Korean Database Rebuild Aims to Cure AI’s Habit of Making Things Up
Ask an AI assistant what a new beekeeper needs to know, and it will happily oblige. Handle the hive bodies, watch for swarming, learn the rhythms of the colony through the seasons. Plausible enough. The trouble starts when the question…
Years on Instagram May Loosen Your Brain’s Grip on Which Face Is Yours
Put on a virtual reality headset, watch a stranger’s cheek being stroked while a researcher strokes your own in perfect time, and something strange happens. The other face starts to feel like yours. Not metaphorically. The brain, fed matching signals…
Food Waste Becomes Jet Fuel Good Enough to Fly On Its Own
Scrape the plates from a city’s worth of dinners, slurry it into a continuous reactor, and hold it in water at 280 degrees and pressures that would crush a submarine. Wait half an hour. What pours out the other end…
Ice Cream Ingredient Lets Builders Print Walls Out of Dirt
A nozzle moves back and forth over a print bed, laying down ribbons of wet earth, one 8-millimetre layer at a time. The wall it builds leans outward as it rises, tilting past 60 degrees, steeper than the Leaning Tower…
A Herpes Vaccine That Works by Stationing Immune Cells at the Front Door
The virus comes in through the vaginal lining and wastes no time. Within hours, herpes simplex virus 2 has slipped into nerve endings, riding them up into the dense clusters of cells near the base of the spine, where it…
New Solid Material Turns Ordinary Sunlight Into High-Energy UV Light
Two cups of warm water will never give you one cup of boiling water. Pour them together and you get a larger volume of lukewarm water, nothing more. The energy simply does not pool that way. And yet, down at…
Scratched Contact Lenses Heal Themselves Under an Hour of UV Light
A razor blade dragged across a soft contact lens leaves a gouge about a third of the way through it, deep enough to scatter light and catch the eye. Shine ultraviolet light on that same lens for an hour, at…
A Bandage That Makes Its Own Gas Could Help Stubborn Wounds Heal
A blister on the heel. A small cut that catches on a sock. For most of us these are nothing, gone in a week and forgotten. For someone with diabetes, the same small breach in the skin can sit open…
Microneedles Mimic a Carnivorous Plant to Heal Diabetic Wounds
The needles start out straight, packed in a tidy array no wider than a fingertip. Press the patch onto warm skin and they begin to move. Within two minutes they have hooked themselves into a coil, like dozens of tiny…
Trained on 2,216 Recipes, AI Built a Burger That Beat the Big Mac
The machine had never tasted anything. It had never smelled a grill, never felt the give of a bun, never known whether salt belonged anywhere near beef. What it had was 2,216 burger recipes, scraped and tidied from the sprawl…
