AI Can Book A Restaurant Or A Hair Appointment, But Don't Expect A Full Conversation

Google recently unveiled its latest talking AI, called Duplex. Duplex sounds like a real person, complete with pauses, “umms” and “ahhs”.

Last year, nearly one third of Australian adults owned a smart speaker device allowing them to call on “Alexa” or “Siri”.

The summer solstice marks the official start of summer. It brings the longest day and shortest night of the year for the 88 percent of Earth’s people who live in the Northern Hemisphere.

If a two-year-old child living in poverty in India or Bangladesh gets sick with a common bacterial infection, there is more than a 50% chance an antibiotic treatment will fail.

In the face of the virus emergency, research standards have been relaxed to encourage faster publication and mistakes become inevitable. This is risky.

Is evolution the best inventor? With hundreds of millions of years of work and the natural world as its canvas, it would seem so.

Maybe you’ve learned to dislike the smell. Maybe your socks are full of gross bacteria. Or maybe, it’s both. Our team studies the brain and sense of smell

The UK and some US states have become the latest to set out plans for easing their lockdown due to coronavirus.

Not so long ago, the concept of a fully automated store seemed something of a curiosity.

With #StayAtHome and social distancing now becoming a way of life, an increasing number of people are relying on the internet for work, education and entertainment.

Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank.

Science gets a lot of respect these days. Unfortunately, it’s also getting a lot of competition from misinformation.

On International Women’s Day, people across the world are taking part in Wikipedia edit-a-thons to address gender bias in the online encyclopedia’s biographies.

Evolution explains how all living beings, including us, came to be. It would be easy to assume evolution works by continuously adding features to organisms, constantly increasing their complexity.

The Human Genome Project was an international scientific collaboration that successfully mapped, sequenced and made publicly available the genetic content of human chromosomes – or all human DNA.

Do you need a buy a new laptop, or is it time to switch to a different device altogether?

A recent study caused arguments among scientists by arguing that the algorithms that power the site don’t help radicalise people by recommending ever more extreme videos, as has been suggested in recent years.

Cars are changing – fast. But are innovations such as autonomous and flying cars a bright new dawn, or just a wild pipe dream?

Biosolids – primarily dead bacteria – from sewage plants are usually dumped into landfills. However, they are rich in nutrients and can potentially be used as fertilizers.

With the exception of Google, there has never been a company that has had this many people using its services.

Smartphones have changed the way we inhabit public space and more specifically, how we fill our time while waiting.

Western science, in its perception of quantitative time, might eventually edge toward a dynamic concept of time (such as the Maya have). Physicists such as Fay Dowker (2018) have started to look for a way out of the concept of fixed time. Dowker says that her teacher Stephen Hawking only touched on the question of whether time really passes.

Some ads can be more than misleading – they can put your health at risk.

A genetic “clock” lets scientists estimate how long extinct creatures lived. Wooly mammoths could expect around 60 years.

Your smartphone is far more powerful than the NASA computers that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969, but it is also an energy hog. 

In 1874, science fiction author Jules Verne set out a prescient vision that has inspired governments and entrepreneurs in the 145 years since.

Using hydrogen as a clean fuel is an idea whose time may be coming. For Australia, producing hydrogen is alluring: it could create a lucrative new domestic industry and help the world achieve a carbon-free future.

Love them or hate them, smartphones have become ubiquitous in everyday life. And while they have many positive uses, people remain concerned about the potential negative harms of excessively using them – especially in children and teens. 

The fear that digital distractions are ruining our lives and friendships is widespread.

It’s hard to imagine a holiday table without bread, meat, vegetables, wine, beer or a board of French cheeses for those with more adventurous palates.

The question of whether it is genes or environment that largely shapes human behaviour has been debated for centuries.

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time.

Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society. Now it seems they have even infected science – at least the quantum realm.

The UK government plans to ban the sale of new conventional petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Clearly the plan is for all citizens to be driving electric or hybrid-electric cars, or – better still – riding bicycles.

Personalised medicine is the ability to tailor therapy to an individual patient so that, as it’s often put, the right treatment is given to the right patient at the right time.

Try to remember that last dinner you went out for. Perhaps you can remember the taste of that delicious pasta, the sounds of the jazz pianist in the corner, or that boisterous laugh from the portly gentleman three tables over.

Today’s students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Cities are fast becoming “smart”, and the impact on people’s lives can be immense. Singapore’s smart traffic cameras restrict traffic depending on volume, and ease the commute of thousands of passengers every day.

Young people hooked on their smartphones may have an increased risk for depression and loneliness, researchers report.

Australia’s first commercial installation of printed solar cells, made using specialised semiconducting inks and printed using a conventional reel-to-reel printer, has been installed on a factory roof in Newcastle.

You might already have what’s often called a “smart home”, with your lights or music connected to voice-controlled technology such as Alexa or Siri.

The short film Slaughterbots depicts a near future in which swarms of micro drones assassinate thousands of people for their political beliefs. 

The human brain sends hundreds of billions of neural signals each second. It’s an extraordinarily complex feat.

By the time he drew his self-portrait at age 45, Humboldt had tutored himself in every branch of science, spent more than five years on a 6,000-mile scientific trek through South America

The field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI) – which use electrodes, often implanted into the brain, to translate neuronal information into commands capable of controlling external systems

What do nuclear submarines, top secret military bases and private businesses have in common?

It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

If you ever find yourself looking forward to a holiday because you’ll be able to switch off your smartphone then perhaps you’re suffering from social media “technostress”.

Since scientists first figured out how to edit genes with precision using a technology called CRISPR, they’ve been grappling with when and how to do it ethically.

A new technique grows live bone to repair craniofacial injuries by attaching a 3D-printed bioreactor—basically, a mold—to a rib.

Coral reefs are critically important to the world but despite the ongoing efforts of scientists and campaigners, these stunningly beautiful ecosystems still face a variety of threats.

Young people are now fully ensconced in the digital age as it whirls around and within them.

|A general election in India, the world’s most populous democracy, seems a theoretical impossibility. 

The meat you eat, if you’re a carnivore, comes from animal muscles. But animals are composed of a lot more than just muscle. They have organs and bones that most Americans do not consume. They require food, water, space and social connections. They produce waste.

An abandoned mine shaft beneath the town of Mansfield, England is an unlikely place to shape the future of cities.

Wirelessly charging your phone, while highly convenient, risks depleting the life of devices using typical lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), report researchers.

Bill Kaysing was a former US Navy officer who worked as a technical writer for one of the rocket manufacturers for NASA’s Apollo moon missions. He claimed that he had inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landings, and many conspiracy theories about the Apollo moon landings which persist to this day can be traced back to his 1976 book...

How could a small internet service provider (ISP) in Pennsylvania cause millions of websites worldwide to go offline?

Getting out into nature may seem a world away from a maths classroom. But the beauty that surrounds us has order – and one of the world’s best codebreakers was the key to unlocking it.

The speed at which digital device usage has spread is phenomenal. Many of us are spending hours of our time each day using these devices – usually looking at screens. I’m referring to things like phones, computers, tablets, TVs, virtual reality headsets and smart watches.

According to those in the industry, and researchers too, driverless cars will totally revolutionise the way we think about individual transport.

As driverless cars become more capable and more common, they will change people’s travel habits not only around their own communities but across much larger distances.

We measure stuff all the time – how long, how heavy, how hot, and so on – because we need to for things such as trade, health and knowledge.

It is unlikely that Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old, apelike fossil from South Africa, is the direct ancestor of Homo, the genus to which modern-day humans belong, according to new research.

What does the word “nanotechnology” conjure up for you? I’ve spent the best part of a week talking about the term “nanotechnology” and whether it’s a real field, a real term or not.

Children in the study described creepy technology as something that is unpredictable or poses an ambiguous threat that might cause physical harm or threaten an important relationship.

While the look and feel of our cars has changed in the past 100 years, the way we drive them hasn’t.

You might not be able to stomach soybeans for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but the animals you eat do.

Your own voice will likely become the most significant focus for food retailers and restaurants over the next little while. 

You may remember the cute Google self-driving car. In 2014, the tech giant announced their brand-new prototype of what the future of transportation might one day look like.

There’s a lot of talk about digital technology and smartcities, but what about smart farms?

Wildlife populations are declining globally, but it’s not all doom and gloom. We’re in the midst of an exciting time for UK mammals.

When artificial intelligence systems start getting creative, they can create great things – and scary ones. 

An almost invisible electronic device used all over the world – best known to much of the public for helping reunite lost pets and their owners...

The ancestors of modern birds were the sole survivors of one of the most severe mass extinction events in the history of the world. Today, 10,000 known bird species exist, all of them the descendants of dinosaurs.

Do human beings have a magnetic sense? Biologists know other animals do. They think it helps creatures including bees, turtles and birds navigate through the world.

One of the most attractive things about driverless cars is their potential to free up the time spent driving from A to B. People travelling by driverless cars will be able to spend their time by working or reading, instead of focused on the road, driving.

Bioethicist Matthew Liao is open to genetic engineering in theory, but he says he was rather horrified to learn that twin girls had been born in China after a researcher genetically modified their embryos to resist HIV infection.

The Fabrication City concept puts manufacturing back in the hands of communities — using 3D printers.

The part of the brain that processes visual information, the visual cortex, evolved over the course of millions of years in a world where reading and writing didn’t exist.

In most of the trillion cells that make up our bodies, 23 pairs of chromosomes store the vital strands of DNA needed to make our bodies grow and function properly. But if the amount of genetic material within our cells is a bit too much or too little, then this can potentially interfere with normal development.

“An evil suicide game” was how one newspaper described the “Momo challenge”, a so-called game that supposedly involved children receiving a series of threatening and increasingly dangerous instructions from an anonymous contact on their smartphone.

The gambler, the quantum physicist and the juror all reason about probabilities: the probability of winning, of a radioactive atom decaying, of a defendant’s guilt.

Is your face long? Wide? Big nose? Small ears? High forehead? It’s our faces that characterise how the world sees us, and how we recognise our close friends and family

A colleague of mine, a roboticist, recently proclaimed that if one could teleoperate the robot he developed in his lab, it could hold down a desk job.

Official figures are produced to serve particular ends. Their names are mere labels, with no connection to infallible underlying stable properties. Most of the time, the statistics that politicians and the media quote do not reveal scientific facts.

Mismatch between biological sex and gender identity, culminating in its severest form as gender dysphoria, has been ascribed to mental disease, family dysfunction and childhood trauma.

Never in the history of the mobile phone has there been so much hype about a new technology ahead of its launch than there is with 5G.

Suppose you toss a coin and get four heads in a row – what do you think will come up on the fifth toss? Many of us have a gut feeling that a tails is due. This feeling is called the Gambler’s Fallacy.

Has there ever been an invention so integral to our lives, and so intimate, as the smartphone? Yet they are slippery things.

I teach measurement – the quantification of things. Some people think this is the most objective of the sciences; just numbers and observations, or what many people call objective facts.

For thousands of years humans turned to nature to cure and soothe their ills. Modern science built on these ancient foundations and the “natural product discovery” programmes established by pharmaceutical companies provided us with medicines that could treat cancer, infections and more.

The Internet of Things is a popular vision of objects with internet connections sending information back and forth to make our lives easier and more comfortable.

Many Americans find themselves bombarded by expert advice to limit their screen time and break their addictions to digital devices – including enforcing and modeling this restraint for the children in their lives.

When we consider interspecies communication we usually think in terms of human-creature exchanges or interactions in which some kind of relationship has been established. But it is not uncommon for us to experience an interaction with members of the plant kingdom...

Today, the scientific community is aghast at the prospect of gene editing to create “designer” humans.

What the internet looks like to users in the U.S. can be quite different from the online experience of people in other countries.

We’re squandering increasing amounts of time distracted by our phones. And that’s taking a serious toll on our mental and physical well-being.

Many of us have had the experience of arriving in an unfamiliar city and needing to get to a specific destination – whether it’s checking in at a hotel, meeting a friend at a local brewery, or navigating to a meeting on time.

One reason women tend to be absent from narratives of science is because it’s not as easy to find female scientists on the public record.