Robot Ships

It sounds like science fiction. Ocean-going ships with no-one on board. But this vision of the future is coming - and sooner than you might think.

You can glimpse it in a Norwegian fjord where a huge, lime-green vessel is being put through its paces. At first glance, it seems like any other ship. Look closer, though, and you suddenly see all the hi-tech kit. Cameras, microphones, radars, GPS and all manner of satellite communications.

"We've added a lot of additional equipment and designed her especially to be what we call 'robotic'," says Colin Field, the head of remote systems at US-UK company Ocean Infinity (OI).

The ship is part of OI's new "Armada" - a fleet eventually of 23 vessels - that will survey the seabed for offshore wind farm operators and check underwater infrastructure for the oil and gas industry.  READ MORE...

Earth's Largest Desert Sands

The age of one of Earth's largest and most complex types of sand dune has been calculated for the first time.

Star dunes - or pyramid dunes - are named after their distinctive shapes and reach hundreds of metres in height.

They are found in Africa, Asia and North America, as well as on Mars - but experts had never before been able to put a date on when they were formed.

Now scientists have discovered that a dune called Lala Lallia in Morocco formed 13,000 years ago.

Star dunes are created by opposing winds that change direction. Understanding their age helps scientists understand those winds and unpick the climate of that era, says Prof Geoff Duller at the University of Aberystwyth, who published the research with Prof Charles Bristow at Birkbeck University.   READ MORE...

Antimatter

It's extremely rare and usually exists for just 142 billionths of a second.

Positronium can generate huge amounts of energy. It can shed light on 'antimatter' which existed at the beginning of the Universe, and studying it could revolutionise physics, cancer treatment, and maybe even space travel.

But until now the elusive substance has been almost impossible to analyse because its atoms move around so much.

Now scientists have a workaround - freezing it with lasers.

"Physicists are in love with positronium," said Dr Ruggero Caravita, who led the research at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), near Geneva. "It is the perfect atom to do experiments with antimatter."     READ MORE...

Improving Your Life in 2024

The start of a new year is a time for making changes and resolutions to improve your health and wellbeing. We look at some of the best tips that science has to offer.  With the arrival of another new year, you might be reflecting on what you'd like to achieve and the kind of person you want to be over the next 12 months.

But while roughly a third of us plan to make resolutions or set goals for ourselves in 2024, sticking to them is quite another matter. In previous years, surveys have revealed between 17% and 45% of us abandon these attempts after just the first month. The majority of people quit their resolutions by the middle of the year, according to one study. (Although if a recent YouGov poll is to be believed, Americans were somewhat better at sticking to their resolutions last year, with only 16% of resolution-makers giving up before the end of the year.)

These failures can lead to what some psychologists describe as an annual cycle of "false hope syndrome". Instead, there's some evidence that it might be better to set goals that are more achievable. Research suggests that approach-orientated goals – those that are realistic, specific and where success can be easily measured – tend to be more successful than those that focus on abstaining or avoiding something, such as giving up smoking or drinking.  READ MORE...

The Unusual

BBC | Zaria Gorvett. Tyrian purple was the most valuable color in the world for hundreds of years until its recipe vanished. Using ancient clues, one man embarked on a 16-year quest to resurrect this legendary dye. (Read)

Atavist | Lily Hyde. The story of three Ukrainian women from two generations of the same family who all became pregnant a few weeks apart, before a war came between them. (Read)

Walking Backwards is Good for One's Health

During the 19th Century, the activity of "retro-walking" was little more than an eccentric hobby, but today research is revealing it can have real benefits for your health and brain.

On an apparent wager to win $20,000 (about £4,250 at the time), a 50-year-old cigar-shop owner called Patrick Harmon embarked on a curious challenge in the summer of 1915 – he planned to walk backwards from San Francisco to New York City.

With the aid of a friend and a small car mirror attached to his chest to help him see where he was going, Harmon made the 3,900 miles (6,300km) journey in 290 days, apparently walking every step backwards. Harmon claimed the journey made his ankles so strong that "it would take a sledge hammer blow to sprain them".  READ MORE...

Russia Against LGBT Movement

Russia's justice ministry has filed a motion with the country's Supreme Court to ban the activities of what it calls the "international LGBT public movement" as extremist.

It is unclear whether the ministry's statement refers to the LGBT community as a whole or specific organisations.

It said the movement had shown signs of "extremist activity", including inciting "social and religious strife".

The ban could leave any LGBT activist vulnerable to criminal prosecution.  The extremist label has been used in the past by Russian authorities against rights organizations and opposition groups such as Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation.  READ MORE...

Artificial Intelligence on the Production LIne

As Doritos, Walkers and Wotsits speed along a conveyor belt at Coventry's PepsiCo factory - where some of the UK's most popular crisps are made - the noise of whirring machinery is almost deafening.

But here, it's not just human workers trying to hear signs of machine failure above the factory fray.

Sensors attached to equipment are also listening out for indications of hardware faults, having been trained to recognise sounds of weary machines that risk bringing production lines to a grinding halt.

PepsiCo is deploying these sensors, created by tech firm Augury and powered by artificial intelligence (AI), across its factories following a successful US trial.   
The company is one of many exploring how AI can increase factory efficiency, reduce waste and get products onto shelves sooner.     READ MORE...

Women of the Silk Road

The raiders came from the north. They came on horseback, the skilled bowmen shooting powerful arrows with expert precision. They ruined and burned the crops, which the Han Chinese villagers living on China's northern frontiers in about 200 BCE tended to with great attention. The Han Chinese called the invaders "Xiongnu", which meant "fierce slave", a pejorative term aimed to emphasize the barbarians' "inferiority".     READ MORE...

Thirteen-Metre Waves

Australian surfer Laura Enever has set a world record for riding the largest wave ever paddled into by a woman.

The 31-year-old tamed the 43.6ft (13.3m) beast in January at a break nicknamed the Himalayas in Oahu, Hawaii.

It beat the previous record - which stood for seven years - by only a foot.

Paddling-in involves entering waves unassisted. It is distinct from a tow-in, in which surfers are pulled by jet-ski so they can access bigger waves.  READ MORE...

Quietly Arming Taiwan

When US President Joe Biden recently signed off on a $80m grant to Taiwan for the purchase of American military equipment, China said it "deplores and opposes" what Washington had done.

To the casual observer it didn't appear a steep sum. It was less than the cost of a single modern fighter jet. Taiwan already has on order more than $14bn worth of US military equipment. Does a miserly $80m more matter?  READ MORE...

Robots Doing House Chores

Imagine the biggest market for a physical product you can. Are you thinking of mobile phones? Cars? Property?


They are all chunky markets but in the coming decades a new product will be rolled out that will dwarf those giants, says Geordie Rose, the chief executive of Sanctuary AI.


The Vancouver-based firm is developing a humanoid robot called Phoenix which, when complete, will understand what we want, understand the way the world works and have the skills to carry out our commands.


"The long term total addressable market is the biggest one that's ever existed in the history of business and technology - which is the labour market. It's all of the things we want done," he says.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves, he qualifies that statement: "There is a long way to go from where we are today."


Mr Rose is unwilling to put a time frame on when a robot might be in your house, doing your laundry or cleaning the bathroom. But others I have spoken to in the sector say it could be within ten years.


Dozens of other firms around the world are working on the technology.


In the UK, Dyson is investing in AI and robotics aimed at household chores.   READ MORE...

Driven to Extinction Will be our Fault

Sam Altman, chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind and Dario Amodei of Anthropic have all supported the statement.

The Centre for AI Safety website suggests a number of possible disaster scenarios:

AIs could be weaponised - for example, drug-discovery tools could be used to build chemical weapons

AI-generated misinformation could destabilise society and "undermine collective decision-making"

The power of AI could become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, enabling "regimes to enforce narrow values through pervasive surveillance and oppressive censorship"

Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"

Dr Geoffrey Hinton, who issued an earlier warning about risks from super-intelligent AI, has also supported the Centre for AI Safety's call.

Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the university of Montreal, also signed.

Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and NYU Professor Yann LeCun are often described as the "godfathers of AI" for their groundbreaking work in the field - for which they jointly won the 2018 Turing Award, which recognises outstanding contributions in computer science.

But Prof LeCun, who also works at Meta, has said these apocalyptic warnings are overblown tweeting that "the most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming".     READ MORE...

Suppressing China Will Not Make American Great

China's foreign minister says China-US relations have "seriously deviated" while warning of potential conflict.

"Containment and suppression will not make America great. It will not stop the rejuvenation of China," said Qin Gang. (above)

Mr Qin, China's former ambassador to the US, held his first press conference as foreign minister on Tuesday.

The spy balloon saga has heightened tensions between the superpowers despite recent efforts to improve ties.

"It [the US] regards China as its primary rival and the most consequential geopolitical challenge. This is like the first button in the shirt being put wrong," said Mr Qin, speaking on the sidelines of the annual meeting of China's parliament in Beijing.

The foreign minister was responding to a question on whether a healthy China-US relationship was still possible as differences between the countries grew.

The US called for establishing "guardrails", but what it really wants is for China to not hit back with words or actions when provoked, Mr Qin added.

He was referring to US President Joe Biden's comments last month that the US would "compete fully with China but [is] not looking for conflict".

Mr Qin said: "If the US does not put on the brakes and continues to roar down the wrong road, no amount of guardrails can stop the derailment and overturning, and it is bound to fall into conflict and confrontation. Who will bear its disastrous consequences?"

He also said the diplomatic crisis caused by the balloon incident could have been averted but the US acted with "the presumption of guilt".

Washington has previously described the suspected spy balloon as a "clear violation of US sovereignty". Beijing admitted the object belonged to them, but said it was a civilian airship blown off-course.  READ MORE...

ASML Makes the Machines that Make the Chips

From the outside it looks like an ordinary corporate building, lots of glass and steel, but this factory in the south of the Netherlands belongs to ASML, and the machines made there are anything but ordinary.


In fact, the technology is so advanced and so much in demand, that ASML has become Europe's most valuable technology firm.


So what is made there?


ASML designs and makes the machines which make computer chips - but not any old computer chips.


ASML machines make the most advanced computer chips and it's the only company in the world with that kind of technology.


This effective monopoly means that exactly how ASML's machines work is subject to some of the most stringent corporate security in the world.


Nevertheless, we were given a tour of its plant, and were guided through the basics.

IMAGE SOURCE,ASMLImage caption,  This illustration shows the complex interior of an ASML 

EUV machine - the extreme ultraviolet light is in purple


Microchips are made by building up complex patterns of transistors, or miniature electrical switches, layer by layer, on a silicon wafer.


They are printed using a lithography system, where light is projected through a blueprint of the pattern of those miniature switches.


The light is then shrunk and focussed using advanced optics and the pattern is etched onto a photosensitive silicon wafer.


That pattern forms the circuitry of a silicon chip, that might end up in a computer, phone or any other electrical device you might care to mention.


The crucial aspect of ASML's most advanced machines is that they can work at tiny scales by generating super fine extreme ultraviolet light - just 13.5 nanometres.  READ MORE...

Searching for Missing Genomes

Enormous strides have been made to unravel the secrets of the human genome, so why are we missing the genetic information of most of the planet?

In the summer of 2020, a 63-year-old African American woman with colon cancer was treated with a common chemotherapy known as fluoropyrimidines at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland. But over the coming weeks, she began to develop a severe side-effect known as pancytopenia – a rapid and sudden decrease of red and white blood cells and platelets – causing her to be rushed into intensive care.

This kind of reaction is surprisingly common. Around 38,000 cancer patients in England and approximately 154,000 patients in the US are initiated on fluoropyrimidine-based treatments every year. While fluoropyrimidines help save lives, between 20% and 30% of the people who receive these drugs require lower doses, because their bodies struggle to process them. If given the standard dose, they experience reactions which can vary from severe to fatal.

Like many adverse drug reactions, this is thought to be at least in part due to variations in the human genome, the strings of billions of letters or chemical bases which comprise our DNA. But while all humans share 99.9% of our genome, the remaining 0.1% varies markedly from one individual to another, or between ethnic groups. Differences in the underlying sequence behind a particular gene – which can be anything from a few hundred to several million bases – can have profound and far-reaching consequences for our health.

In recent years, genetic-sequencing studies have started to get to the bottom of why some people react so badly to fluoropyrimidines, pinpointing four different variations of a gene called DPYD which is involved in metabolism, as the likely cause. Healthcare systems around the world have now begun sequencing the DNA of certain cancer patients and screening for each of these four variants before determining their chemotherapy dose.

The only problem is that these studies were done entirely on white people, or as geneticists say, "individuals of European ancestry". While different variants of DPYD may serve as warning signs for people of other ethnicities, we do not have enough data to be sure of which variants are most applicable to different ethnic groups. "Ethnic minority patients will usually be given conventional doses of the drugs," says Munir Pirmohamed, a pharmacologist at the University of Liverpool in the UK. "Some of these patients will carry other ethnic-specific variants which also affect their ability to metabolise these drugs, but we do not currently genotype for those, largely because we do not know."  READ MORE...

FBI Says COVID Leaked From Chinese Lab

FBI Director Christopher Wray (above) has said that the bureau believes Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.  "The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident," he told Fox News.


It is the first public confirmation of the FBI's classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged.  Many scientists point out there is no evidence that it leaked from a lab.  And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.


Some of them have said - but with a low level of certainty - that the virus did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans.  The White House has said there is no consensus across the US government on the origins.  A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) investigation in 2021 called the lab leak theory "extremely unlikely".


However, the WHO investigation was deeply criticised and its director-general has since called for a new inquiry, saying: "All hypotheses remain open and require further study."  Mr Wray's comments come a day after the US ambassador to China called for the country to "be more honest" about Covid's origins.


In his interview on Tuesday, Mr Wray said China "has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate" efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic.  He said details of the agency's investigation were classified but the FBI had a team of experts focusing on the dangers of biological threats.


In response, Beijing accused Washington of "political manipulation".  "The conclusions they have reached have no credibility to speak of," said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.  Some studies suggest the virus made the leap from animals to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly at the city's seafood and wildlife market.


The market is near a world-leading virus laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research into coronaviruses.  READ MORE...

Gaming Capital of the World

Think of the cities of the world which are renowned as hotbeds of innovative technology and Helsinki might not be near the top of the list.  However, the often snow-covered streets of this relatively quiet northern European capital are home to some of the most ambitious and successful games makers in the world.


The first Angry Bird was flicked across the screen of an iPad in Helsinki, it's home of major games studios like Clash of Clans maker Supercell, and is also the place Netflix has chosen to set up its first ever internal gaming studio. "Why Helsinki? It is home to some of the best game talent in the world," the streamer has said.  As a result of all this, the Finnish capital is considered by many to be the capital of mobile gaming, an industry currently worth an estimated £120bn to the global economy.


Which leads to an obvious question, how did it develop this reputation?  In the 1980s and 1990s, Finland wasn't considered to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world.  Much of the population relied on computers that were far from top of the range. The restrictions that came with that would help fuel what was known as the "demoscene" - a subculture which saw programmers create art presentations, music and games that pushed the technology of the time to the limits of its power.


Finns became used to doing a lot with very little, and then along came Nokia.  Sonja Ängeslevä, CEO of Phantom Gamelabs, which is based in Helsinki, says this foundation is a significant reason behind the success of the games industry in the city today: "Nokia showed an example that we could build something big from here," she explains.


As a games maker, board member of the successful console developer Remedy games and the founder of a new development studio, Sonja knows the Finnish games sector inside out.  READ MORE...

The Spying Game

The latest controversy to swirl around the Chinese telecoms company Huawei has shone a spotlight on the murky world of Chinese espionage, agent-recruitment and an ambitious programme of extending its influence across the globe.

So how extensive is it, how does it work and who runs it?

A dossier reportedly compiled with the help of a former MI6 spy has accused China of trying to manipulate key UK figures, including politicians, to back the telecom giant's business in Britain.

Every major Chinese enterprise anywhere in the world allegedly has an internal "cell" answerable to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to drive the political agenda and ensure that the company is compliant with political directives.

This is why China experts assert that the CCP does operate here in Britain, often under the natural cover of business. "The Party machine is everywhere", says one, adding: "For China, business is inseparable from politics."

The CCP has 93 million members, with many of them placed or hidden in organisations abroad. This allows them to be tasked with gathering secrets, especially in the technology sphere, including telecoms.

Experts say these "agents", as well as targeted individuals in important positions in foreign companies, can be recruited or persuaded using a number of different methods.

Setting honeytraps
The first approach is usually what is known as "a positive incentive", especially if the targeted individual is a non-Chinese national.

In the West this can take the form of a tempting invitation to an important business meeting in China, an offer of financial help for a company facing difficulties, or the offer of a (sometimes meaningless) seat on a board as a non-executive director or even in some cases a life-changing sum of money.

In the last 10 to 15 years there has been an increasing readiness to target well-placed foreigners with positive incentives.  READ MORE...

Yahoo To Lay Off Workers

Yahoo plans to lay off more than 20% of its total 8,600 workforce as part of a major restructuring.  The veteran tech company is reorganising its advertising unit, which will lose more than half of the department by the end of the year.  Nearly 1,000 employees will be affected by the cuts by the end of the week.

Yahoo is the latest tech firm to announce job losses as firms struggle with a downturn in demand, high inflation and rising interest rates.  "These decisions are never easy, but we believe these changes will simplify and strengthen our advertising business for the long run, while enabling Yahoo to deliver better value to our customers and partners," a spokesperson told the BBC.

Yahoo, which has been owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management since a $5bn buyout in 2021, added that the move would enable the company to narrow its focus and investment on its flagship ad business called DSP, or demand-side platform.

Advertising changes
The layoffs are part of a broader effort by the company to streamline operations in Yahoo's advertising unit.  It comes as many advertisers have pared back their marketing budgets in response to record-high inflation rates and continued uncertainty about a recession.  The re-focus signals an intention by the firm to stop competing directly against the likes of Google and Facebook's Meta for digital advertising dominance.

The Yahoo spokesperson added: "The new division will be called - simply - Yahoo Advertising.  "In redoubling our efforts on the DSP on an omni-channel basis, we will prioritise support for our top global customers and re-launch dedicated ad sales teams towards Yahoo's owned and operated properties - including Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports and more."  READ MORE...