From ancient mythmakers to modern technologists, the idea of artificial intelligence — machines or beings with human-like thought — has captivated and unnerved people for millennia. A new historical survey shows that **stories about human-created automatons, thinking machines and artificial humans stretch back to ancient Greece, resurfacing through folklore, religion and early science fiction long ...
If the world’s climate continues warming, West Antarctica’s massive ice sheet could not only raise global sea levels but also trigger dramatic geological upheaval beneath the continent, new research suggests. Scientists studying sediment cores from the seafloor and ancient climate records have uncovered evidence that when this ice sheet collapsed repeatedly in the past, the ...
They don’t build skyscrapers; they steal them. In forests from Panama to Pennsylvania, climbing vines hitch a ride up the bodies of trees, saving energy on wood and spending it on leaves, speed, and stealth. Scientists are now piecing together the playbook behind this apparent shortcut, revealing a suite of strategies that turn tree architecture ...
Since its discovery in July 2025 as it sped through our solar system at interstellar velocities, the object known as 3I/ATLAS has ignited both scientific curiosity and wild speculation about its origins — from natural comet to hypothetical alien probe. But recent deep scanning for technosignatures, part of an international effort to test whether the ...
For the first time, scientists have created a comprehensive evolutionary tree of all known bird species, synthesizing data from nearly 300 studies published between 1990 and 2024. This groundbreaking effort provides a unified framework for understanding bird evolution, taxonomy, and ecological relationships. How Scientists Built the Evolutionary Tree Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology ...
It’s one of the strangest language detours in tech: a canned meat from the 1930s lends its name to the most irritating part of the modern internet. The story starts in a TV studio, jumps to early online chat rooms, then bursts into your inbox with industrial force. Along the way it says a lot ...
Imagine a language spoken for centuries, echoing through valleys, sung in lullabies, and woven into the stories of an entire people—suddenly silenced, nearly lost to time. That was the fate of te reo Māori, the indigenous language of Aotearoa (New Zealand), in the twentieth century. But what happens when a language refuses to vanish, fighting ...
Most nights, America’s only native marsupial slips under the radar, padding across fences and driveways like a commuter on the late shift. Yet new research and a clearer look at their biology reveal an animal that quietly solves problems humans struggle with – venom, disease, and urban waste among them. In a moment when public ...
Archaeology is supposed to move slowly, one trowel scrape at a time, yet some of the most disruptive discoveries of the past few decades have appeared where nobody thought to look: under suburbs, beneath jungle canopies, below busy streets, and even inside construction pits. Again and again, “lost cities” have surfaced in places assumed ...
You wake up with your heart racing, fingers clawing at the sheets, certain you were plummeting into the dark – and then the room snaps back into focus. That split second between dream and waking is so visceral that many people remember it for years, even though it never actually happened. Scientists have catalogued ...
