Tech
- Physics
Experiment: Make your own cents-able battery
Make your own ‘voltaic pile’ with pennies and nickels, and find out how many coins will make the most electricity!
- Materials Science
Scientists Say: Semiconductor
Modern electronics, from cell phones to video games, work thanks to these conductor-insulator hybrids.
- Artificial Intelligence
Here’s why AI like ChatGPT probably won’t reach humanlike understanding
Unlike people, this type of artificial intelligence isn’t good at learning concepts that it can apply to new situations.
- Tech
Scientists Say: Digital Footprint
Your digital footprint contains both what you post online — and information about your online activity collected by others.
- Artificial Intelligence
How to design artificial intelligence that acts nice — and only nice
Today’s bots can’t turn against us, but they can cause harm. “AI safety” aims to train this tech so it will always be honest, harmless and helpful.
- Artificial Intelligence
‘Jailbreaks’ bring out the evil side of chatbots
Researchers break chatbots in order to fix them. This so-called red-teaming is an important way to improve AI’s behavior.
- Artificial Intelligence
A new tool could guard against deepfake voice scams
Scammers can use AI to create deepfake mimics of people’s voices. AntiFake could make that type of trick much harder to pull off.
- Artificial Intelligence
AI learned how to influence humans by watching a video game
New research used the game Overcooked to show how AI can learn to collaborate with — or manipulate — us.
- Tech
Scientists Say: Bionic
This type of technology combines natural and synthetic systems. It can restore lost vision and mobility and even grant cells new abilities.
- Tech
Could we build a mecha?
In the movies, mechas come equipped with all kinds of abilities. But real giant robots would first have to master simpler actions, like walking and jumping.
- Tech
Artificial intelligence helped design a new type of battery
Supercomputing and AI cut the early discovery steps from decades to just 80 hours. The process led to a new solid electrolyte.
- Animals
Analyze This: Marsupial gliders may avoid the ground to dodge predators
It has been unclear why gliding evolved in marsupials. To search for clues, researchers strapped activity trackers to some of these cryptic creatures.
