In a new call for proposals, DARPA envisions living materials that could self-assemble into antennas, nets to capture debris, ...

"In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film 'Her' imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to ...

The project explores how life adapts to extreme environments—and hopes to inspire new drugs or even treatments to aid space travel. We’ve only scratched the surface of what thrives in the deepest ...

There’s no perfect form of energy. Coal and natural gas emit carbon dioxide. Solar and wind are intermittent. Nuclear is costly and creates radioactive waste. Geothermal and hydro are ...

“Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has introduced the first AI model that can produce either conventional output or a controllable amount of ‘reasoning’ ...

With their bright blue bases, yellow gears, and exposed circuit tops, the 3D-printed robots look like a child’s toys. Yet as a roughly two-dozen-member collective, they can flow around obstacles ...

I admit, since middle school, I’ve spent most of my downtime immersed in video games. There are the quintessential epics: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, and Fortnite. And then there ...

In the 1970s, images from the NASA Mariner 9 orbiter revealed water-sculpted surfaces on Mars. This settled the once-controversial question of whether water ever rippled over the red planet. Since ...

Thanks to increasingly efficient and affordable gene sequencing technologies, we can now chart our genetic blueprint in unprecedented detail. But what does each gene do? Of the roughly 20,000 genes ...

Many years ago, Microsoft committed itself to an exotic, high-risk approach to quantum computing. Now, as the company unveils its first prototype chip, it says its perseverance has paid off. One of ...

When the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 rocketed to fame more than a decade ago, it transformed biotechnology. Faster, cheaper, and safer than previous methods, the tool helped scientists gain insight ...

A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled ...