A fungus is to duet with a piano at an upcoming arts festival. The Physarum polycephalum mold responds to music in what the pianist calls a creative way. It’s the work of Professor Eduardo Miranda, who specialises in the crossover between music and science, His previous work includes a collaboration between a traditional string quartet […]
The wonderful thing about the medium of animation is, even though it caters to kids visually, animated movies can be aimed at adults and children. Not all animated films feature cute, fuzzy animals getting into hilarious hi-jinx. Some feature them being ripped apart and raging war against one another, like Watership Down. Something I touched […]
So there is a ‘thing’ going around the interwebz right now about mixing coke with milk and what happens as a result. I, myself, am not sure it is something I would ever want to do, but apparently it is the “Coke and Mentos” of 2015. It is a reaction of the Phosphoric Acid contained […]
A Google-backed experiment showed a computer was able to learn how to play 49 Atari 2600 games and, in many cases, while outperforming a human player. It’s in some ways more impressive than even chess-playing supercomputers. The likes of Deep Blue learn from their experiences playing, but were originally programmed with the rules of chess. The […]
British researchers claim to have achieved a 1 terabit per second data transfer over mobile broadband. But although they used 5G technology, it’s far in excess of what anyone expects to be possible in “real world” use. The speed was reached by the 5G Innovation Centre at the University of Surrey. They achieved it in […]
Google has stepped up its warning system for dubious websites: Chrome will now flag up sites that contain potentially harmful downloads, even if the site itself does no damage. Until now Google’s warnings had only taken effect in two situations: when a Chrome user clicked on a link to a page believed to contain malware […]
When many of us think about the black plague which ravaged much of Europe on the 14th century, we associate it with scurrying, nasty, dirty little rats. The truth, as it turns out, shows that we are just a bit off. Seems the real culprit may have been some (decidedly less creepy looking) gerbils. According […]
Researchers at Stanford say they can track an Android user’s location simply by gathering battery use data for a few minutes. While it’s of limited effect, they argue this could undermine the user permissions system on Android. The researchers explored the idea that the cellular radio in a phone makes up a significant proportion of […]
Why is the human brain so much larger than that of chimpanzees? Newly-published research suggests it’s the result of orders from DNA. Researchers at Duke University believe the answer lies in a section of DNA known as human-accelerated regulatory enhancer, or HARE5. It’s part of what was once labelled junk DNA in the (apparently misguided) […]
A university researcher says he’s developing a tattoo removal cream that could remove tattoos cheaply and without pain. A tattoo doesn’t work simply by burying ink deep enough (in the dermis) that it remains in place as the skin regenerates. Instead it’s that the needle doesn’t just deliver the pigment, but rather that its penetration causes […]