A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

A new battery design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

What happens if AI is trained to write choral music by feeding it a specially created vocal dataset? Moving new exhibition The Call tackles some thorny questions about AI and creativity – and stirs the soul with music

Researchers have managed to encode enormous amounts of information, including images, into DNA at a rate hundreds of times faster than was previously possible

Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says Jacob Aron

AI models have safeguards in place to prevent them creating dangerous or illegal output, but a range of jailbreaks have been found to evade them. Now researchers show that writing backwards can trick AI models into revealing bomb-making instructions.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, more and more people are training to become quantum software developers

Next-generation phone networks could dramatically outperform current ones thanks to a new technique for transmitting multiple streams of data over a wide range of frequencies

A simulator for the process of scientific discovery shows that AI models still fall short of human scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses and carrying out experiments on their own

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

Autonomous taxis are already operating on US streets, while Elon Musk has spent years promising a self-driving car and failing to deliver. The newly announced Tesla Cybercab is unlikely to change that

The UK government's decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius surprisingly threatens the extinction of millions of website addresses ending in ".io", and no one is quite sure what will happen next

Two of the three science Nobel prizes in 2024 have been won by people working in AI, but does this mean that AI models are now vital for science?

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. We visit 2032 and meet artificial animals that love their owners, without the carbon footprint of biological pets. Rowan Hooper explains how it happened

New technologies will radically change the experience of living with and caring for someone with Alzheimer's, says Professor Fiona Carragher, chief policy and research officer at Alzheimer's Society, UK

It is thought that humans can only maintain relationships with around 150 people, a figure known as Dunbar's number, but it seems that AI models can outstrip this and reach consensus in far bigger groups

Gears just a few micrometres wide can be carved from silicon using a beam of electrons, enabling tiny robots or machines that could interact with human cells

The 2024 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enabled machine learning and are key to the development of artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT