AI agents Co-Scientist, Robin could accelerate research Two new AI agents, Google Co-Scientist and FutureHouse Robin, offer to help researchers accelerate science work. Rather than replace scientists, they are intended as virtual collaborators. By generating and refining hypotheses, while scientists steered the process and gave feedback, Co-Scientist could identify drug combinations for leukaemia. Robin automated...
Category: Science & Tech
SpaceX launches its biggest, most beefed-up Starship yet on test flight
SpaceX launched its biggest, most powerful Starship yet on a test flight Friday (May 22, 2026), an upgraded version that NASA is counting on to land astronauts on the moon. The redesigned mega rocket made its debut two days after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced he’s taking the company public. It blasted off from the...
Guppies lie about mate choice to trick rivals
By >Anne-Marie Hodge, University of Wyoming When it comes to sex among guppies, competition is high for those at the top of the game. To get around this predicament, >a recent study has shown, guppies use trickery. Competition in fish of the Poeciliidae family (fresh-water fish to which guppies belong) is especially intense, because members...
Language learning begins in the womb
By >Josephine Lethbridge , The Conversation Human foetuses begin to hear sounds outside the womb at about 27 weeks. But whether foetuses can learn from these sounds in ways that shape speech perception and development during infancy has remained unclear. >New research from the University of Helsinki suggests that humans begin to distinguish between sounds...
Fake memory implanted in mice with a beam of light
If you’ve ever been frustrated by erratic memories, spare a thought for the mice involved in a study published in the journal >Science . Researchers have been able to consistently create a “false memory”, making a mouse fearful of a place it has no reason to fear. The memory was implanted by shining blue light...
Albert and Adam rewrite the story of human origins
By >Daniel Zadik , Leicester University The DNA of Albert Perry may change the story of human origins. Perry, an African-American, approached a DNA testing company to find out more about his ancestry. >The results would have come as quite a surprise (had he lived to see them), and have raised questions >for geneticists around...
New theory of general relativity casts doubt on dark matter
Astronomers have been searching for a mysterious substance called “dark matter” since the 1930s. Most scientists still believe it exists, despite many fruitless decades. Now we propose a new theory of general relativity that may ultimately get rid of the need for dark matter, and perhaps get physicists to think in terms of things we...
Explainer: what is napalm?
By >Simon Cotton , University of Birmingham There are >allegations that a nerve agent was used in Syria recently. According to US officials, it >killed more than 1,400 people, including 400 children. But since then, in a >more recent incident , a bomb dropped on a school caused many children to suffer from burns. The...
Mega-canyon discovered beneath Greenland ice sheet
A previously unknown canyon has been discovered in Greenland, hidden beneath the ice. It is at least 750 kilometres long. To put that in perspective, imagine a ten kilometre wide gorge, up to 800 metres deep, running from the Southern coast of England and into Scotland. This is on the same scale as parts of...
Mystery solved: meteorite caused Tunguska devastation
By >Simon Redfern , University of Cambridge On the morning of June 30 in 1908, a gigantic fireball devastated hundreds of square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest around the Tunguska river. The first scientists to investigate the impact site expected to find a meteorite, but they found nothing. Because no traces of a meteorite were...
