Aedan O'Brien

If doomsday comes, know this: precautions have been taken. On an isolated Arctic archipelago, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – aka Norway’s ‘Doomsday Vault’ – holds over 1 million seed samples in a fortress-like bunker designed to be the most invulnerable seed bank in the world.   Svalbard protects more than just seeds, though. On

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram started out as a way to connect with friends, family and people of interest. But anyone on social media these days knows it’s increasingly a divisive landscape.   Undoubtedly you’ve heard reports that hackers and even foreign governments are using social media to manipulate and attack you.

While artificial intelligence systems continue to make huge strides forward, they’re still not particularly good at dealing with chaos or unpredictability. Now researchers think they have found a way to fix this, by teaching AI about physics.   To be more specific, teaching them about the Hamiltonian function, which gives the AI information about the

By making use of the ‘spooky’ laws behind quantum entanglement, physicists think have found a way to make information leap between a pair of electrons separated by distance. Teleporting fundamental states between photons – massless particles of light – is quickly becoming old news, a trick we are still learning to exploit in computing and encrypted communications

The list of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world just got updated again, and there’s a new number one: the Fugaku supercomputer built by the RIKEN Institute and the Fujitsu tech company in Japan.   IBM’s Summit supercomputer has been comprehensively pushed into second place, because Fugaku can crunch through 415.5 quadrillion computations per second

Stripped of any fancy circuitry and complex layers of higher order thinking, the nervous system is little more than a calculator for making smart choices. Food is good, but what if it’s toxic? Empty calories won’t give you energy, but what if they’re satisfying?   To better study how a rudimentary brain deals with decisions

For the first time, US doctors can prescribe a video game. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved EndeavorRX as an effective treatment for kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.   Children aged 8-12 years old can now be prescribed gaming sessions on EndeavorRX, in which players pilot a small aircraft

Artificial intelligence networks have learnt a new trick: being able to create photo-realistic faces from just a few pixelated dots, adding in features such as eyelashes and wrinkles that can’t even be found in the original.   Before you freak out, it’s good to note this is not some kind of creepy reverse pixelation that

Synthetic gas, or syngas for short, is a crucial building block in the chemical manufacturing industry. Most people may never have heard of syngas, but every day it is used in the production of drugs, fertiliser, plastic, and biofuels.   Unfortunately, even when syngas – a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide – is fermented to

So much of our everyday tech runs on batteries, the importance of lithium-ion rechargeables cannot be overstated. But they are expensive to produce, with difficult-to-source materials.   There is an alternative – sodium-ion batteries have the potential to be cheaper and more easily produced, if we can get past the problem of getting these batteries to

This summer, the clean energy company SINN Power is showcasing “the world’s first floating ocean hybrid platform” – a high-tech buoy that produces electricity from not one, not two, but three sources of renewable energy.    Using waves, wind, and the sun, the SINN Power floating structure, which can supposedly withstand waves up to six

A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a “solid state laser” in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday. The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the

Our neurons talk in melodies; understanding their rhythms has proved key to creating a new device that could join their conversations. Just as glasses can aid our struggling eyes, the hope is that artificial brain matter could one day aid our brain bits that aren’t working as well as they could be.   An international

A tiny device called a micro-comb could one day replace existing internet infrastructure to hit crazy new highs in download speeds, providing millions with ample data at the same time, even during the busiest periods.   The lightweight technology has recently been put to the test in a field trial that measured data rates of

Here’s something you might not have expected to see Boston Dynamics’ robot dog Spot doing any time soon: herding sheep on a rugged New Zealand mountainside. The slightly bizarre sequence is part of a promotional video demonstrating Spot’s potential in the agricultural industry; it also includes footage of Spot checking on crops and clambering over

Cell phone towers across New Zealand are being set on fire and authorities believe the attacks are linked to the increasing proliferation of conspiracy theories connecting 5G networks to the coronavirus pandemic.   As of May 18, 17 cell towers had been attacked in Auckland, Wellington, and Northland, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in

The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic have claimed an unlikely victim: the machine learning systems that are programmed to make sense of our online behavior.   The algorithms that recommend products on Amazon, for instance, are struggling to interpret our new lifestyles, MIT Technology Review reports. And while machine learning tools are built

Scientists have developed a new type of self-assembling silver membrane that could be used to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions before they have a chance to spread in the atmosphere.   Using a technique the team says has never been attempted before, the researchers seeded their gas separation membrane with only a tiny deposit of