AI has given us hallucination as word of the year. We should quarrel with this humanising definition while recognising that it evokes unprecedented timesWhen the Cambridge dictionary announced “hallucinate” as its word of the year this week, it was not referring to its existing definition as a human condition of “seeing, hearing, feeling or smelling something that does not exist”, but to...

Flooding and landslides triggered by heavy rains in southern Brazil have claimed at least six lives over the past week, authorities said Sunday.

Many organizations, from community sporting groups to the United Nations, have set themselves a target of gender parity: ensuring half of staff or members are women. Gender parity is desirable because training and retaining equal halves of a population's available talent influences an organization's growth, problem-solving capacity and future-readiness.

Huge rent increases threaten the biological society and other cherished scientific organisations based in Burlington House, writes Philip BarberThe Linnean Society of London was founded in 1788 in honour of Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, the system of biological classification still in use today. It is the oldest biological society still in existence, and remains a national and...

The UN warned Wednesday that the number of sand and dust storms are increasing "dramatically" with Central Asia the most hit by the dangerous phenomenon.

Plan to nurture homegrown investors focused on ensuring UK innovations have commercial payoffLarry Elliott: Hollywood ending unlikely for Jeremy HuntJeremy Hunt will use his autumn statement to announce a US-inspired scheme aimed at developing homegrown science and technology investors focused on ensuring UK innovations have a commercial payoff.Amid concern in government that Britain too often...

I was just his little sister, now I’m trying to free him from an Egyptian prisonThe drive north out of Cairo from my family home is one I know well. It’s the route up to the coastal city of Alexandria, a joy-filled trip I often used to make to Egypt’s north-coast beaches. On the morning of 17 November 2022, however, almost exactly a year ago today, the journey could not have felt more...

A few French high-altitude ski resorts opened ahead of schedule Saturday, just days after storms in the northern Alps wiped out some early snows.

A bottle of The Macallan 1926, described by Sotheby's auction house as the "most valuable whisky in the world", on Saturday went under the hammer for a record £2.1 million.

SpaceX on Saturday made progress in the second test launch of its mammoth Starship rocket, with the booster separating from the spaceship, but both then exploding shortly after over the ocean.

Around the world, highly secure chambers are being built to preserve everything we need to withstand any number of worst-case scenariosAre we allowed to go in?” I surprise myself with this question, given that I’m staring through the small window of a door into one of six underground vaults, each one essentially a walk-in freezer. The temperature inside is -20C. It is a grey winter day at the...

Three New Brunswickers are enjoying an astronomical surprise: an asteroid has been named after them. It's called Mipach — using the first two letters from their...

Another space launch failed, but it’s the loss of major advertisers on X that has enraged the tycoonIt has been an explosive weekend for Elon Musk. The American billionaire has had to witness not only the public “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of another of his rockets, but also watch while a group of well-known global companies, including Apple, Disney and IBM, pulled advertising from X,...

The eat out to help out scheme will face scrutiny when Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty and Angela McLean appear this weekExplosive evidence about the tensions and disagreements between the then prime minister Boris Johnson, his ministers and the country’s top scientific advisers at key moments during the Covid-19 pandemic is expected to be made public this week at the official inquiry into the...

Could a computer ever rival their astonishing feats? The idea seemed preposterous‘Your memory could fill the Albert Hall,’ proclaimed the Observer on 21 March 1971, explaining that ‘a computer to perform even the simpler functions of the human brain would need to be at least as big as the Albert Hall.’ Now we outsource much of our memory to devices that slip in our back pockets, what can...