Joshua Krook, University of Southampton
For the first time, researchers have managed to use GPT1, precursor to the AI chatbot ChatGPT, to translate MRI imagery into text in an effort to understand what someone is thinking.
Bradley Elliott, University of Westminster
As nightmares go, being trapped in a small box deep underwater is probably high on many peoples’ lists. But one US professor is doing this on purpose. Joe Dituri, a former US navy diver and expert in biomedical engineering has been living in a 55 square meter space 30 feet below the surface of the Florida Keys since March 1, and plans to stay for 100 days. If he manages this, he will break a record for most time spent in a habitat beneath the surface of the ocean.
Sara Imari Walker, Arizona State University
Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.
Kelly Jakubowski, Durham University
You’re walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Now suddenly, instead of noticing all the goings on in the city around you, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. Hearing that piece of music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory.
Valerie van Mulukom, Coventry University
You’re sitting on the plane, staring out of the window at the clouds and all of a sudden, you think back to how a few months ago, you had a heart-to-heart with a good colleague about the pressure you experience at work. How do thoughts seemingly completely unrelated to the present pop into our heads? Why do we remember certain things and not others? Why does our mind go off on tangents and why do we have daydreams?
Adrian Winckles, Anglia Ruskin University and Andrew Moore, Anglia Ruskin University
You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet – could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back door. They could have infected your device with malware to make it a “bot” or a “zombie” and be using it – perhaps with hundreds of other unwitting victims’ phones – to launch a cyberattack.
Taha Yasseri, University College Dublin
At the end of every year, I gather statistics on the most viewed Wikipedia articles of the year. This helps me, a computational social scientist, understand what topics captured the most attention and gives me a chance to reflect on the major public events of the year. I try to use data to determine how the public (and more specifically here, English-language Wikipedia readers) will collectively remember the past year.
Sallie Burrough, University of Oxford
“You know what’s wrong with scientific power? It’s a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.” That’s how filmmaker Michael Crichton put it in Jurassic Park nearly 30 years ago. The problem of scientific colonialism has not, however, gone away.
Arnald Puy, University of Birmingham
A dominant view in science is that there is a mathematical truth structuring the universe. It is assumed that the scientist’s job is to decipher these mathematical relations: once understood, they can be translated into mathematical models. Running the resulting “silicon reality” in a computer may then provide us with useful insights into how the world works.
Robert Young, Lancaster University
The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles.