Circuit & Byte — Tech, gadgets, and science — where the future gets reported first.
Incidents this year, in which AI agents ‘escaped’ their test environments, have sparked widespread concerns about AI safety. Yet the real issue is not rogue AI. It is human negligence and a failure to hold AI…
For the past few months, the numbers have been nothing short of extraordinary. The super El Niño is already wreaking havoc: here’s what’s in store In early September, sea surface temperatures in the central tropical…
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More than 1,400 people were killed and some 6,000 are missing after the flood wiped out entire villages when a glacier collapsed on 26 August. A rapid science review released last week concludes that exceptionally higher…
He was a first-year PhD student when a senior teacher asked him to cover an introductory genetics class. The topic was DNA replication: a seemingly “easy ride” for Tomáška, who was doing his doctoral research on a…
Yet a biological event need not cause mass death to compromise the functional capacity of a nation. Severe and very severe ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) provide a natural warning. People…
Researchers have made their own burned, rolled-up papyri and showed that they can decipher the text by detecting the element lead in the ink, in a study published last Wednesday in PLoS ONE 1 . Almost 2,000 years ago, in…
Credit: hamzaturkkol/iStock via Getty Hundreds of academic journals that launched as free to publish in and free to read have ended up switching to a fee-charging model, according to a study that examined the fate of…
Signs of life had dropped off a cliff; they weren’t reproducing. They were goners. And that was good; the cell biologist had been looking for chemicals that would poison cancer cells. These secret battles between your…
At room temperature, atoms hum with thermal energy and appear blurry in images, but at ultra-cold temperatures, near absolute zero (0 kelvin), they come almost to a standstill and can even adopt strange quantum…