About 1.5m years ago a big-toothed cousin of prehistoric humans walked quickly along a lakeside in Kenya, footprints marking the muddy ground. But they were not our only ancestor on the scene: treading the same ground was the early human Homo erectus. Researchers say an analysis of fossilised footprints discovered in deposits of the Turkana … Read more
Just a day after the conclusion of the United Nations’ annual climate conference in Azerbaijan, diplomats began convening in Busan, South Korea, for a separate bout of discussions — this time over plastics. The fifth and potentially final round of negotiations over a global plastics treaty began on Monday, with hopes running high that countries will … Read more
The US Department of Energy (DOE) thinks AI can speed up the process of connecting new energy projects to the power grid. It announced $30 million in funding now available through its Artificial Intelligence for Interconnection (AI4IX) program. The DOE is interested in fostering partnerships between grid operators and software and energy project developers to … Read more
Shrikanth Narayanan has spent his entire career making speech and language processing technologies more accessible. The IEEE Fellow has developed machine intelligence and signal processing technologies to analyze human behavior including spoken language, facial expressions, and physiological indicators. Shrikanth Narayanan Employer: University of Southern California Title: Professor of electrical engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, pediatrics, … Read more
Squarespace helps small businesses and regular Joe Schmoes to get software help to build their own websites (for both personal and business), even including the commerce side of things with point of sale, inventory, and customer data features (both online or in person). In the age where literally everything is digitized and accessed through the … Read more
Sasha Prasad-Shreckengast is trying to get into the mind of a chicken. This is not the easiest of feats, even here at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, a scenic hamlet in the rolling Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. For decades the sanctuary has housed, and observed the behavior of, farm animals – like … Read more
A critically endangered ‘Akikiki that study lead author Kyle Kittelberger photographed on Kauai in 2022. Credit: Kyle Kittelberger Looking to inform the conservation of critically endangered bird species, University of Utah biologists have completed an analysis identifying traits that correlate with all 216 bird extinctions since 1500. Species most likely to go extinct sooner were … Read more
From powering a cleaner planet to unlocking the mysteries of space, three visionaries at Monday’s TIME100 Talks in London explored a crucial challenge: how to transform promising breakthroughs in science into real-world solutions. In a discussion moderated by TIME senior correspondent Alice Park, Phil Caldwell, CEO of clean energy company Ceres Power, space scientist and … Read more
Although many lunar phenomena are one-night-only events, a ring around the moon is much less elusive. Also known as a lunar halo, a bright white ring of light around the moon can appear anytime during the lunar calendar and at any time of year, especially in winter. But, if you hope to see a lunar … Read more
Artist’s representation of a galaxy with a brilliant quasar at its centre NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI) Space-time, the so-called fabric of physical reality, may be made of tiny, discrete pieces stitched together. A preliminary analysis of the way matter orbits quasars suggests we could find evidence of this cosmic quilt in the universe’s … Read more