LearningBD

Scientists have finally gotten to the bottom of why astronauts struggle to poop in space, thanks to a new blood test. The findings also reveal an unexpected side effect of this cosmic constipation that may need to be addressed before humans take long-haul trips to Mars and beyond, the study authors say. As soon as […]

One does not need a doctorate in mathematics to split 12 eager trivia buffs into two competitive teams. But consider that each person arrives with unique strengths and liabilities: One may be a geography obsessive with no ear for music, another could be a naturalist who doesn’t own a television, and another could be a

The dream of coming home to a spotless kitchen you didn’t have to clean yourself is edging closer to reality. We’re used to seeing robotic vacuums cleaning our floors — but what about all our other chores? Humanoid robots are being engineered to take care of more complex tasks around the house, from folding laundry

NASA’s Swift Observatory is set to come crashing down to Earth later this year after a private mission failed to save the tumbling telescope. A rescue spacecraft named LINK, which was designed by private company Katalyst Space, launched on July 3 with the aim of raising the falling observatory to a higher orbit. However, in

When an LLM answers a question, is it reasoning like humans, or just producing text that looks like reasoning? The distinction isn’t just philosophical, this determines what we can trust AI to do, how closely we need to supervise it, and ultimately what its real-world impact will turn out to be. Melanie Mitchell at the

Cats can identify each other based on the scent of their pee, and researchers have just decoded the secret “messages” that make that possible. A group of chemicals called branched-chain fatty acids (BFAs) help give cats their unique scent marks, a new study found. Unusual fat droplets in the cats’ kidneys likely help them maintain

IBM has revealed a new modular, ultracold system designed to link hundreds of quantum computer chips together to solve one of the field’s biggest infrastructure bottlenecks. The company says its new “quantum fridges” will let it deliver the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer in 2029. These stable systems use quantum error correction techniques to fix

Practically all modern computers, from the cheap microcontroller in your dishwasher to high-tech hardware crunching numbers for artificial intelligence systems, rely on versions of the same technology: slabs of silicon patterned with microscopic structures called transistors. Electronic circuits containing transistors can rapidly and reliably toggle between two states, usually labeled “0” and “1.” That enables