Mauro Vallati, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, University of Huddersfield Will artificial intelligence one day surpass human thinking? The rapid progress of AI, coupled with our standard fear of machines, has raised concerns that its abilities will one day start to grow uncontrollably, eventually leading it to take over the world and wipe out humanity […]

We suspect that this might be some sort of exotic system that we have never seen before involving a radio-flaring giant star orbiting a neutron star (the dense remnant of a supernova star explosion) or a black hole. Laura Nicole Driessen, PhD Student in Radio Astronomy, University of Manchester 25 November 2019 After observing a […]

Synthetic biology researchers are harnessing the power of nature to solve problems in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture, in other words, engineering biology to do things it wouldn’t normally do. Claudia Vickers, Director, Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform, CSIRO We need to revolutionise agriculture in the next 30 years. In 2050 we may have almost 10 […]

Ashish Sinha, Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences, California State University, Dominguez Hills and Gayatri Kathayat, Associate Professor of Global Environmental Change, Xi’an Jiaotong University Ancient Mesopotamia, the fabled land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, was the command and control center of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This ancient superpower was the largest empire of […]

Michael Ford, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Materials Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines […]

Globally greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, with increasingly damaging effects. Thomas Newsome, Lecturer, University of Sydney and William Ripple, Distinguished Professor and Director, Trophic Cascades Program, Oregon State University 6 November 2019 Exactly 40 years ago, a small group of scientists met at the world’s first climate conference in Geneva. They raised the alarm […]

  The cells in your body are like computer software: they’re “programmed” to carry out specific functions at specific times. If we can better understand this process, we could unlock the ability to reprogram cells ourselves. In a cutting-edge talk, computational biologist Sara-Jane Dunn explains how her team is studying embryonic stem cells to gain […]

Given TESS’s unique ability to simultaneously search tens of thousands of stars for planets, the mission is expected to yield over 10,000 new worlds. Daniel Apai, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona and Benjamin Rackham, 51 Pegasi b Postdoctoral Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Within just 50 light-years from Earth, there […]

Michael Oluwatosin Bodunrin, AESA-RISE Postdoctoral fellow, University of the Witwatersrand William Gregor, an amateur mineralogist and chemist, first discovered ilmenite – some black sand containing one of the world’s lightest metals – in the UK in 1791. Four years later, this light metal was isolated and named “titanium” by a German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. […]

Christopher R. Moore, Archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina 23 October 2019 What kicked off the Earth’s rapid cooling 12,800 years ago? In the space of just a couple of years, average temperatures abruptly dropped, resulting in […]