All posts filed under: Science

UK launches AI sandbox to optimise medicine safety

UK launches AI sandbox to optimise medicine safety

Published by skeptic

The UK is preparing to launch a pioneering AI sandbox designed to explore how artificial intelligence can improve medicine safety and accelerate the development of new treatments. Led by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the initiative will create a controlled testing environment where researchers, technology firms and regulators can evaluate emerging AI tools. The programme, backed by the government’s Regulatory Innovation Office, aims to address long-standing challenges in drug development and patient safety. By allowing innovators to test AI systems under regulatory oversight, the UK hopes to identify more reliable ways to predict medication-related risks before treatments reach patients. Officials believe the initiative could help reduce adverse drug reactions, which currently lead to approximately 250,000 hospital admissions across the UK each year and place a financial burden of more than £2bn on the NHS. The project is also expected to provide stronger evidence on the effectiveness of AI in supporting regulatory decision-making. UK Health Innovation Minister Preet Gill explained: “The AI revolution is here, and we want our NHS staff to be …

Australia’s association to Horizon Europe finalised

Australia’s association to Horizon Europe finalised

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The European Commission and Australia have completed negotiations on Australia’s association to Horizon Europe, marking a significant step in strengthening research and innovation ties between the two partners. The agreement will enable Australian organisations to gain expanded access to Horizon Europe, the European Union’s €93.5bn research and innovation programme. From January 2027, Australian institutions will be eligible to participate in key funding opportunities under the scheme on the same basis as organisations from EU Member States. The outcome is expected to deepen scientific collaboration, increase access to funding for Australian researchers, and create new opportunities for joint projects tackling global challenges across technology, climate, energy, agriculture, and space. Speaking on Australia’s association to Horizon Europe, Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation, said: “We can tackle the challenges of tomorrow only together. “That is why the future of science and technology depends on strong international partnerships, like the one between the EU and Australia. Together, we’ve already delivered breakthroughs such as the Square Kilometre Array, one of the world’s most advanced radio telescopes. “By combining …

Robots are about to overtake armed soldiers as the deciders of war

Robots are about to overtake armed soldiers as the deciders of war

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Ukraine’s “Legit” unmanned ground vehicle OLEKSANDR KLYMENKO/Ukrinform/NurPhoto/Getty Images There’s a received piece of wisdom among militaries around the world that whatever new technologies appear, in the end, foot soldiers are what matters. As British Army officer Field Marshal Archibald Wavell put it shortly after the second world war: “All battles and all wars are won in the end by the infantryman.” This may now finally be changing. Robots in battle are about to reach a critical point for Ukraine. In May, it began the mass production of Legit, a low-cost robot capable of carrying a machine gun. This comes after announcing plans to replace a third of its infantry with uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) in one sector, despite their limitations. “Even imperfect systems become valuable if they absorb risk instead of soldiers,” says Oleksandra Molloy at the University of New South Wales in Australia. The most important proving ground for Ukraine’s robots will be the front line. It is there where casualties are most likely and where substituting machines for people is most vital. Yet, …

Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

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Fragments of the skull (left) and shoulder blades (right) of a woman buried at Loch Borralie, UK Rebecca Ellis-Haken A woman interred in Scotland 2000 years ago has peculiar scrape marks inside her skull, which suggest that removing the brain after death may have been a funeral tradition in Iron Age Britain. The funerary practices in Iron Age Britain – which ran from about 800 BC until the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 – and the Iron Age more generally are mysterious because human remains from that long ago rarely survive. We do know that some people from this time tended to be buried alongside their maternal kin, rather than spouses. Excavations of bones at the Suddern Farm and Danebury Iron Age sites in southern England indicate that bodies were sometimes exhumed after burial, and in one case a body was left exposed until the flesh was gone before the skeleton was reburied. Laura Castells Navarro at the University of York, UK, and her colleagues have re-examined the remains of an adult woman …

Great White Sharks Have Been in the Mediterranean Sea for Millions of Years—but Sightings Are Incredibly Rare

Great White Sharks Have Been in the Mediterranean Sea for Millions of Years—but Sightings Are Incredibly Rare

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An encounter with a great white shark is undoubtedly a “thrilling” experience, considered especially rare in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The latest sighting, which has attracted media attention and made headlines around the world, occurred during a dive in the Strait of Sicily carried out by volunteers from Ghost Diving and Healthy Seas, organizations dedicated to protecting marine ecosystems. The encounter was documented by diver Derk Remmers, who told the BBC that he struggled to switch on his camera because of the excitement. The footage—the first ever recorded of a great white shark in its Mediterranean Sea habitat—shows a huge adult male specimen of Carcharodon carcharias, a native species that is now considered critically endangered. The Great White Shark Carcharodon carcharias, commonly known as the great white shark, belongs to the Lamnidae family and is one of the largest predatory fish in existence. It can exceed 6 meters (20 feet) in length and weigh more than 2 tons. It feeds primarily on fish, including rays and other sharks, though adult individuals may also …

GM Wants Your Electric Car to Power Your House—and Your Neighborhood

GM Wants Your Electric Car to Power Your House—and Your Neighborhood

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Still, Wade Scheffer, GM Energy’s vice president, insists: The reason more people aren’t using their cars to power their lives comes down to “awareness, awareness, and awareness.” To that end, at Tuesday’s event the subsidiary announced two partnerships with utilities: a “stress test” of bidirectional charging capabilities with 30 GM employees, enabled by Michigan’s DTE Energy, and a plan to get 52,000 GM EVs on PG&E’s major Northern California grid by 2030. The automaker says it’s worked out dozens of partnerships with other utilities. Still, getting all of those GM cars hooked up and contributing to the grid will be a long and likely winding road. Not all states are enthusiastic about EVs or new energy tech right now. And even in early adopter states, where lawmakers are gung ho about innovative climate and energy policies, vehicle-to-grid tech is still in its early stages. It took researchers with the University of California at Irvine several years of collaboration with Kia and Hyundai to get a vehicle-to-home charging project up and running in six Southern California …

MacOS 27 Golden Gate: Top New Features

MacOS 27 Golden Gate: Top New Features

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One of the most interesting new features is Custom Extensions, which lets you create an extension for Safari in natural language. Lastly, the new version of Safari will work the Passwords app to automatically fix website login passwords that are deemed no longer safe to use. The other exciting implementation of Apple Intelligence is within the Shortcuts app. The app received some artificial intelligence upgrades last year, but this new update takes things much further. You can now use natural language to design an automated shortcut, no longer requiring the manual work of connecting functions within apps together. Apple’s example was that you could type, “Whenever I’m leaving work, calculate the ETA, and send it to Pedro,” which would use a combination of Maps and Messages. Other updates include using natural language when creating an event in Calendar, which will then fill in the details with contacts or locations. Image Playground also received a major update, which is now based on Google’s Gemini image generation tech. It can now cook up photorealistic imagery, and looks …

The Top New Features in Apple’s iOS 27 and iPadOS 27

The Top New Features in Apple’s iOS 27 and iPadOS 27

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While the news coming out of WWDC 2026 is not as dramatic as last year’s iOS 26 update, where the new Liquid Glass redesign caused a big stir, Apple’s presentation still made waves. During the WWDC keynote, Apple walked through the new changes coming to the next version of its mobile operating systems, iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. These updates will roll out to iPhones and iPads later this year, likely in September. iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 focus largely on stability improvements that enrich the everyday usability of the operating systems. There are several smaller quality-of-life improvements, but the big highlight is the Siri AI upgrades. Here’s everything you need to know. Is Your iPhone or iPad Compatible? AccordionItemContainerButton Apple sometimes cuts a few older devices from support list with every new iOS or iPadOS version, supposedly due to hardware age. (Apple typically supports iPhones and iPads for six to seven years.) But there’s good news this year. iPhones from 2019 and newer—the iPhone 11 and up, including the iPhone SE (2nd Gen)—will support …

Anthropic Offers Mythos Upgrade for Cyber Partners and a ‘Safe’ Version for the Rest of You

Anthropic Offers Mythos Upgrade for Cyber Partners and a ‘Safe’ Version for the Rest of You

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Anthropic released two new AI models called Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on Tuesday, which the company says have greater capabilities than the Mythos Preview model it released in April to a limited set of tech industry partners. Anthropic has said the initial, limited release stemmed from concerns that the model’s capabilities could be exploited by bad actors to develop hacking tools that could catch defenders off guard. Anthropic is currently only releasing Claude Mythos 5 to a limited set of industry partners, many of which received access to Mythos Preview, and the company says it is collaborating with the US government on the rollout. Claude Fable 5, which is being publicly released, uses the same underlying model as Mythos 5, but will have “guardrails” in place at launch, the company said Tuesday, that will block the model from answering many user questions related to cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry. These requests will instead be rerouted to an older AI model, Claude Opus 4.8. If Anthropic suspects a user is trying to conduct distillation—training …

Nasa names Artemis III crew, but a rocket explosion has thrown US Moon plans into turmoil

Nasa names Artemis III crew, but a rocket explosion has thrown US Moon plans into turmoil

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Nasa has named the crew of its next Artemis mission, which it promised would be an “extraordinary demonstration of what is possible”. Artemis is the ambitious American-led effort to the return humans to the lunar surface by 2028. However, the Artemis III mission will not travel to the Moon. Instead, the Orion spacecraft will stay in low Earth orbit and aim to dock with lunar landing vehicles launched separately by one or two space companies. Nasa astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and Andre Douglas and Italian European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano will carry out the mission in late 2027. There are two potential landers that could fly on their separate mission to then rendezvous with the Orion spacecraft; one made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos’ firm Blue Origin. They will carry astronauts down to the Moon’s surface on subsequent missions. However, the timetable for Artemis III and the first mission to return astronauts to the lunar surface (Artemis IV) has been thrown into doubt by the recent explosion of …