Is AI finally ready to replace your doctor?
Advances in artificial intelligence mean that machines can now perform certain diagnostic tasks with far better accuracy than human doctors - but the picture is more complicated than you might think ⌘ Read more

People prefer AI-generated poems to Shakespeare and Dickinson
Readers give higher ratings to AI-generated poetry than the works of poets such as William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson – perhaps because they often have more straightforward themes and simpler structure ⌘ Read more

AI helps driverless cars predict how unseen pedestrians may move
A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car ⌘ Read more

Google tool makes AI-generated writing easily detectable
Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer ⌘ Read more

Clown visits may shorten the amount of time children spend in hospital
Medical clowns, who play with children in hospitals, may help them be discharged sooner by reducing their heart rates ⌘ Read more

Falling satellite will give clues to how objects burn up on re-entry
A chance to observe the high-speed re-entry of a falling satellite will give researchers important insights on how debris burns up in our atmosphere ⌘ Read more

Windows computers around the world are failing in a major outage
An update to a piece of software called CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor appears to be negatively impacting Windows computers worldwide, with banks, airports, broadcasters and more finding that devices display a “blue screen of death” instead of booting up ⌘ Read more

Is sharing your smartphone PIN part of a healthy relationship?
Smartphones contain some of our most intimate data, but are you willing to share it with your most intimate partner? A survey has revealed that 51 per cent of people are happy to give their PIN to their partner, but other forms of data sharing are less agreeable ⌘ Read more

Silicon Valley’s top AI models are terrible at rebus wordplay puzzles
Rebus puzzles provide wordplay challenges involving both images and text, and they can confound Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI models ⌘ Read more

AI made from living human brain cells performs speech recognition
A biocomputing system consisting of living brain cells learned to recognise the voice of one individual from hundreds of sound clips ⌘ Read more

Game-playing DeepMind AI can beat top humans at chess, Go and poker
An artificial intelligence capable of beating humans at a variety of games is an important step towards a more general intelligence, says Google DeepMind ⌘ Read more

How AI avatars of the deceased could transform the way we grieve
Companies are now offering chatbots that appear to come from beyond the veil. But psychologists say this “grief tech” may interfere with the patterns of brain activity through which we adapt to loss ⌘ Read more

DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now ⌘ Read more

Terminator model has living skin made from fungus
By fusing fungi and robots, researchers hope to create a sustainable and biodegradable skin capable of sensing a variety of stimuli, as demonstrated by a model of the Terminator ⌘ Read more

GPT-4 wins chatbot lawyer contest – but is still not as good as humans
Several AI chatbots were tested to see how well they could perform legal reasoning and tasks used by human lawyers in everyday practice – GPT-4 performed the best, but still wasn’t great ⌘ Read more

Tricks for making AI chatbots break rules are freely available online
Certain prompts can encourage chatbots such as ChatGPT to ignore the rules that prevent illicit use, and they have been widely shared on social platforms ⌘ Read more

Google AI predicts floods four days early in South America and Africa
An artificial intelligence from Google can predict floods even in regions with little data on water flow, and its predictions four days in advance are as accurate as conventional systems manage for the same day ⌘ Read more

Montana lawsuit: Young people win landmark climate change case
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a court in Montana in the US sided with a group of young activists who said the state had violated their right to a “clean and healthful environment” ⌘ Read more

Could pumping CO2 under Canada’s coast cause earthquakes?
Injecting CO2 underground might increase pressure along geological faults and cause earthquakes, but a report concludes the risk is minimal for a proposed CO2 storage site near Vancouver Island ⌘ Read more

Is it possible to drill a hole straight through a planet?
Could we bore a hole through the centre of Earth? What would it be like to fling yourself through it? The Dead Planets Society podcast digs deep into the potential hazards ⌘ Read more