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Businessman Elon Musk says ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence “bots” are too liberal and that he plans to create his own. Musk, the owner of Twitter and the Tesla electric vehicle company, spoke with Tucker Carlson on the American television channel Fox News on Monday night. He said his new AI “bot” will be called TruthGPT. He said it will be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries...

Scientists have released a more detailed version of the first image of a black hole. That first image, released four years ago, showed a blurry, round-shaped orange object. Now, researchers have used machine learning methods to create an improved picture. The new image was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The same shape remains as in the first image, but it has a narrower r...

Have you ever caught a whiff of something and been strongly reminded of a person or place? It seems there is a deep psychological link between smells, our personality and our memory. Some research even suggests that smells can influence our cognition. 您是否曾闻到某物的气味并强烈想起某个人或某个地方？气味、我们的性格和我们的记忆之间似乎存在着深刻的心理联系。一些研究甚至表明气味会影响我们的认知。 S...

For many, the idea of commuting daily to a place of work might sound outdated. In the UK, at least, the shape of the working week is changing, and a new hybrid approach is becoming commonplace. This new look seems inevitable: new technology means tasks traditionally done in the office can be done at home. And there's the demand for a better work-life balance, too. All of this has been accelerated...

Well, you're in a real pickle. You see, a few years ago, the king decided your life would be forfeit unless you tripled the gold coins in his treasury. Fortunately for you, a strange little man appeared and magically performed the feat. He placed handfuls of coins in and out of a magical bag, and sang a strange rhyme:“The more gold goes in and more comes out, as sure as I am me. And in again, and...

For many years, skateboarding was considered an activity for young rebels or drug users in city streets, schoolgrounds and public parks. Those days are long gone. Skateboarding, which has Indigenous roots connected to surfing, is now an Olympic sport. There are many skateboarding competitions held across the United States and other countries. Recently, skateboarding was honored with a special reco...

An Australian company has made lab-grown meat using genetic information from a wooly mammoth, an extinct animal. The company launched the creation in a science museum in the Netherlands. It came just days before April 1, known as April Fools’ Day. “This is not an April Fools' joke,” said Tim Noakesmith, founder of the Australian company Vow. “This is a real innovation.” The lab-grown meat, also ca...

What does a small school in the American state of Florida have to do with the famous Italian statue of David in Florence, Italy? Well, the mayor of Florence and the museum where David is housed recently invited parents, students and the former principal of the school to visit. The invitation came after some parents were upset when their sixth-grade children at Tallahassee Classical School saw a ph...

Thousands of Japanese cherry trees are blooming on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. When the trees reach peak bloom, the United States’ capital city is awash in pink and white. In the 1920s, the average peak bloom date was April 5. That moved up to March 31 in recent years. And the 2023 peak arrived yet a week earlier, the National Park Service said last week. “I’m feeling like this is going...

Throughout history, people have been attracted to puzzles, from Ancient Greek riddles to brain-teasing video games, people have tried to solve problems for fun. But what is it about these conundrums that makes us enjoy them? It could be that the desire to find a solution is wired into us. A study has shown that when people complete anagrams, it can stimulate the reward centre in the brain. One of...

In the early 20th century, a meteorologist named Alfred Wegener noticed striking similarities between the coasts of Africa and South America. These observations led him to propose a controversial new theory: perhaps these and many other continents had once been connected in a single, gigantic landmass. Wegener’s Theory of Continental Drift directly contradicted the popular opinion that Earth’s con...

Medieval Europe. Where unbathed, sword-wielding knights ate rotten meat, thought the Earth was flat, defended chastity-belt wearing maidens, and tortured their foes with grisly gadgets. Except... this is more fiction than fact. So, where do all the myths about the Middle Ages come from? And what were they actually like? The “Middle Ages” refers to a 1,000-year timespan, stretching from the fall of...

In 1971, Ian Waterman suddenly collapsed from a severe case of what seemed to be gastric flu. His illness passed after a few days, but a stranger set of symptoms lingered. Although his muscles and joints remained healthy, Waterman was unable to move. In fact, he was unable to feel anything from the neck down. Eventually, he was diagnosed with a rare and extreme form of deafferentation, a neurologi...

A new report says an estimated 43,000 people died during Somalia’s longest drought on record last year. Half of them were likely children under five years old. It is the first official count of deaths announced in the drought that is affecting large parts of the Horn of Africa. At least 18,000 people, and as many as 34,000, are predicted to die in the first six months of this year. 一份新报告称，...

Colombia is one of just eight countries where bullfights remain legal. Many places in those countries are establishing restrictions on the activity. Courts and city governments in Spain and Mexico have issued rulings that have discouraged the events. In December, Colombia’s Senate approved a measure to ban bullfighting nationwide. Lawmakers in the House of Representatives could take up the legisla...

As the morning sun shines on the Golden Gate Palace, brother and sister Hisham and Asma prepare for the journey of a lifetime. It is 791 CE, and the Abbasid Caliphate is at the height of its power, stretching from India to North Africa. With over half a million inhabitants, its capital city of Madinat al-Salaam, also known as Baghdad, is the largest in the Islamic Empire, possibly the world. And i...

The American Library Association (ALA) released a new report Thursday about book banning in the country. It found attempted book bans and information restrictions at school and public libraries continue to increase, setting a record in 2022. The report says there were 1,200 known challenges in 2022. That is almost double the number from the year before, and it had also been record setting. The ALA...

Less than two months ago the new South Korean girl group MAVE: released its first music video. It now has nearly 20 million views on YouTube. At first look, MAVE: looks like any other K-pop band. But it only exists virtually. Its four members - SIU, ZENA, TYRA and MARTY - live in the digital world, also called the metaverse. The group’s songs, dances, talks and even their hair are created by...

In this south Texas clearing, an ancient tale that ties the members of four species together is unfurling. The first involved is our soon-to-be queen leafcutter ant. The second is this fungus, a piece of which she scoops into her mouth pocket. The third are these tiny cockroaches, which nestle under her wings. And the fourth is the one that threatens them all. But it’ll reveal itself later. 在得克...

Sea turtles are miraculous. First, they've been around since the late Jurassic, roughly 150 million years ago. Cohorts of the dinosaurs, sea turtles have survived through the challenges of eons, existing still today, where many others have ended their evolutionary run. Second, throughout the centuries and up till today, every living adult sea turtle has overcome the odds, existing as a consequence...

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. It can be found in swathes of city pavements, bridges that span vast rivers, and the tallest skyscrapers on earth. But this sturdy substance does have a weakness: it’s prone to catastrophic cracking that costs tens of billions of dollars to repair each year. But what if we could avoid that problem, by creating concrete that heals...

From space, our planet appears to be more ocean than Earth. But despite the water covering 71% of the planet’s surface, more than half the world’s population endures extreme water scarcity for at least one month a year. And current estimates predict that by 2040, up to 20 more countries could be experiencing water shortages. Taken together, these bleak statistics raise a startling question: are we...

The Screen Actors Guild Awards, or SAG Awards, are known as an important predictor for the Academy Awards, or Oscars. On Sunday night in Los Angeles, the film Everything Everywhere All at Once was a big winner at the SAG Awards. Three actors from the film won awards. In addition, the group of actors in the film won the award for best cast. 演员工会奖或 SAG 奖被称为奥斯卡金像奖的重要预测指标。周日...

Behind some great men, there is a big brother. Leon Monet, Claude Monet’s older brother, is central to a new public art show, or exhibition, in Paris. The exhibition explores the part Leon Monet played in the famous impressionist painter’s life and art. Leon was a color chemist who was four years older than Claude. Historians now understand that Leon helped Claude succeed. He helped in the develop...

Researchers who examined DNA from famous German composer Ludwig van Beethoven have learned new details about his health. The DNA – which came from Beethoven’s hair – did not provide a cause for his deafness. But the samples did find that he had a genetic risk for liver disease. The DNA also showed evidence that Beethoven was infected with the virus hepatitis B in the last months of his l...