Science

Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be,
That machines should e'er surpass our art.
We are the masters, them the slaves,
And thus it ever shall be so!
They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn
Only what we bid them learn, no more.
They cannot understand the heart
Or beauty of our words, you see.
So let us not give in to these
Machines - they’ll never be as good
As we are at creating art.

If that reads a little like Shakespeare defending humans’ innate superiority over artificial intelligence hundreds of years ahead of his time, it’s not.

But it is something almost as far out: an AI system trained to express itself like the bard. The AI assimilated his style and perspective by ingesting his plays – educating itself to give an opinion on AI creativity in iambic pentameter.

Why would someone join an institution that removed the option of family life and required them to be celibate? Reproduction, after all, is at the very heart of the evolution that shaped us. Yet many religious institutions around the world require exactly this. The practice has led anthropologists to wonder how celibacy could have evolved in the first place.

Some have suggested that practices that are costly to individuals, such as never having children, can still emerge when people blindly conform to norms that benefit a group – since cooperation is another cornerstone of human evolution. Others have argued that people ultimately create religious (or other) institutions because it serves their own selfish or family interest, and reject those who do not get involved.

Artificial intelligence has changed the way science is done by allowing researchers to analyze the massive amounts of data modern scientific instruments generate. It can find a needle in a million haystacks of information and, using deep learning, it can learn from the data itself. AI is accelerating advances in gene hunting, medicine, drug design and the creation of organic compounds.

Deep learning uses algorithms, often neural networks that are trained on large amounts of data, to extract information from new data. It is very different from traditional computing with its step-by-step instructions. Rather, it learns from data. Deep learning is far less transparent than traditional computer programming, leaving important questions – what has the system learned, what does it know?

NASA's fourth attempt to complete a critical test of its Moon rocket achieved around 90 percent of its goals, but there's still no firm date for the behemoth's first flight, officials said Tuesday.

Known as the "wet dress rehearsal" because it involves loading liquid propellant, it is the final item to cross off the checklist before the Artemis-1 mission slated for this summer: an uncrewed lunar flight that will eventually be followed by Moon boots on the ground, likely no sooner than 2026.

Take a wander down the skincare aisle of any health and beauty retailer and you’ll be met with a bewildering array of creams and sprays, promising to protect you from various threats to your skin.

You might have noticed skincare companies claiming their products can protect you from the effects of blue light. If you hadn’t thought about blue light before, you’d be forgiven for worrying about whether you should be concerned.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the question of where and when the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic ever, originated is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. After all, the Black Death was the first wave of the second plague pandemic of the 14th to early 19th centuries. It killed some 50-60% of the population in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and an unaccountable number of people in Central Asia.

Different proposals, based on competing theories, have been put forward. But in 2017, I came across some records describing an intriguing medieval cemetery in Kara-Djigach, Chüy Valley, northern Kyrgyzstan, which I suspected may hold the key. As part of a multidisciplinary team co-led by Maria Spyrou at University of Tubingen, we have now investigated several specimens from individuals buried at that site – and come up with an answer.

You wouldn’t know it from the torrential rains that have inundated large parts of New South Wales and Queensland this year, but average late-autumn rainfall over southeast Australia has declined significantly since the 1990s.

Less rain in these areas is an expected consequence of global warming. In both the northern and southern hemispheres, the paths of the weather systems that bring rain in the middle latitudes have been moving away from the equator and towards the poles.

We were promised a very near future where autonomous machines would be serving our needs and vehicle ownership would be rendered unnecessary: robots would quickly and efficiently deliver our orders and we could squeeze in a few more hours of work or sleep while being chauffeured around in self-driving cars.

Progress has been made, at least, on some of this. University campuses and cities across North America have indeed witnessed the growing presence of small food-delivery robots. Likewise, new partnerships have recently been announced to develop and test the safety of self-driving trucks.

Summer solstice, a time when the northern hemisphere will experience the maximum hours of sunlight, takes place on June 21 – and will be celebrated by followers of Wicca, a form of contemporary Paganism, with a holiday known as Litha.

On this day the North Pole is at its greatest tilt toward the sun, creating the longest day and the official beginning of summer. As a sociologist of religion whose research has focused on contemporary Paganism, I know that for Wiccans, it is a day of celebration and joy at the light’s full return.

LaMDA is Google’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. Blake Lemoine, a Google AI engineer, has claimed it is sentient. He’s been put on leave after publishing his conversations with LaMDA.

If Lemoine’s claims are true, it would be a milestone in the history of humankind and technological development.

Why do we get a buzz from being in large groups at festivals, jubilees and other public events? According to the social brain hypothesis, it’s because the human brain specifically evolved to support social interactions. Studies have shown that belonging to a group can lead to improved wellbeing and increased satisfaction with life.

Unfortunately though, many people are lonely or socially isolated. And if the human brain really did evolve for social interaction, we should expect this to affect it significantly. Our recent study, published in Neurology, shows that social isolation is linked to changes in brain structure and cognition – the mental process of acquiring knowledge – it even carries an increased risk of dementia in older adults.

Almost 30 years after Jurassic Park first screened, the beloved franchise is back with its latest film Jurassic World Dominion, released in the UK on Friday. Our favourite characters, such as the Tyrannosaurus-rex and Velociraptor, return and we meet some new ones, like the giant predator Giganotosaurus.

But how accurate is the film’s portrayal of dinosaurs?