1+ week, 13+ hour ago   (783+ words) Kids testing AI-powered toys were curious at first, but frustration quickly followed when the talking toys failed to listen or understand them. Talking toys aren’t new. Chatty Cathy pulled a string and spoke her lines back in the 1960s and Furby…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (973+ words) New research warns that weak AI safety regulations can actually make artificial intelligence less safe. Instead of encouraging companies to improve their products, poorly designed rules may shift responsibility in ways that reduce overall safety. The risk appears when regulations…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago   (799+ words) Most people trust their own nose to judge whether food has gone off. The human nose works fairly well, yet it misses plenty. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 48 million Americans suffer a foodborne illness each…...

3+ mon, 2+ week ago   (825+ words) The usual assumption about a struggling brain is that something has gone quiet – a circuit turned down, a signal lost. When mental flexibility breaks down, the picture that comes to mind is underactivity. A new study offers a stranger answer....

4+ mon, 1+ day ago   (902+ words) Seven years into its mission, NASA’s TESS satellite has already confirmed roughly 700 exoplanets. That sounds like a lot. But the telescope watches over 2 million stars, and most signals flagged as promising have never been properly sorted. Buried in that backlog…...

4+ mon, 2+ week ago   (429+ words) For most of meteorology’s history, wind has been the atmosphere’s most uncooperative variable. Temperature reads cleanly off a thermometer and pressure off a barometer. However, the motion of the air itself has long resisted easy capture from above. A study…...

9+ mon, 2+ week ago   (244+ words) This revelation emerged from sophisticated computer modeling that analyzed temperature data, infrastructure maps, and thousands of citizen science observations from platforms like eBird. The results defied conventional wisdom about these elusive predators. Unlike barred owls expanding into new territories, great…...

9+ mon, 3+ week ago   (793+ words) Earth holds memories far older than humans. These memories rest inside ancient stones shaped by heat, pressure, and time. Many early signs of life vanished as these rocks changed deep within the crust. Yet scientists continue to search for faint…...