed up this process? Creativity is crucial when exploring new scientific ideas. It...

Singularity Hub

Aviation has proven to be one of the most stubbornly difficult industries to decarbonize. But a new roadmap outlined by University of Cambridge researchers says the sector could reach net zero by 2050 if urgent action is taken. The biggest...

Singularity Hub

For the past few years, a series of controversies have rocked the well-established field of cosmology. In a nutshell, the predictions of the standard model of the universe appear to be at odds with some recent observations. There are...

Singularity Hub

Roughly 20 years ago, at the dawn of YouTube, a video of a sneezing baby panda—and its mom’s gasp in surprise—captured the internet’s heart. With their distinctive black and white fur, giant pandas are known for their calm nature,...

Singularity Hub

TECH AI’s Hungry Maw Drives Massive $100B Investment Plan by Microsoft and BlackRock Benj Edwards | Ars Technica “The partnership initially aims to raise $30 billion in private equity capital, which could later turn into $100 billion in...

Singularity Hub

DNA is nature’s computing device. Unlike data centers, DNA is incredibly compact. These molecules package an entire organism’s genetic blueprint into tiny but sophisticated structures inside each cell. Kept cold—say, inside a freezer or in...

Singularity Hub

Norway’s sizable oil and gas deposits have made it one of the wealthiest countries in the world. That’s why it might come as a surprise that it’s the first country to have more electric vehicles than gasoline-powered ones. Transportation...