Category: 7. SciTech

A little over 5 million years ago, water from the Atlantic Ocean found a way through the present-day Strait of Gibraltar. According to this…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Large language models work well because they’re so large. The latest models from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek use hundreds of billions of “parameters”—the adjustable knobs that determine connections among data and get tweaked…

The bitter bracket fungus, Amaropostia stiptica, is probably not available at your local farmer’s market, and if you didn’t get the hint from its name, it’s because it tastes really, really terrible.

In fact, this bracket fungus is so bitter that a team of gustatory physiologists and…

Find it difficult to do several things at once? First, the good news is you’re not alone – most people are terrible at task-switching. Secondly (and in even more good news), psychologists have been studying it for decades to figure out why.

In an ideal world, we’d focus on one task at a…

A new theoretical study suggests that the mysterious force driving the accelerated expansion of the universe—known as dark energy—may actually be rooted in a deeply quantum structure of space-time. This new preprint study could finally provide us with long-sought-after evidence…

Bacteria is amazing. We’ve found bacteria we’ve never seen on the ISS, and even bacteria that can eat forever chemicals. But what do you get when you combine a Raspberry Pi, 12 motorized arms, and some microbial inspiration? A bacteria-inspired robot named ZodiAq that swims using…

You’ve probably seen the videos as you scroll through your social media feed: It starts with a cat minding their own business, calmly eating kibble or wet food. Behind the feline, however, sits a…

In a world of calorie-counting fitness trackers and workouts promising to ‘shred your belly fat’, we’ve grown used to the idea that exercise equals weight loss. The more miles on the treadmill, the more calories you burn, the more weight you stand to lose… right? 

Not necessarily. 

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For most of us, a fast car is just a tool to get us from A to B – to pick the kids up from school or procure the weekly shop. For others, however, it’s about getting to B with a grin on their face and their ears still ringing – the groceries, inevitably, left behind (though maybe not the…