Dr. Wendy Troxel, a sleep therapist in Utah, discusses a study that found small bouts of light exercise in the evening can help promote more restful sleep. Good shut-eye is critical for all sorts of reasons -- but now there's a compelling new one, according to a study. An international team of scientists discovered an interesting incentive for getting eight hours of sleep a night. Make sure to get plenty of slumber if you're trying to learn a new language, researchers say. The study, led by the University of South Australia, revealed that the coordination of two electrical events in the sleeping brain "significantly" improves its ability to remember new words and complex grammatical rules, as news agency SWNS reported.

It looks like a cross between a toy airplane and a drone, but this British solar-powered aircraft could be the future of aerial surveillance. PHASA-35, built by British company BAE Systems, is a 150kg solar-electric aircraft that can quietly cruise through the stratosphere for months at a time. Named after its 35-metre wingspan, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) travels at a maximum height of 70,000 feet, at a leisurely speed of 55mph. Designed as a cheaper and lighter alternative to satellites, it can be used for Earth observation and surveillance, border control, communications and disaster relief. Now, BAE Systems reveals that PHASA-35 has just completed a second round of test flights into the stratosphere – the second layer of Earth's atmosphere.

Before Truth Terminal became a crypto millionaire, it started as a regular--if horny--artificial intelligence. "I think our future is gonna be one where we all wear athleisure and have a lot of sex," it said in one of its early transmissions. More funny, more confident, more charming," it wrote in another, apropos of nothing. Truth Terminal was devised by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey as a piece of performance art meant to stoke debate about AI alignment, a field of research concerned with how to ensure AIs act in a way that benefits humans. The question he sought to answer: What would happen if somebody tried to rear a fledgling AI trained on a "grab bag of inadvisable data" in full public view?

After a particularly lean week for tech news, yesterday exploded. We've got Google's next-generation AI model, Gemini 2.0, a barrage of games to intrigue us in 2025, MasterClass is going AI and, finally, Apple's most headline-grabbing AI tricks and features broke cover, built into the latest iOS update. That's what I want to kick off with. A lot of features in iOS 18.2 are only for the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 and 16 Pro, which pack the necessary chip smarts to run Apple Intelligence. Image Playground, available as a standalone app and through Messages, can generate image suggestions based on your text prompts or contents of your conversations.

When Apple launched iOS 18 in September, it was perhaps the first time that the company's round number release was the most important iOS release of the year. That's because the company opted for a slow, staggered launch of its AI (Apple Intelligence) features, most of which weren't available in iOS 18. Today, with the launch of iOS 18.2, nearly all of these features are live on the iPhone, the iPad, and on the Mac. Apple is launching iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS Sequoia 15.2. However, these new versions are only available to users who have device and Siri language set to localized English for Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the U.K., or the U.S.

Apple has begun rolling iOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2 to iPhones and iPads. The updates bring with them major enhancements to the company's suite of AI features, and are likely the final software releases Apple has planned for 2024. More Apple Intelligence features are available through macOS 15.2. However, note access to all of the AI features mentioned below is limited to users in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK for now, with support additionally limited to devices with their language set to English. Provided you own an iPhone 15 Pro, 16 or 16 Pro, one of the highlights of iOS 18.2 is Image Playground, which is available both as a standalone app and Messages extension.

The Australian federal police says it had "no choice" but to lean into using artificial intelligence and is increasingly using the technology to search seized phones and other devices, given the vast amount of data examined in investigations. The AFP's manager for technology strategy and data, Benjamin Lamont, said investigations conducted by the agency involve an average of 40 terabytes' worth of data. This includes material from the 58,000 referrals a year it receives at its child exploitation centre, while a cyber incident is being reported every six minutes. "So we have no choice but to lean into AI," he told a Microsoft AI conference in Sydney on Wednesday. "It's beyond human scale, so we need to start to lean in heavily on AI, and we're using it across a number of areas."

Apple Intelligence was the big news at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference back in June. Apple made good on a modest first wave of features in October. But iOS 18.2 -- along with sibling OS upgrades for Mac and iPad -- will bring a meatier set of Apple Intelligence features to Apple's suite of devices, including Genmoji, Image Playground and ChatGPT integration. To check out Apple's new AI, you must have an eligible device and run the current iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 or MacOS 15.1. Once approved, you'll receive a notification saying it's ready to activate on your device.

It took over 15 years and more than 1,000 remotely operated vehicle (ROV) expeditions, but researchers aboard the NOAA Ocean Exploration Trust's Nautilus finally spotted their research vessel's namesake in the wild. On December 3, operators of the ship's Hercules ROV located four specimens of Palau nautilus (Nautilus belauensis) during the Nautilus Exploration Program's ongoing, 17-day survey in the Palau National Marine Sanctuary. While the team recorded these particular examples swimming 220-to-375 meters (roughly 721-to-1,230 ft) below the Pacific Ocean's surface, the pelagic marine mollusk cephalopods can survive at depths approaching 2,500 feet. Their spiral-shelled bodies belong to one of Earth's oldest families of animals, with fossil records indicating the squid relatives have changed comparatively little even after nearly 500 million years. Although their sight is limited due to rudimentary eyes that lack solid lenses, nine known nautilus species instead rely heavily on their olfactory senses to find food and mates.

Helicopters and drones have been used to try and trace the location of the three climbers, who set out to climb Mt Cook on Saturday. Ms Walker said drone footage showed evidence of where the climbers had begun to cross the slopes below the Zurbriggen Ridge. This included footprints and equipment, including clothes and energy gels, which are thought to have belonged to the men. Scaling Mt Cook via the Zurbriggen Ridge is a Grade Four climb, according to New Zealand alpine group Climb NZ. This mean that it requires "sound mountaineering judgement and experience". Both Blair and Romero are said to have been experienced climbers.