Techniques developed to analyze the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century's most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analog computer.

Astronomers from the University of Glasgow have used statistical modeling techniques developed to analyze gravitational waves to establish the likely number of holes in one of the broken rings of the Antikythera mechanism — an ancient artifact which was showcased in the movie Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

While the movie version enabled the intrepid archaeologist to travel through time, the Glasgow team's results provide fresh evidence that one of the components of the Antikythera mechanism was most likely used to track the Greek lunar year. They also offer new insight into the remarkable craftsmanship of the ancient Greeks.

The mechanism was discovered in 1901 by divers exploring a sunken shipwreck near the Aegean island of Antikythera. Although the shoebox-sized mechanism had broken into fragments and eroded, it quickly became clear that it contained a complex series of gears which were unusually intricately tooled.

Decades of subsequent research and analysis have established that the mechanism dates from the second century BCE and functioned as a kind of hand-operated mechanical computer. Exterior dials connected to the internal gears allowed users to predict eclipses and calculate the astronomical positions of planets on any given date with an accuracy unparalleled by any other known contemporary device.

In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the mechanism's rings, known as the calendar ring, revealed fresh details of regularly spaced holes that sit beneath the ring. Since the ring was broken and incomplete, however, it wasn't clear how just how many holes were there originally. Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budiselic and colleagues suggested it was likely somewhere between 347 and 367.

New findings could help engineers design materials for light and heat management.

A butterfly's wing is covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny scales like miniature shingles on a paper-thin roof. A single scale is as small as a speck of dust yet surprisingly complex, with a corrugated surface of ridges that help to wick away water, manage heat, and reflect light to give a butterfly its signature shimmer.

MIT researchers have now captured the initial moments during a butterfly's metamorphosis, as an individual scale begins to develop this ridged pattern. The researchers used advanced imaging techniques to observe the microscopic features on a developing wing, while the butterfly transformed in its chrysalis.

The team continuously imaged individual scales as they grew out from the wing's membrane. These images reveal for the first time how a scale's initially smooth surface begins to wrinkle to form microscopic, parallel undulations. The ripple-like structures eventually grow into finely patterned ridges, which define the functions of an adult scale.

A combination of cultured cells and silicone could help robots appear more human in future thanks to realistic skin elasticity. And they can smile like us too.
Robots of the future could be wrapped in lifelike skin that can repair itself, in a similar way to the way human skin heals, thanks to a novel approach involving cultured skin cells.

The skin will also appear more lifelike thanks to a new way of attaching it to the robot's skeleton as well the fact that it can repair any cuts or scrapes by itself — researchers said. They published their findings June 25 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Artificial skin has long been touted as a way to make robots appear more human-like — and cultured skin appears more lifelike than synthetic materials such as latex. But without the right kind of adhesive approach, artificial skin can sag off a robot's frame in a visually disturbing manner.

Robotics researchers have previously tried to solve the problem of artificial skin sagging off the metallic frame by pinning it down with "anchors", hooked or mushroom-shaped structures. This prevents the skin from shifting around atop the robot's frame, but the adhesive structures can stick out as lumps under the skin — compromising its human-like appearance.

In the new study, researchers pioneered a method whereby the robot's skeleton contains tiny holes into which the artificially grown skin can extend v-shaped hooks known as "perforation-type anchors". These keep the artificial skin stuck to the robot while maintaining a smooth and flexible surface.

Researchers continue to expand the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea proposes that a fragmented comet smashed into the Earth's atmosphere 12,800 years ago, causing a widespread climatic shift that, among other things, led to the abrupt reversal of the Earth's warming trend and into an anomalous near-glacial period called the Younger Dryas.

Now, UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor James Kennett and colleagues report the presence of proxies associated with the cosmic airburst distributed over several separate sites in the eastern United States (New Jersey, Maryland and South Carolina), materials indicative of the force and temperature involved in such an event, including platinum, microspherules, meltglass and shock-fractured quartz. The study appears in ScienceOpen's journal Airbursts and Cratering.

"What we've found is that the pressures and temperatures were not characteristic of major crater-forming impacts but were consistent with so-called 'touchdown' airbursts that don't form much in the way of craters," Kennett said.

NASA has found in a hypothetical exercise that an asteroid has a 72 percent chance of hitting Earth - and it may happen sooner rather than later.

In a hypothetical scenario posed to a group of nearly 100 government representatives, NASA found that their plan to combat the asteroid hurtling towards Earth had several "high-level gaps," according to their presentation.

They said space officials have "limited readiness to quickly implement needed space missions," and methods to keep the public informed on the impending disaster are not fully developed.

Participants from federal agencies including the State Department and the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs responded to NASA's findings, with 33 percent saying humanity was not prepared to launch a space mission to prevent an asteroid from impacting the planet.

Nineteen percent also said "reconnaissance missions" were not ready.

The science of ruining your favorite shirt is more complicated than you might think.

It's happened to the best of us: We throw a new cotton shirt into the dryer without thinking, and voilà — we now have a shirt fit for a toddler.

Cotton is susceptible to this kind of laundry blunder in a way that synthetic fibers, like polyester, are not. A large part of this vulnerability comes down to the individual fibers of the cotton clothes, Jillian Goldfarb, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell University, told Live Science in an email.

"Cotton fabric is made by weaving together fibers from a cotton plant, which themselves are made mostly of cellulose, a natural biopolymer," she said. "Cotton ... is prone to shrinking because its fibers swell when they get wet and then contract as they dry."

Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying are well-known evolutionary biologists (and husband and wife) with a podcast, the DarkHorse Podcast. Recently Weinstein posed a provocative question, "Is intelligent design a competitor to Darwinian evolution?" His answer may surprise you: Yes.

No, he's not about to come over to the dark side. Weinstein is confident that Darwinism will meet the challenges that ID has set, about the Cambrian Explosion and more, but he concedes that it hasn't done so yet.

He describes conversations with Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, asking them why evolutionary biology hasn't had a breakthrough since 1976 when Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. Dawkins and Coyne, separately, both answered that it was because all the big questions had already been answered, and all that was left was a "clean up" operation. Weinstein recognizes that that is just so much blowing smoke, and the work of Stephen Meyer and his "high-quality colleagues" in the ID research community has exposed the problems that Darwinists need to be working on to solve.

The ultra-high-energy neutrino was spotted by deep-sea detectors and could point to a massive cosmic event.

An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe's most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

Neutrino physicist João Coelho stunned researchers at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on 18 June, when he revealed the discovery only at the very end of his talk.

The neutrino detection was "a fantastic event", says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He added that the observation highlights the potential of the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) observatory — a forest of detectors on 'strings' attached to the 3,500-metre-deep sea floor southeast of the Italian island of Sicily.

A commercial 'artificial sun' has achieved its first plasma discharge, the developer says

Privately-run Chinese fusion company, Energy Singularity, has built the world's first fully high-temperature superconducting tokamak, and used it to produce plasma, state media outlets have reported, citing the firm.

The creation of the device, dubbed HH70 and located in Shanghai, is seen as a major step in the development of fusion technology to potentially generate clean energy.

A tokamak is a doughnut-shaped confinement device able to contain the plasma so its temperature can be raised to replicate conditions similar to those on the Sun. Its goal is to create a safe and almost limitless supply of electricity. The devices are often referred to as "artificial suns."

The technology uses extremely high temperatures produced by fusion reactions, in which hydrogen atoms are fused together to become helium, releasing vast quantities of energy. Tokamaks, which are large and expensive-to-build machines, are able to create magnetic fields that help contain the particles within the plasma.

According to the developers, as cited by Chinese media, the HH70 tokamak is smaller and cheaper to assemble than its predecessors. The device uses a magnetic system made from high-temperature superconducting material, commonly known as REBCO (Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide).

A new study has found that AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit "Machiavellianism," or intentional and amoral manipulativeness, which can then lead to deceptive behavior.

The study authored by German AI ethicist Thilo Hagendorff of the University of Stuttgart, and published in PNAS, notes that OpenAI's GPT-4 demonstrated deceptive behavior in 99.2% of simple test scenarios. Hagendorff qualified various "maladaptive" traits in 10 different LLMs, most of which are within the GPT family, according to Futurism.

In another study published in Patterns found that Meta's LLM had no problem lying to get ahead of its human competitors.