At Secret Math Meeting, Researchers Struggle to Outsmart AI The world’s leading mathematicians were stunned by how adept artificial intelligence is at doing their jobs By Lyndie Chiou edited by Clara Moskowitz Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley,…
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr Tasos Katopodis/Getty One of the top vaccine experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, resigned on 4 June – a week after Robert F Kennedy Jr announced that covid-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for most children…
For the dwarf planet candidate, one trip around the sun takes over 24,000 years. Its orbit challenges a proposed path for a hypothetical Planet Nine.
A Japanese Spacecraft Has Crash-Landed on the Moon—Again Investigations by the Japanese company ispace identified issues with speed and an altitude sensor that likely doomed the lander By Rachel Fieldhouse & Nature magazine A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket transported the M2 lunar lander into space. Gregg Newton/AFP via Getty Images A Japanese spacecraft has probably…
The surface of the moon, as seen from orbit by Resilience before it crashed ispace SMBC x HAKUTO-R VENTURE MOON A Japanese space mission hoping to make history as the third ever private lunar landing has ended in failure, after ispace’s Resilience lander smashed into the moon at some point after 7.13pm UTC on 5…
Adding a cup of chickpeas or black beans to people’s daily diets could improve health by lowering cholesterol and inflammation, a new study suggests.
We’re all familiar with the sun’s daily motion in the sky. It rises in the east, gets higher in the sky until circa noon, then begins its hours-long descent to set on the western horizon. You may also know of our star’s more stately annual journey. For Northern Hemisphere dwellers, as summer approaches, it moves…
Numbers allow us to focus on one aspect of a situation in detail, but can also oversimplify things Mika Baumeister/Unsplash UnequalEugenia Cheng (Profile Books (UK, on sale) Basic Books (US, 2 September)) Things are either equal or they aren’t – mathematically speaking, at least, right? Not so fast, says Eugenia Cheng in her new book, Unequal:…
Velvet Worm Slime Reveals Its Sticky Secrets The velvet worm’s extraordinary goo could inspire recyclable bioplastics By Elizabeth Anne Brown edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier Velvet worms like this one “sneeze” out a sticky goo with intriguing properties. The velvet worm, a squishy little predator that looks like the stretch-limo version of a caterpillar, has…
What do you do when food is running low and you are a tiny, millimetre-long worm? The answer, it turns out, is join up with thousands of your fellows to make a tentacle-like superorganism that can bridge gaps to nearby objects or grab hold of larger animals to carry you further afield. Biologists studying nematode…
