Silicon Valley’s top AI models are terrible at rebus wordplay puzzles
Rebus puzzles provide wordplay challenges involving both images and text, and they can confound Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI models ⌘ Read more

AI made from living human brain cells performs speech recognition
A biocomputing system consisting of living brain cells learned to recognise the voice of one individual from hundreds of sound clips ⌘ Read more

Game-playing DeepMind AI can beat top humans at chess, Go and poker
An artificial intelligence capable of beating humans at a variety of games is an important step towards a more general intelligence, says Google DeepMind ⌘ Read more

How AI avatars of the deceased could transform the way we grieve
Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this “grief tech” may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss ⌘ Read more

DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now ⌘ Read more

Terminator model has living skin made from fungus
By fusing fungi and robots, researchers hope to create a sustainable and biodegradable skin capable of sensing a variety of stimuli, as demonstrated by a model of the Terminator ⌘ Read more

GPT-4 wins chatbot lawyer contest – but is still not as good as humans
Several AI chatbots were tested to see how well they could perform legal reasoning and tasks used by human lawyers in everyday practice – GPT-4 performed the best, but still wasn’t great ⌘ Read more

Tricks for making AI chatbots break rules are freely available online
Certain prompts can encourage chatbots such as ChatGPT to ignore the rules that prevent illicit use, and they have been widely shared on social platforms ⌘ Read more

Google AI predicts floods four days early in South America and Africa
An artificial intelligence from Google can predict floods even in regions with little data on water flow, and its predictions four days in advance are as accurate as conventional systems manage for the same day ⌘ Read more

Montana lawsuit: Young people win landmark climate change case
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a court in Montana in the US sided with a group of young activists who said the state had violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” ⌘ Read more

Could pumping CO2 under Canada’s coast cause earthquakes?
Injecting CO2 underground might increase pressure along geological faults and cause earthquakes, but a report concludes the risk is minimal for a proposed CO2 storage site near Vancouver Island ⌘ Read more

Is it possible to drill a hole straight through a planet?
Could we bore a hole through the centre of Earth? What would it be like to fling yourself through it? The Dead Planets Society podcast digs deep into the potential hazards ⌘ Read more

The moon’s magnetic field may have been altered by huge sinking rocks
There’s a new explanation for the moon’s former magnetic field, and it involves 60-kilometre-wide slabs of rock sinking through the lunar mantle ⌘ Read more

Largest ever fish colony hosts 100 billion eggs under Antarctic ice
In the Weddell Sea near Antarctica, scientists have found the largest colony of fish nests in the world, covering 240 square kilometres ⌘ Read more

Can electric fields help plants grow? New claims met with caution
Yields of peas grown exposed to an electric field generated by wind and rain were up 17.9 per cent, but is still remains unclear whether ‘electroculture’ really works ⌘ Read more

Largest 3D map of the universe contains 8 million galaxies
Astrophysicists hope a map created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument will help answer questions about the expansion of the universe ⌘ Read more

Astronomers may have found a huge moon around a Jupiter-like exoplanet
A confident detection of a moon orbiting a planet beyond our solar system – called an exomoon – has eluded astronomers so far, but they have found a new candidate ⌘ Read more

Fix the Planet newsletter: The race to replace meat
Meat is responsible for roughly twice the greenhouse gas emissions of plant-based food. Can we afford not to seek alternative sources of protein for our food? ⌘ Read more

Electric knee implants could help treat pain of osteoarthritis
A device that delivers electric current to the knees could help combat osteoarthritis, a painful condition caused by worn cartilage, after successful tests in rabbits ⌘ Read more

AI makes it possible to simulate 25 billion water molecules at once
Computer simulations of clouds of atoms and molecules must always trade scale for accuracy, but a new technique shows that both are possible at once using AI and clever coding ⌘ Read more

Huge gas bubble that contains the solar system mapped for first time
The solar system lies inside a structure called the Local Bubble some 1000 light years across – and a map of its surface shows it is the site of star formation ⌘ Read more

The Large Hadron Collider blips that could herald a new era of physics
Hints of a new particle carrying a fifth force of nature have been multiplying at the LHC – and many physicists are convinced this could finally be the big one ⌘ Read more

How bacteria-killing viruses are being used to keep food safe
Bacteria-killing viruses known as phages are increasingly being sprayed on food to keep them free of pathogens, and they could soon be put to work in healthcare ⌘ Read more

These are the games to look out for in 2022
This year sees no shortage of post-apocalyptic games, but light relief is available courtesy of Star Trek and a robot-loving cat, says Jacob Aron ⌘ Read more

Unusual anglerfish glows with bioluminescent and fluorescent light
We already knew that anglerfish have light-generating bacteria in their tissues – now it turns out that one species, the Pacific football fish, can also glow by fluorescing green ⌘ Read more