Defender may not be blameless in team’s struggles but his criticism goes to the heart of what has gone wrong at the club Heartbreaking: the worst defender you know just made a great point. And no, nobody would describe Lisandro Martínez as the ideal person to scrutinise Manchester United’s indifferent...
Trill seekers: can scientists use AI and tutors to help birds remember lost songs?
When populations fall, fledglings can struggle to learn the right notes to attract mates. But research on how birds communicate offers hope for species’ survival Listening to birdsong is one of life’s great joys, but when researchers heard a particular tune emerging from a tree in a Buenos Aires park,...
Stop making sense: focus on sounds to help learn a language, study suggests
Research shows that the best linguists process unfamiliar foreign speech sounds more like non-speech sounds If you want to get really good at French, Arabic or Hungarian, don’t start with rote learning vocabulary and grammar, focus on how they sound instead, research suggests. A new study of how humans learn...
Is your boss watching you? The rise of AI surveillance at work – podcast
Workers have always been monitored by their bosses, first through output targets, and then via computer software labelled ‘bossware’. But AI is transforming the capabilities of these systems, processing huge volumes of data to provide minute-by-minute accounts of activity, and productivity. To find out more, Ian Sample hears from UK...
Could AI ‘change the stakes’ in the development of bioweapons?
Experts say the technology could help terrorists and nation states with production but that significant hurdles remain In his annual speech on threats to the nation, Sir Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s intelligence service, MI5, warned that AI had the potential to “change the stakes” on existing and...