[ad_1] IN 2006, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York started to worry about the overheating US housing market. Concerned that the bubble might burst, they used their best model to predict what would happen if house prices dropped by 20 per cent. Not much, was the answer it churned out. Soon after, […]
[ad_1] Tubular feet on the underside of a chocolate chip sea star Matthew McHenry and Eva Kanso Starfish coordinate hundreds of feet to hop about – and they do it without a brain. A new understanding of how they manage this could inspire underwater exploration robots that work on the same principles. The marine […]
[ad_1] The cyborg cockroaches being tested on desert-like terrain Yang Bai, et al. (2024) A swarm of remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches can navigate to a target location while avoiding obstacles and each other. Researchers say such swarms could be contained inside large robots and released on cue to do jobs that would take too long for […]
[ad_1] This artist’s impression shows the orbits of both a massive stellar black hole and its companion star ESO/L. Calçada Astronomers have found the largest stellar black hole ever spotted, dubbed Gaia-BH3. It has a mass 33 times that of the sun, dwarfed only by supermassive black holes and those that formed through mergers of […]
[ad_1] In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay, prisoners live on a hostile alien world Gremlin/Getty Images Alien ClayAdrian Tchaikovsky (Tor) Service ModelAdrian Tchaikovsky (Tor, out 6 June) British writer Adrian Tchaikovsky has not one, but two new novels out in the first half of this year. That may be due to the vagaries of publishing, rather […]
[ad_1] NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI In the middle of the last century, the psychologist Abraham Maslow set about investigating the foundations of happiness. Interviewing people about their lives, he was intrigued to find that many reported having experienced rare moments of epiphany, associated with “awe… rapture, ecstasy or bliss” in which “all separateness or […]
[ad_1] Fibre optic cables designed to carry telecommunications can also be used to map Earth’s interior Connect world/Shutterstock Offline telecom cables called “dark fibres” can be used to sense underground seismic waves. Geophysicists are increasingly using such signals to study aspects of Earth’s subsurface, including hidden sources of geothermal energy and earthquake hazards. “If a […]
[ad_1] The enormous mouth of a tiny nematode worm Sara Wighard and Ralf Sommer / Max Planck Institute for Biology Tubingen Tiny soil worms called nematodes usually feast on bacteria or algae, and have tiny mouths to suit their diet. But give a baby nematode some fungus and its mouth can as much as double […]
[ad_1] Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images For Bill Gates, artificial intelligence is the most important invention since the internet or the personal computer. For Google boss Sundar Pichai, it will have a more profound impact than electricity and fire. Already, though, there are signs the AI revolution may be faltering. Since OpenAI released its landmark GPT-4 system […]
[ad_1] ryan wills; Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images EVER feel like you are stuck in a hole? Newsflash: you are. Astronomers call it the “local hole”, but that is quite the understatement. It is vast, gigantic, enormously huge – although, in truth, adjectives fail us when it comes to this expanse of nothingness. It is the largest […]