Aedan O'Brien

Having insults hurled our way is never going to do wonders for our self-esteem, but it turns out that disparaging remarks can cut us even when they’re delivered by a robot. You might think that critical comments from robots – droids only saying what they’ve been programmed to say, with no consciousness or feelings of

A new startup backed by Bill Gates says it has managed to harness solar energy to greater effect than ever before, generating enough heat from a field of mirrored panels to drive the production of cement, steel and glass – processes that are usually reliant on fossil fuels.   In keeping with our modern age,

It took just 2 1/2 hours for the Titanic to sink after it collided with an iceberg in 1912. Before the disaster, the ship was said to be unsinkable thanks to the design of its below-deck compartments. But the Titanic’s engineers hadn’t anticipated that a disaster would puncture six of those compartments.   More than

Next to the famous Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, is an abandoned coal mine protecting a different kind of resource against the end of the world: all of GitHub’s open source code.   Now, if the world ends, whatever survivors crawl out of the ashes will be able to access and use the software

Artificial intelligence is already making great strides forward, but taking it to the next level might require a more drastic approach. According to two researchers, we could try giving AI a sense of peril and the fragility of its own existence.   For now, the machines we code don’t have a sense of their own

You might take it for granted that you can load up Twitter or browse through Reddit whenever you like, but around half of the 7.7 billion people living on the planet right now aren’t yet able to get online.   And that’s a big problem, according to one researcher. Merten Reglitz, a philosopher and global

What is the deadliest weapon of the 20th century? Perhaps you think first of the atomic bomb, estimated to have killed as many as 200,000 people when the United States dropped two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.   But another weapon is responsible for far more deaths – numbering up

Cupid was late this year. More than eight months late. Hundreds of people reported on social media that overnight on November 8 they had received texts from partners, employers and even dead family members that were originally meant to arrive in February. Many were sent on Valentine’s Day.   Alana Johnson, a children’s librarian at

There is no doubt that climate change is a very serious (and worsening) problem. According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), even if all the industrialized nations of the world became carbon neutral overnight, the problem would continue to get worse.   In short, it’s not enough to stop

Software detected the woman almost six seconds before Uber’s self-driving car struck her, investigators say, in the crash that would lead to her death and prompt the ride-share giant to slam the brakes on its autonomous vehicle testing.   But the SUV didn’t start to stop until about a second before impact. One big reason:

Electron microscopes are great at producing high-resolution images of a material’s atomic structure – if the material is hard, that is. Unfortunately, the devices’ electron beams can destroy softer materials, so scientists typically rely on X-rays, which can’t reach atomic resolution, to image those.   But scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National

When it comes to squeezing maximum amounts of energy out of the daylight hours, plants have a head start thanks to evolution. Now, engineers have designed solar panels that mimic the sunflower’s sun-chasing talent, through clever use of nanotechnology.   By moulding temperature-sensitive materials into thin, supportive structures, scientists have come up with tiny ‘stems’

Smart speakers have become a home addition for many, but the choice requires some vigilance over potential security breaches. Now, researchers have shown that hackers could get these small devices to do their bidding without making a single noise.   Devices running Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Siri were all shown to be vulnerable to

It’s the closest thing we’ve seen to real-life Transformers: robotic blocks that can travel independently, attach themselves to each other in predefined structures, follow paths and light sources, and more.   MIT researchers just released video footage of these new M-Blocks 2.0 cubes in action, and we can’t stop watching. They can shuffle themselves into

California has been caught in the midst of a fiery assault fueled by historically powerful winds, humidity levels stuck in the single digits, and the effects of long-term climate change.   Fierce, fast-moving wildfires exploded up and down the state during October, prompting utilities to shut off power to millions and forcing hundreds of thousands

It’s called ‘range anxiety’, and it’s often pointed to as one of the key reasons why consumer uptake of battery-powered electric vehicles still hasn’t really taken off. In a nutshell, range anxiety is the fear that an electric car’s battery won’t hold enough juice to get you where you need to be going – and

Video games were invented for humans, by humans. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re the best when it comes to playing them. In a new achievement that signifies just how far artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed, scientists have developed a learning algorithm that rose to the very top echelon of the esports powerhouse StarCraft II,

A team of scientists from the universities of Alberta and Toronto have laid out the blueprints for a “quantum battery” that never loses its charge. To be clear, this battery doesn’t exist yet — but if they figure out how to build it, it could be a revolutionary breakthrough in energy storage.   “The batteries