The US military has prioritised deploying high-altitude balloons that can carry out surveillance

A neural network can recreate the classic computer game Doom despite using none of its code or graphics, hinting that generative AI could be used to create games from scratch in future

Advances in generative AI mean fake images, videos, audio and bots are now everywhere. But studies have revealed the best ways to tell if something is real

A new procedure turns an alloy of nickel and titanium into a material as strong as steel but 20 times stretchier – and one application could be building planes with shape-shifting wings

Google has built a quantum computer that makes fewer errors as it is scaled up, and this may pave the way for machines that could solve useful real-world problems for the first time

The author of Sapiens has turned his attention to the information networks that shape our societies, but when you stop and think about what he's saying, it's obvious

As misinformation about the upcoming US elections rockets across social media, creating chaos, companies need to be honest about where this content is coming from, says Annalee Newitz

In a basement beneath City St George's, University of London, senior NATO leaders watch on as four research teams demonstrate the latest in AI-controlled, autonomous drone technolo0gy

Are humanoid robots the future of space exploration? New Scientist reporter James Woodford took NASA's Valkyrie for a spin to find out

NASA’s Valkyrie is undergoing tests to understand what it would take to get a humanoid robot onto offshore facilities or into space. New Scientist's James Woodford took the controls to see what it is capable of

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. This time, Rowan Hooper takes us to the early 2030s, when a technological step change enabled us to produce all the food we needed without the use of animals

A powerful new AI called o1 is the most dangerous that OpenAI has ever released, the firm claims – but who are these warnings for, asks Chris Stokel-Walker

Cyborg: A documentary tells the intriguing story of Neil Harbisson, who wears an antenna to “hear” colour, but it is lacking in depth and should have probed its subject more, says Simon Ings

Archaeologists are using AI and US spy satellite imagery from the cold war to find ancient underground aqueducts that helped humans survive in the desert

A new design for a nuclear battery that generates electricity from the radioactive decay of americium is unprecedentedly efficient

A quantum computing protocol makes it possible to extract energy from seemingly empty space, teleport it to a new location, then store it for later use

Artificial intelligence has more in common with ants than humans, says Neil Lawrence. Only by taking a more nuanced view of intelligence can we see how machines will truly transform society

Using more training data and computational power is meant to make AIs more reliable, but tests suggest large language models actually get less reliable as they grow

Smart TVs from Samsung and LG monitor what you are watching even when you are using the screens to display a feed from a connected laptop or video game console

Voice assistants can build profiles of their users’ habits and preferences, but the consistency and accuracy of these profiles vary

What if tech bros ruled the world, asks Asif Kapadia's 2073. This docudrama is captivating and disturbing, but lacks enough heft to stand out

A US standards agency has issued new guidance saying organisations shouldn’t require users to change their passwords periodically – advice that is backed up by decades of research

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t

Google DeepMind claims its AlphaChip AI method can deliver “superhuman” chip designs that are already used in its data centres – but independent experts say public proof is lacking

Hurricane Helene hit a quartz mine in North Carolina that is key to global semiconductor production, which could impact the entire tech industry. Here is everything we know so far

Motion sensors in smartphones can be turned into makeshift microphones to eavesdrop on conversations, outsmarting security features designed to stop such attacks

The 2024 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for discoveries that enabled machine learning and are key to the development of artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT

Gears just a few micrometres wide can be carved from silicon using a beam of electrons, enabling tiny robots or machines that could interact with human cells

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. We visit 2032 and meet artificial animals that love their owners, without the carbon footprint of biological pets. Rowan Hooper explains how it happened

The UK government's decision to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius surprisingly threatens the extinction of millions of website addresses ending in ".io", and no one is quite sure what will happen next

Autonomous taxis are already operating on US streets, while Elon Musk has spent years promising a self-driving car and failing to deliver. The newly announced Tesla Cybercab is unlikely to change that

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, more and more people are training to become quantum software developers

Google’s NotebookLM tool is billed as an AI-powered research assistant and can even turn your text history into a jovial fake podcast. But it could also tempt you into narcissism and nostalgia, says Jacob Aron

A type of mathematical problem that was previously impossible to solve can now be successfully analysed with artificial intelligence

Google DeepMind has been using its AI watermarking method on Gemini chatbot responses for months – and now it’s making the tool available to any AI developer

What happens if AI is trained to write choral music by feeding it a specially created vocal dataset? Moving new exhibition The Call tackles some thorny questions about AI and creativity – and stirs the soul with music

A new supercapacitor design that uses only water, clay and graphene could source material on Mars and be more sustainable and accessible than traditional batteries

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car

Thanks to artificial intelligence, understanding animals may be closer than we think. But we may not like what they are going to tell us, says RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood

An off-the-shelf millimetre wave sensor can pick out the tiny vibrations made by a smartphone's speaker, enabling an AI model to transcribe the conversation, even at a distance in a noisy room

I have a confession to make. After taking a handful of autonomous taxi rides, I have gone from a hater to a friend of robot cars in just a few weeks, says Annalee Newitz

One day, doctors might be able to 3D print copies of your organs in order to test a variety of drugs, thanks to a new technique that uses light and sound for rapid printing

Oil and water can be separated efficiently by pumping the mixture through thin channels between two semipermeable membranes

Hollywood has been imagining the impact AI might have on our lives for decades, but how accurate are these portrayals?

An AI-assisted robot can listen to spoken commands and assemble 3D objects such as chairs and tables out of reusable building blocks

Agents are being offered double the normal commission to help shift apartments throughout capital cities.

After seven years of voicing Elena Ferrante’s ambitious heroine, the Italian actress brings Lenù Greco home.