Researchers have found that humans and animals have remarkably similar tastes. The team, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, wanted to know whether the features that make certain animal calls irresistible to females of the species would also be music to our human ears.
For a long time, scientists believed that it would be impossible for a cat in free fall to turn over. That's why French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey's 1894 high-speed photographs of a falling cat landing on its feet proved so shocking to Marey's peers. But Gbur has emphasized that cats are living creatures, not idealized rigid bodies, so the motion is more complicated than one might think.
A new report from OpenAI and a group of outside scientists shows how GPT-5, the company's latest AI large language model (LLM), can help with research from black holes to cancerfighting cells to math puzzles. Each chapter in the paper offers case studies: a mathematician or a physicist stuck in a quandary, a doctor trying to confirm a lab result. They all ask GPT-5 for help. Sometimes the LLM gets things wrong.
The shutdown of the US government, about to enter its third week, is starting to take a toll on US science. Since the shutdown began, the administration of US President Donald Trump has cancelled funding for clean-energy research projects and laid off public-health workers. The activities of some federally funded museums and laboratories have been suspended, along with the processing of grant applications by agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF).
On the morning of 6 August 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, a flash of light enveloped the sky so brightly that a 13-year-old boy, Oiwa Kohei, thought the Sun had fallen to Earth and landed in his mother's flower beds.
In March, some 1,900 members of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published an open letter, declaring: "We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation's scientific enterprise is being decimated."
