No, you can’t puncture your brain with a COVID-19 swab test So is this cause for alarm? Not really. The 40-year-old woman had a pre-existing defect in the base of her skull (the bone at the top of the nose) and a sac of brain tissue had protruded out into the nasal cavity. This is a rare condition that we see in neurosurgery and in ear, nose and throat clinics....

Digital technology is ubiquitous. We have been increasingly reliant on smartphones, tablets and computers over the past 20 years, and this trend has been accelerating due to the pandemic. Conventional wisdom tells us that over-reliance on technology may take away from our ability to remember, pay attention and exercise self control. Indeed, these are important cognitive skills. However, fears that technology would supplant cognition may not be well founded. Technology alters society Socrates,considered by many to be the father of philosophy, was deeply worried about how the technology of writing would affect society....

GPT-3 is arguably the world’s most advanced text-generator. It was trained using supercomputing clusters, a nearly internet-sized dataset, and 175 billion parameters. It’s among the most impressive generative AI systems ever created. But it absolutely did not create a video game. You may have read otherwise. But it’s what you didn’t read that matters. Background GPT-3, for those who aren’t in the know, is a big powerful AI system that generates text from prompts....

Recently I’ve started being far more up-front with colleagues about progress on tasks. It’s not that I ever set out to communicate badly, or – gasp! – let tasks slip by, it just happens sometimes. New tasks and conversations come into my head and some of the older ones fall out of mind. So what’s changed? At my company we use an internal web-based Collaborative Platform to manage our day-to-day consulting business....

Nobody knows why there’s ghostly blobs in the sky — astronomers are excited Hunting ORCs Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them ORCs, which stands for “odd radio circles”. But the big question, of course, is: “what are they?” At first, we suspected an imaging artefact, perhaps generated by a software error. But we soon confirmed they are real, using other radio telescopes....