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 […]
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 […]
Humans are unrivalled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers. Our understanding of brain function has […]
Have you ever been in a situation in which irony was misunderstood as sincerity? For example, let’s say you’re at a clothing store with a friend of yours and you see a really ugly shirt on display. You say “Look! What a nice shirt!”. The next thing you know, your friend decides to buy you […]
How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favour the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. Although Charles Darwin thought the process occurred over geological timescales, we have seen examples of dramatic adaptive evolution over only a handful of generations. The peppered moth changed colour in response to […]
Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 […]
Machine-learning systems are increasingly worming their way through our everyday lives, challenging our moral and social values and the rules that govern them. These days, virtual assistants threaten the privacy of the home; news recommenders shape the way we understand the world; risk-prediction systems tip social workers on which children to protect from abuse; while […]
Plants that inhabit the Earth have the incredible ability to grow continually for hundreds of years, and always towards the light of the sun, which provides them with the necessary energy to sprout. At the source of this growth are changes in their environment, such as variations in light, temperature and humidity. But new stimuli […]
Blasting out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens is a controversial idea – two teams of scientists are doing it anyway If a person is lost in the wilderness, they have two options. They can search for civilization, or they could make themselves easy to spot by building a fire or writing HELP […]
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about USD 4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent […]