The Ethics of Commercial Spaceflight

Number of words: 2,199 On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship’s console. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, travelling more than twice … Read more

The Science Behind Image Super-Resolution

Number of words: 547 You may well have seen sci-fi movies or television shows where the protagonist asks to zoom in on an image and enhance the results – revealing a face, or a number plate, or any other key detail – and Google’s newest artificial intelligence engines, based on what’s known as diffusion models, … Read more

The Mystery of Motivated Behaviour in Sea Slugs

Number of words: 676 A study published in the journal eLife has thrown some light on how a spontaneous cellular event could give rise to highly variable motivated behaviour among sea slugs. According to Björn Brembs, a professor of neurogenetics at the University of Regensburg, Bavaria, the study addresses a longstanding question in neuroscience: how … Read more