Science

“Poses big questions about what it means to be human” … WALL-EAlamy Stock Photo Hollywood has a lot to answer for in shaping and often misinforming public discourse around artificial intelligence. In my work as an ethics fellow at The Alan Turing Institute – the UK’s national institute for data science and AI – I am often asked to address common misconceptions about AI. Countless blockbuster movies share the familiar plot line of AI developing its own superintelligence, making its own decisions and ultimately posing a threat to the future of humanity. In putting together this list, I have tried (but not entirely succeeded) to avoid these all-too-familiar, unrealistic narratives. I wish there were more movies showing AI not as a character, but rather as systems in the b...

A splash of water helps ground coffee avoid clumping togetherD.Kvasnetskyy/Shuttersto​ck Adding a drop of water to your coffee beans before grinding them can reduce mess and lead to a more flavourful brew. Coffee aficionados often add a little water to their beans before grinding, either from a wet spoon or as a spritz of moisture, because it stops coffee grounds sticking together and keeps them from flying away from the main pile. Scientists think this is because the water reduces static electricity, but the exact mechanism and the perfect amount of water to add were unclear. To investigate, Christopher Hendon at the University of Oregon and his colleagues sprayed various amounts of water on a range of coffee beans that had been roasted for different lengths of ...

Why Did This Journalist Enroll in the Climate and Society Program? As an 8-year-old living in the Hassan district of Karnataka, India, Vishal Manve recalls already being attuned to the sociopolitical impacts of climate change. In his own family, Manve witnessed his Ajji (grandmother) struggle to accurately gauge the changing rainfall to predict its impact on seasonal rice cultivation and what this would mean for their household savings. Since then, Manve has looked for ways to help make the world more sustainable and just, especially for vulnerable communities—first as a journalist and now as a student at the M.A. in Climate and Society program at the Columbia C...

The water consumed by a single bitcoin transaction could fill a small swimming poolRadharc Images / Alamy Buying or selling bitcoin uses 16,000 litres of clean water for every single transaction, which could exacerbate existing droughts around the world. While the energy consumption and carbon emissions produced by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been well studied, this is the first assessment of its water use and wider environmental impact. Alex de Vries at the VU Amsterdam School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands has calculated that mining – the computational process that secures the bitcoin network – uses between 8.6 and 35.1 billion litres of water per year in the US alone. He says that bitcoin used 1.6 trillion litres of water globally in 2021, ...

Attempts to recreate red matter under different pressures couldn’t replicate the material’s changing colourNanjing University The scientific paper announcing the wonder material dubbed “red matter”, which researchers claimed earlier this year was the world’s first room-temperature superconductor, has been retracted by Nature. The retraction marks the end of a year-long saga over room-temperature superconductors, following the failed replications of LK-99, another material that held the promise of revolutionising electronics and drove an online frenzy. Unlike LK-99, which was first published in the relatively little-known Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology, and took researchers by surprise, the work on red matter, or N-doped lutetium hydride, wa...