Her deft fingers tapped silently in the air. They had been designed to play melodies, despite never having met a piano. From the storage shed’s dusty window, she watched the newer pianist on the gorgeous grand piano in the main parlour, dreaming it was her playing instead. How could they know this other pianist played
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.Credit: Christopher Michel (CC BY-SA 4.0) I vividly remember the first time I read one of Francis Halzen’s papers about high-energy neutrinos. It was the late 1990s, and I was an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. The field of astroparticle physics was young, and Halzen was making
Screening of mouse hippocampus cells (pictured) identified an enzyme whose production rose with age. Credit: Talley Lambert/Science Photo Library An enzyme found in the brain could help to preserve cognitive resilience with advancing age, according to research in mice, humans and cells1. Researchers found that high levels of the enzyme are linked to low levels
The protein catalogue gives a dynamic picture of the mitochondria, beyond what was known from humans and yeast. Credit: Dr David Furness/Keele University/SPL Scientists have mapped in unprecedented detail the proteins that make up the mitochondria in six organisms — five single-celled parasites and one plant — spanning the eukaryotic tree of life. The findings,
Enigma machines were used by the German armed forces to encrypt communications during the Second World War.Credit: Ullstein Bild via Getty Carter Leffen couldn’t believe his eyes when the artificial-intelligence model GPT-6 Astra decoded a secret German army message that had been encrypted for 85 years. Leffen, who has no cryptography experience, asked the model
PhD students are increasingly using AI to help write their dissertations.Credit: Ginaellen/Getty Roughly 30% of PhD dissertations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the United States this year contained AI-generated text, according to a working paper1 that reviewed the abstracts submitted to an online database since 2019. What’s more, the working paper, which
