With the biggest event in the soccer calendar now underway, fans are speculating on which team might emerge victorious from the 2018 World Cup in Russia – and an artificial intelligence model based on 100,000 simulations has made its prediction too. Using a database of statistics from previous tournaments, and three different AI methods to

Scientists have made a breakthrough that could open the doors to a whole new way of producing nuclear fuel, and they did it using nothing but the power of the ocean – or at least the chemicals floating inside it. Researchers in the US used a specially designed yarn to extract natural trace amounts of

Most of us are used to technology predicting the words we want to type. Soon this kind of software will be able to look even further into the future to predict actions we’ve barely considered ourselves. This isn’t some creepy Minority Report style of precognition. Not yet at least. But it could see us get

Remember Elon Musk’s Not-A-Flamethrower – a propane-fuelled, oversized barbecue starter that looks more like a modified Nerf gun? It might have been a joke when Musk first posted about it on Instagram in January, but it got deadly serious when 20,000 people pre-ordered it. On Saturday, the first wave of 1,000 people have received their

Every second, millions of emails, clicks, and searches happen via the world wide web with such fluidity that the internet seems almost omnipresent. As such, people often mistakenly assume that internet traffic happens by air – our mobile devices, after all, aren’t wired to anything. But satellites carry less than 1 percent of human interactions,

When it comes to future challenges, one of the biggest will be water scarcity – on a warming planet we’re going to have plenty of seawater, but not enough fresh, clean water in the right places for everybody to drink. And while a lot of research has focussed on desalination, a team of scientists have

One of the most important dating tools used in archaeology may sometimes give misleading data, new study shows – and it could change whole historical timelines as a result. The discrepancy is due to significant fluctuations in the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and it could force scientists to rethink how they use ancient

The greatest mystery in aviation history will keep its secrets for now with the search for the wreckage of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 ending this week without success. Ocean Infinity, the US-based technology company which began a supplementary search for the Malaysian government at the start of 2018 on a no-find, no-fee basis, failed to

Batteries powered by radioactive materials have been around for more than a century, but what they promise in power they usually lose in bulk. Not so with a new kind of power source, which combines a novel structure with a nickel isotope to pack ten times more power than an electrochemical cell of the same

Powering cold, hard mechanics with muscle tissue is a promising idea that so far hasn’t delivered awe-inspiring results. But a new way to grow muscles and attach them to a frame could help overcome existing hurdles, resulting in a biological hybrid device that isn’t just stronger than previous attempts, but lasts longer as well. Engineers

We’re really bad at choosing passwords. According to a new study by a researcher at Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a popular password manager service, most users make the same mistakes when making passwords, such as making their password the name of a popular brand or sports team. And while these things make passwords easy to

Do you have a right to know if you’re talking to a bot? How about the bot? Does it have the right to keep that information from you? Those questions have been stirring in the minds of many since well before Google demoed Duplex, a human-like AI that makes phone calls on a user’s behalf,

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love being able to say “Alexa, play me some bangers”, and those who got one targeted advertisement too many and are paranoid that their smart devices are always listening. Recent news, unfortunately, gives some more credence to the latter. A few weeks ago, a

Microsoft is the latest tech company to try and tackle algorithmic bias — that is, artificial intelligence that was fed subpar data and came to mirror society’s own prejudices or unfair perspectives. The company wants to create a tool that will detect and alert people to AI algorithms that may be treating them based on

The hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI could cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity. Just looking at the media headlines, you might think that we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every