Aedan O'Brien

Scientists have created new kinds of ‘living materials’ by tweaking the base ingredients of kombucha – the popular tea drink fermented with a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY).   This kind of ‘tea fungus’ – sometimes called ‘kombucha mother’ – can do a lot more than just produce sour-tasting beverages, it seems.

Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price is at the time of writing around US$34,000 – up about 77 percent over the past month and 305 percent over the past year.   First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital

Scientists have just set a new world record for high-temperature sustained plasma with the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, reaching an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for a period of 20 seconds.   Known as Korea’s “artificial sun”, the KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and

Sometimes, science is all about the mind-aching big picture. Like the idea that our Universe is just a giant hologram, or that we’ve actually detected gravitational waves from a neutron star collision. Or that we might not actually have as much free will as we think…   Those are really exciting concepts. But then there are

The start of electric aviation is upon us, but it’s going to take many more years before the average environmentalist can fly guilt free on a fully electric long haul jet. In the meantime, scientists are trying to make the commercial planes we already have more sustainable, and one of the best ways to do

Within the next few decades, according to some experts, we may see the arrival of the next step in the development of artificial intelligence. So-called “artificial general intelligence“, or AGI, will have intellectual capabilities far beyond those of humans.   AGI could transform human life for the better, but uncontrolled AGI could also lead to

A newly developed glue that gets its stickiness from a magnetic field could lead to serious energy and cost savings for companies that need to stick things together on an industrial scale.   To harden – or cure – the mix of chemicals in most epoxy-based glues, some kind of environmental effect like heat, light,

Dropping your smartphone often means living with a cracked screen until your next upgrade, or footing an expensive repair bill – but researchers have been busy bringing self-healing display technology closer to a practical reality.   A team from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed a self-healing electronic material that can

One of the central technologies of artificial intelligence is neural networks. In this interview, Tam Nguyen, a professor of computer science at the University of Dayton, explains how neural networks, programs in which a series of algorithms try to simulate the human brain, work.   What are some examples of neural networks that are familiar

If we’re going to get better at powering the planet with renewable energy, we need to get better at finding ways of efficiently storing that energy until it’s needed – and scientists have identified a particular material that could give us exactly that.   The material is known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), in which

Improving the efficiency of solar cells can make a huge difference to the amount of energy produced from the same surface area and the same amount of sunshine, and another world record has been beaten in the push for better yields.   Researchers have now hit an efficiency of 29.15 percent in the perovskite/silicon tandem

A team of Chinese scientists have developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers.   In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve “quantum supremacy,” the first to outperform the world’s best supercomputers at quantum calculation, Live

German divers who recently fished an Enigma encryption machine out of the Baltic Sea, used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II, handed their rare find over to a museum for restoration on Friday.   The legendary code machine was discovered last month during a search for abandoned fishing nets in

The dark web has a shady reputation. Hidden below the transparency and visibility of the internet’s surface, the complex anonymity networks that make up the dark web host and distribute all kinds of murky content: illicit drugs, child abuse material, illegal weapons, extremist paraphernalia, and more.   But the dark web is also a misunderstood

A long-standing and incredibly complex scientific problem concerning the structure and behaviour of proteins has been effectively solved by a new artificial intelligence (AI) system, scientists report.   DeepMind, the UK-based AI company, has wowed us for years with its parade of ever-advancing neural networks that continually trounce humans at complex games such as chess

How might The Terminator have played out if Skynet had decided it probably wasn’t responsible enough to hold the keys to the entire US nuclear arsenal? As it turns out, scientists may just have saved us from such a future AI-led apocalypse, by creating neural networks that know when they’re untrustworthy.   These deep learning

The Virgin Hyperloop made its first journey carrying passengers Sunday, in a test the company claimed represented a major step forward for the “groundbreaking” technology capable of transporting people at 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) an hour.   The Hyperloop is intended to carry passengers in small pods through a vacuum tube, with proponents arguing it

Between COVID-19 lockdowns and nail-biting elections, 2020 is certainly driving many of us to spend more time on social media than ever before.  We all know this habit isn’t necessarily a good thing, with studies suggesting it can have negative impacts on our mental health, especially in young people. In turn, this can affect our