Science

"Until meaningful government safeguards are in place to protect the public from the harms of generative AI, we need a pause."

So says a report on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) published Tuesday by Public Citizen. Titled Sorry in Advance! Rapid Rush to Deploy Generative AI Risks a Wide Array of Automated Harms, the analysis by researchers Rick Claypool and Cheyenne Hunt aims to "reframe the conversation around generative AI to ensure that the public and policymakers have a say in how these new technologies might upend our lives."

In January 2017, I met Jiankui He, the now-infamous Chinese scientist who would go on to create the world’s first genome-edited babies. This was at a meeting in Berkeley, Calif., hosted by Jennifer Doudna who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR genome-editing technology.

At this meeting, geneticist George Church, known for his work to revive the woolly mammoth, described research on “synthetic human embryos” derived from stem cells. Church dubbed these embryo-like structures “synthetic human entities with embryo-like features.”

On farms, spiders are important predators who control insect populations, including pests that can damage crops.

Understanding their role in agricultural ecosystems reveals how they could be used as a biocontrol agent to limit pest populations.

Two years ago, Paul's teacher noticed that the 10-year-old boy could no longer see anything on the board at the front of the class.

An ophthalmologist confirmed that Paul was one of the soaring number of children worldwide with myopia, also known as nearsightedness, an eye condition projected to affect half of the world's population by 2050.

The coastal town of Exmouth in Western Australia is due to experience one of the most spectacular astronomical phenomena on April 20 2023 – a total solar eclipse.

Eclipses have entranced us for millennia. But it turns out calculating exactly when and where we can watch an eclipse in its full glory can be surprisingly hard.

Do you remember learning to drive a car? You probably fumbled around for the controls, checked every mirror multiple times, made sure your foot was on the brake pedal, then ever-so-slowly rolled your car forward.

Fast forward to now and you’re probably driving places and thinking, “how did I even get here? I don’t remember the drive”. The task of driving, which used to take a lot of mental energy and concentration, has now become subconscious, automatic – habitual.

Floating in the port of Los Angeles, a strange-looking barge covered with pipes and tanks contains a concept that scientists hope to make waves: a new way to use the ocean as a vast carbon dioxide sponge to tackle global warming.

Scientists from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have been working for two years on SeaChange -- an ambitious project that could one day boost the amount of CO2, a major greenhouse gas, that can be absorbed by our seas.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Saturday posted a scientifically illiterate tweet about climate change that left many of her followers stunned.

In trying to play down the threat posed by a warming planet, Greene wrote a lengthy, nonsensical post that did not even attempt to discuss the actual science behind climate change.

The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal pounded the Republican-controlled Texas Senate for a new proposal to avoid another disaster like the February 2021 freeze that left an estimated 10 million without power and officials scrambling as the death toll mounted.

Getting right to the point, the editorial board began their piece with "What a mess" before delving into the new proposal that will cost Texas taxpayers billions for subsidies with no guarantee the problems have been fixed.

Finding life on other planets might well be the holy grail of astronomy, but the hunt for suitable host planets that can sustain life is a resource-intensive task.

The search for exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System) involves competing for time on Earth’s biggest telescopes – yet the hit rate of this search can be disappointingly low.

Tropical cyclone Ilsa has been downgraded to a category-three cyclone as it moves southeast through Western Australia. The storm first made landfall as a category-five cyclone, passing near Port Hedland around midnight.

Ilsa smashed into the largely uninhabited Pilbara region (the country’s most cyclone-prone region) at record-breaking speeds. It has delivered Australia’s highest ten-minute sustained wind speed record at landfall: about 218 kilometers per hour. The previous record of 194km per hour came from tropical cyclone George in 2007.