Science of the Future
Agricultural drones poised to make affordable aerial weed-fighting crop protection available to small farmers
As farmers wrestle with increased weed resistance to herbicides, new management techniques offer modernized ways to combat weeds. Rapid improvements ...
What might dogs eat in a post-meat era ushered in by climate change?
As managing director of British startup Yora Pet Foods, Rankin’s job is figuring out how to lure dogs — or ...
Micro-algae a panacea for sustainability woes? Microorganisms have the ability to treat wastewater, eat up plastic, feed plants, produce food, and control pests
Every drop of seawater is teeming with microscopic life. But researchers in Europe believe that one particular kind could be ...
No extinct species has yet been brought back to life. Not discouraged, Colossal Biosciences adds the Dodo to its list of de-extinction targets
Genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences said [January 31] that it will try to resurrect the extinct dodo bird, and it’s ...
AI Chat GPT research summaries fool even expert scientists
Scientists cannot always differentiate between research abstracts generated by the AI ChatGPT and those written by humans ...
How do we build houses on Mars? Bricks made of bacteria and fungi filaments could help
Rather than hauling construction materials or prefabricated modules aboard a spaceship, astronauts bound for Mars could bring synthetic bacteria cultures ...
What should you say to a potential date? AI takes on the online dating world
New AI-driven tools are meant to help singles cut the small talk and get on more dates. Will they change ...
Floating Dutch dairy farm produces 200 gallons of milk a day — Here’s how this quirky project offers an answer to rising sea levels and the ‘global land squeeze’
Samuel L Jackson can have his snakes on a plane. Peter and Minke van Wingerden have concocted something even wilder: ...
Part II: Nature is complex — Rewilding offers promising ecological benefits, but it is not the panacea its proponents contend — and can cause harm
Nature can be unpredictable, often foiling the best of intentions. And rewilding experiments gone awry are only a fraction of ...
Part I: Europe’s rewilding movement — A victory for environmentalism or a romantic, scientifically-debatable notion that does not revive ancient ecosystems? Or both?
It’s less than half a mile from the crowded marina to the site of cannibalistic excess — at least, that’s ...
Deepfakes: AI-generated photos can create fake “proof” of almost anything — from cheating on your spouse to joining a paramilitary group. What should you do?
AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease: AI tech makes it trivial to generate harmful fake ...
‘Cellular medicine’: Siddhartha Mukherjee on ‘creating new humans’ to limit cancer and other diseases
The cancer physician and author explains why breakthroughs are leading to the creation of ‘new humans’ ...
‘A hotbed of hype and self-experimentation’: Meet the ultra-rich innovators who want to live forever
Hope, hype, and self-experimentation collided at an exclusive conference for ultra-rich investors who want to extend their lives past 100 ...
Viewpoint: Unleashing the power of biomedicine and personalized medicine
The world is awash in data. Data abundance and tools to extract meaning from data let us better understand, control ...
How digital innovations can spur a Fourth Agricultural Revolution
Two billion people in the world currently suffer from malnutrition and according to some estimates, we need 60% more food ...
‘Time for a reality check’: How close is artificial intelligence (AI) to thinking like humans?
Last month, Deepmind, a subsidiary of technology giant Alphabet, set Silicon Valley abuzz when it announced Gato, perhaps the most ...
How Artificial Intelligence can predict severity of psychiatric disorders
AI uses genetics to predict psychiatric disorders: The AI deep learning model can also predict the severity of multiple disorders ...
Analysis: Climate mitigation funding imbalance? US government slow to fund climate-smart agricultural innovation — 1/35th of what’s spent on clean energy
Agriculture is a substantial source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, accounting for about 10% of the U.S. total. Farmers, ranchers, ...
7 breakthrough technological innovations that may have flown under your radar this year
The release of several advanced generative AI systems was inarguably the biggest science and tech story of 2022 — DALL-E ...
‘Space seeds’: First rice seeds grown and harvested in orbit return to Earth
With the return of the Shenzhou-14 crew on December 4, the third batch of space science experiment samples that arrived ...
Live to 150? That’s what some AI algorithms claim is possible. What does the science say?
We’re obsessed with aging. In the quest to prolong life while remaining healthy, people have tried everything from turtle soup ...
Natural, plant-based air purifiers? This bioengineered houseplant can clean pollutants from the air
A startup in Paris has developed a plant that could take over the work of 30 houseplants — and it’s just the ...
AI can predict 10-year risk of heart attack or stroke with an X-ray scan
Early research suggests a promising use of artificial intelligence to predict the 10-year risk of death from a heart attack ...
Bioactive compounds from potatoes and tomatoes could help us create new cancer drugs
Vegetables such as potatoes could someday help us fight cancer, according to a study completed at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland and published ...
Viewpoint: Gene drives are not ‘nature conservation’. Anti-GM activists call for a moratorium on the technology
Ahead of the UN Biodiversity Conference COP 15 and its Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in Montreal over 140 civil society organisations ...
Viewpoint: AI is getting smarter every day. Here’s why that might not be a good thing
AI gets smarter, more capable, and more world-transforming every day. Here’s why that might not be a good thing ...
‘Space salad’ and ‘cosmic tomatoes’: How scientists plan to limit bone density loss in astronauts during deep space voyages
Basically, the goal is to grow dwarf tomato plants (essentially cherry tomatoes) under two different light quality treatments in space, ...