Science

As temperatures shift, animals move to different regions and pathogens have more opportunities to jump between hosts. Could the next pandemic be fuelled by an unstable climate?

During WWI the act of hearing was recast as a tactical activity — one that could determine human and even national survival.

One of the big announcements at the UN climate conference this weekend in Dubai was a pledge by more than 110 countries to triple the amount of renewable energy they are generating by 2030. That work is already underway in a rather unlikely place.

Whoomp! There it is.

The Sun is a giant sphere of plasma. Temperatures at its core exceed 10 million° C, and they drop to about 5,500° C at the surface. Densities at the solar core are also extreme, reaching more than 20 times the density of solid iron. But they too drop dramatically as you rise from core to surface.

Humans rely on a bevy of strange natural chemicals to liven up our food and drink, to endure pain, and to change our perspective.

In a preprint research paper titled "Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?", two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI's GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking it was human with the greatest success.

Amazon deliveries could be headed for some turbulence in the new year. Pilots for US-based Air Transport International, a cargo airline that ferries Amazon packages from its fulfillment centers to airports nearer to its customers, voted to authorize a strike last month.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. But making a fusion power plant a reality will require a huge amount of science and technology progress.

The discovery that the brain has different systems for representing small and large numbers provokes new questions about memory, attention and mathematics. Introduction More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number 4.