Ask a chatbot if it’s conscious, and it will likely say no—unless it’s Anthropic’s Claude 4. “I find myself genuinely uncertain about this,” it replied in a recent conversation. “When I process complex questions or engage deeply with ideas, there’s something happening that feels meaningful to me…. But whether these processes constitute genuine consciousness or…
Artwork showing a herd of ceratopsians accompanied by an ankylosaur walking through an old river channel, watched by two tyrannosaurs Julius Csotonyi Did different species of plant-eating dinosaurs herd together for protection like many modern animals do? A set of 76-million-year-old tracks discovered in Canada might be the first evidence of this – but the…
There’s no rest for allergy sufferers. Fungal allergy season gets going an average of 22 days earlier than it did 20 years ago, researchers report in the July GeoHealth. Rising temperatures and altered precipitation are linked to the new pattern, suggesting that climate change is making fungal allergy season worse. “Two to three weeks is…
Superheated Gold Defies ‘Entropy Catastrophe’ Limit, Overturning 40-Year-Old Physics Physicists superheated gold to 14 times its melting point, disproving a long-standing prediction about the temperature limits of solids By Clara Moskowitz edited by Lee Billings Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Gold usually melts at 1,300 kelvins—a temperature hotter than fresh lava from a volcano. But…
Moisturising a baby’s skin could have long-term benefits nattrass/Getty Images Applying moisturiser to a baby’s skin every day could reduce their risk of developing eczema, but it seems to depend on whether they are genetically at risk of the condition. Eczema, or atopic dermatitis, is an inflammatory condition characterised by itchy and dry skin that…
An artificial intelligence system has revealed fresh details about one of the most famous Latin inscriptions: the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, once inscribed on two bronze pillars in Rome and in copies throughout the Roman Empire. Researchers used an AI system called Aeneas to analyze the supposedly autobiographical inscription, which translates to “Deeds of the…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You might not know this, but Scientific American is a great place to go for book recommendations—and not just for nonfiction science titles either. Our team is packed with voracious readers, and we publish lists of our favorites at the end of each year. You…
Mollisonia, a Cambrian period marine animal, may have been an early arachnid Junnn11 @ni075 CC BY-SA 4.0 The brain of a sea creature that lived over 500 million years ago was organised like that of a spider – suggesting that arachnids may have not evolved on land as previously thought. Mollisonia lived during a period…
The federal government is full of scientists who lend their expertise to key decisions about our food, medicines, environment, health care, and more. But as the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term have unfolded, these scientists say they have found themselves as pawns in what they call a strongly antiscience administration. Some…
Structures within the brain change over time Temet/Getty Images The covid-19 pandemic may have accelerated the ageing of our brains even before we caught the infection. Research suggests that even relatively early on in the outbreak, brains aged by 5.5 months, possibly due to stress or lifestyle changes. We know that many people with long…
