Katyanna Quach

Humans and octopuses may have drastically different brains, but both react in a surprisingly similar way when under the effects of the drug MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy. Octopuses are solitary creatures, preferring to slink around cracks and crevices in rocks on the seabed rather than bothering to socialise with their …

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has landed a pair of tiny drum-like hopping robots on the surface of asteroid Ryugu. The cylindrical bots are about 18cm wide and 7cm tall (7 x 2.8in), and were traveling onboard the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which left Earth in December 2014. When the probe reached the right spot …

A year-long round trip to Mars could give you more than half the maximum radiation dose recommended for an astronaut's entire career, according to data collected by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The spacecraft, weighing in at over 4,000 kilograms (8,801lb), was launched by the European Space Agency and its Russian counterpart …

Video Scientists have managed to capture a small floating human-made satellite using a net deployed from a spacecraft orbiting the Earth for the first time. The plan is to develop this technology to collect space clutter, and clean up our home world's orbit. Space junk circling our planet is a growing problem as more spacecraft are …

Good luck sinking your teeth into nuclear pasta. For one it’ll be tricky to get a hold of since it’s the stuff lodged inside neutron stars. Additionally, it may also be the universe’s strongest material. Neutron stars are the cores leftover from dead stars that have already shed their gaseous layers in a supernova explosion. …

Video Wireless network gear can be used to estimate the number of people hidden behind walls, according to fresh research out of America. Saandeep Depatla, a PhD student, and Yasamin Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, both at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to figure out more or less …

Facebook is under fire for allowing companies to allegedly unfairly post on the social network job ads specifically for men – and not women. The American Civil Liberties Union and Outten & Golden LLP, an employment law firm, on Tuesday dragged the tech giant and ten employers before the US Equal Employment Opportunity …

Roundup Hello, here's a roundup tying up all the bits of AI news together for this week. Google has a new competition to challenge developers to defend or attack image classification systems with adversarial examples. DeepMind are planning to test its algorithms for head and neck radiotherapy algorithms on humans. And Microsoft have …

The mysterious shutdown and evacuation of a solar research laboratory, tucked away in a forest in New Mexico, USA, has sent the internet abuzz with a flurry of conspiracy theories. The Sunspot Solar Observatory (SSO), located in the Sacramento Mountains, was switched off earlier this month, and staff ordered to leave. The FBI …

Scientists have discovered that a type of stomach bug contracted from unpasteurized dairy or raw meat can produce electricity. Listeria monocytogenes is a pathogenic bacteria that causes listeriosis, a particularly nasty infection that can be fatal. Milder symptoms include diarrhea, but it can also lead to more serious …

Pics Scientists have discovered, tucked inside a cave in South Africa, the oldest drawing yet, made around 73,000 years ago. And it looks suspiciously like a worldwide web address. The drawing consists of from red scraggly lines arranged in a cross-hatch pattern on a slab of rock, some marks are horizontal, others are at angles …

Dealing with chatbots and virtual assistants can be so frustrating that it’s normal for humans to start getting snarky. Such run-ins would be a little more entertaining if the machines could give some of that sass back. Unfortunately, it’ll be awhile before that can happen since computers don’t really understand sarcasm at all …

Video Fluid dynamics is weird. Physicists have reverse engineered the popping of a bubble and managed to keep it levitated just by using the power of sound. Iridescent bubbles form when a film of soapy liquid is punctured. The film retracts from the hole and the molecules are pulled back and rearranged to reduce its surface area, …

Videos Using AI to make fake videos look as realistic as possible is all the rage at the moment. Developers aren't deterred by the controversy surrounding deepfakes – videos in which people's faces are digitally pasted onto the bodies of smut stars and other performers using machine-learning software. OK, sure, adding Nicholas Cage’ …

AI is helping astronomers spot fast radio bursts, a mysterious class of signal emitted from a new type of object very rarely found in space that boffins are still trying to classify. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are difficult to study. They don’t crop up too often - there have only been around 30 confirmed events since their …

Video A trio of researchers have trained a robot that can pick up new objects it hasn’t seen before. It’s a trivial task for humans yet an incredibly complex one for machines. When people reach out to grab a mug, it’s common sense to hold it by its handle - it doesn’t matter if the mug is upright, upside down, or tipped on its side …

Roundup Here's a quick roundup of AI announcements this week beyond what we've already covered. US Defense research unit funding billions for AI Next campaign: DARPA is dumping a whopping $2 billion to kickstart the “third wave” of AI focused on making systems more adaptable. It’s all part of the US military's ‘AI Next’ campaign, …

The drama surrounding Pluto’s planetary status just won’t die. A bunch of physicists are still fired up over the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) decision to demote Pluto from being a fully fledged planet to a mere dwarf world in 2006. Pluto hovers on the edge of our Solar System, mixing it up with bits of icy debris …

NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, is back scanning the stars after an period of hibernation and repair. After the spacecraft downloaded a wad of data - codenamed Campaign 19 - in late August, it powered down for a snooze in sleep mode. Now, it’s back up and running after NASA has fixed up one of its thrusters. “The …

While America today is ahead of the world in artificial intelligence, China will take the lead in five years, Google China's former president Kai-Fu Lee said today. Lee – now founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, which invests in AI startups in both nations – argued the US and the Middle Kingdom each has its own strengths …

A recently observed neutron star collision was so violent it sprayed jets of radio signals that appeared to travel faster than light, it has just emerged. The cosmic prang – logged as GW170817 after the resulting gravitational wave detected in mid-2017 – involved two neutron stars running into one another in NGC 4993, a galaxy …

AI can predict when you’ll keel over and die clutching at your chest from a heart attack better than doctors can, apparently. A group of researchers scraped together dataset from over 80,000 patients from CALIBER, a large clinical research project studying mortality in England, and used machine learning methods to find common …

Video Cameras on drones have helped make aerial photography more accessible – and with machine-learning software, they may be able to assist budding filmmakers in the future, too. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US, and Yamaha Motors in Japan, have published a paper showing how drones can be used …

Roundup Hello, here's a quick roundup of what's been happening in the world of AI. Google has a new framework to help researchers develop reinforcement learning algorithms, and Google Assistant is now bilingual. Also watch how Microsoft's Azure Machine Learning Studio is helping Japanese fish farmers. Unsupervised machine translation …

Black holes can bring dead stars back to life - even if it’s just for a few seconds, according to a new study. When stars teeter too close to the menacing voids, they can kickstart tidal disruption events (TDEs). Stars are yanked in towards the black hole by its strong gravitational field, and are eventually ripped apart by …