$13 thrift store camera hid 70-year-old undeveloped film
An offhand purchase at a secondhand shop has revealed itself to be an unexpected time capsule—and is steeped in its own mystery. Recently, a customer near Salisbury, England paid around…
A Winter Blanket Covers North Carolina
Earth Observatory Science Earth Observatory A Winter Blanket Covers North… Earth Earth Observatory Image of the Day EO Explorer Topics All Topics Atmosphere Land Heat & Radiation Life on Earth…
MIT professor designs 2026 Winter Olympics torch
Every Olympic Games has a torch. Every torch has a designer. For the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, that designer is MIT engineer and architect Carlo Ratti.…
AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them
On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide…
Watch Kanzi the bonobo pretend to have a tea party
Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood playtime and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a…
OpenAI is hoppin’ mad about Anthropic’s new Super Bowl TV ads
On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch complained on X after rival AI lab Anthropic released four commercials, two of which will run during the…
This black hole “burps” with Death Star energy
Back in 2022, astronomers were puzzled by a so-called “tidal disruption event” (TDE), dubbed AT2018hyz, that had faded when it was first noticed three years earlier, only to unexpectedly reanimate…
In 1916, hybrid cars could’ve changed history. But Ford wouldn’t allow it.
In October 1914, as gas cars were tightening their grip on America’s roads, Frank W. Smith, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of America, stood before a convention in Philadelphia…
Museums incorporate “scent of the afterlife” into Egyptian exhibits
In 2023, scientists identified the compounds in the balms used to mummify the organs of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, suggesting that the recipes were unusually complex and used ingredients not…
Man solves ceiling fans’ most annoying problem
Anyone who’s used an overhead ceiling fan knows it can be a pain to work. Yanking its chain gets the motor running, but there’s no easy visual indication of what…