Aedan O'Brien

Facebook’s Messenger Kids is supposed to provide parents complete control over who their children chat can with on the app. But as The Verge reported on Monday, that key promise appears to have been broken, thanks to a design flaw with the app.   According to the report, Messenger Kids had a design flaw that

Solar cells that transfer sunlight into electricity are a brilliant part of modern technology, but one particular aspect has proven to be a huge headache. They’re not super efficient – most of the sunlight they absorb is lost in the form of heat.   As a result, the average efficiency of a commercial solar panel

Finding cheap and practical ways of removing salt from seawater could potentially help some of the 844 million people worldwide without regular access to clean water – and scientists just found a new nanoscale method for doing just that.   Using a tiny disc made of super-hydrophilic filter paper, layered with carbon nanotubes for light

This just keep Viral photo app FaceApp has taken the world by storm. Launched in 2017, the app has recently enjoyed mass popularity due largely to Hollywood celebrities posting their humorous edited pictures online.   FaceApp uses “neural network” artificial intelligence technology to alter people’s faces with various filters. Users simply take or upload a

We’re yet to see any Hyperloop tracks open to the public, but the futuristic, high-speed travel technology continues to develop at a rapid pace – and a team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany just set a new speed record for Hyperloop travel.   The top speed of 463 km/h or 288

What has the magnetic properties of a solid magnet, but the mechanical properties of a liquid? If you answered ‘nothing,’ you’re wrong – because engineers have just created just such a substance, by using a modified 3D printer.   Yes, ferrofluid is already a thing, but this is different. Unlike the ferrofluid you may know

FaceApp is the most popular free app on Google Play and Apple’s App Store thanks to an age filter that makes people in photos look much older. But while countless photos of aged celebrities and casual FaceApp users have been shared online in the past week, there are mounting concerns with how FaceApp handles user

Your mind and computer may have gotten one step closer. Elon Musk on Tuesday announced in a livestream that his neurotechnology startup, Neuralink, hoped to begin implanting devices into human brains as early as next year.   “We hope to have this aspirationally in a human patient before the end of next year,” Musk said

We already know what a wondrous material graphene can be – filtering water, dyeing hair, super-strengthening substances – but now scientists have figured out a way to produce it much more cheaply: with the help of bacteria.   When mixed with oxidised graphite, which is relatively easy to produce, the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis removes most of the

How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness?   After all, the only consciousness you can know with certainty is your own. Everything else is inference. The

A compact device that uses waste heat shed by solar cells to purify water could one day change the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. The new spin on old technology from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia promises to ease increasing pressures on the nexus point

Automatic landing systems using radio guidance have been a feature of commercial airliners for decades, but there’s never been a heart-in-your-mouth touchdown quite like this. In an incredible new video, researchers show a test flight in which a small four-seater plane fitted with an experimental optical positioning system successfully nails an entirely automated landing –

In private Facebook groups devoted to natural treatments for cancer and other ailments, hundreds of thousands of members tell each other that baking soda, apple cider vinegar and frankincense are cures that doctors don’t want you to know about.   Parents of children with autism have their own groups devoted to unscientific treatments – like

You might be familiar with the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, where a computer-generated character or robot looks almost human… but with enough of a gap to a real person to leave you feeling uneasy. Now neuroscientists have figured out which part of the brain might give rise to these weird feelings.   The same research suggests

Researchers at Princeton released a new study on how many online shopping sites use coercive so-called “dark pattern” techniques to trick people into spending more money. “This is manipulating users into making decisions they wouldn’t otherwise make and buying stuff they don’t need,” Gunes Acar, a research associate at Princeton who helped run the study,

Chernobyl has become a byword for catastrophe. The 1986 nuclear disaster, recently brought back into the public eye by the hugely popular TV show of the same name, caused thousands of cancers, turned a once populous area into a ghost city, and resulted in the setting up of an exclusion zone 2600 km² in size.

Magic: The Gathering, the card game where you build your own deck from over 19,000 unique cards and then battle this deck against other people, is not what you would call simple.   But a pre-print paper first published in March turns this already complex game up a notch, showing that a specific set of

The data from all those Instagram pictures you’re posting needs to be stored somewhere, and the increasing amount of digital information we’re all producing means we also need an increasing amount of energy just to store it all.   Now scientists have come up with a working example of what’s known as universal memory, a