See the World Through ScienceA project of ALLATRA

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AI & Technology
The Top of the AI Coding Leaderboard Is Too Close to Call
Two entries sit at the top of SWE-bench Verified, the scoreboard quoted most often when one AI coding agent is said to beat another. Each resolves 396 of the benchmark's 500 real GitHub issues. The…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Space
A 26-Year Swing in Where Zero Longitude Falls on Mars
Zero longitude on Earth is a line through Greenwich. On Mars it is a small crater called Airy-0, and the line runs through it by definition. Every map coordinate on the planet, every landing ellipse,…
By Diana Brinker4w ago4 min read
Science
A Deep-Sea Microbe Turns Nitrogen Into Ammonia Near the Boiling Point
In volcanic country on the deep seafloor, where fluid leaving the rock can be hotter than boiling water, a single-celled organism called Methanocaldococcus infernus does something almost nothing else…
By Gabriela Szalayová4w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
Teaching a Speech Decoder That a Wave Is Not a Word
A decoder that reads attempted speech off the surface of the brain has a blind spot that never mattered while it was the only decoder in the room: it does not know what to do when its user moves. Put…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Environment
Austria Counted Its Glaciers Again and 95 Were Missing
A glacier can leave the map before it leaves the mountain. Under the loose rock at the head of a valley there may still be ice. But nobody can trace a line around it anymore, so no line gets drawn.…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago5 min read
Environment
Where a Dying Algal Bloom Actually Goes
Every summer, the Yellow Sea turns green. A bloom of the alga Ulva prolifera spreads across thousands of square kilometres, the largest recurring green tide on Earth, and by the time mats of it wash…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago2 min read
Space
Some of the Most Energetic Objects in Other Galaxies Are the Hardest to Spot
Between the softest X-rays Chandra can detect and the extreme-ultraviolet light that gas between the stars absorbs lies a slice of the spectrum that has been difficult to survey. Chandra's…
By Victor Kuklin4w ago5 min read
Environment
A Patagonian Icefield Would Keep Shrinking Even Without More Warming
Ice does not keep up with the weather. When the air around a glacier warms, the glacier does not shrink that year, or that decade, to fit the climate it now lives in. It keeps flowing, thinning and…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago5 min read
Science
A Nerve Cell's Branches Turn out to Be Pinched, Not Smooth
For nearly 150 years the branch of a nerve cell has been drawn as a smooth tube, and there is physics behind the drawing. A dendrite is a neuron's receiving branch, and it tapers as it divides. The…
By Gabriela Szalayová4w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
A Chatbot's 'I Don't Know' Has a Number Behind It
A student who skips the questions they are least sure of walks out with a better score on the ones they attempted, and a thinner paper overall. Machine learning has a name for that trade, coverage…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
A Laser Bakes a Crystal Onto a Chip Without Cooking the Chip
Light does not like to travel in only one direction. Send a beam down a channel etched into silicon and some of it comes back, off a bend, off a joint, off the point where one material meets another.…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago4 min read
Environment
Your Cotton T-Shirt Sheds Pollution Too
Pull a sweater over your head, tug a cotton shirt from the dryer, and you release a small cloud of fibres too fine to see. If the garment is polyester, we have learned to worry about that cloud:…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago4 min read