Why biological clocks get our'true age' wrong - and how AI could help Your chronological age can't always tell you the state of your health, which is why biological clocks have been developed to show our risk of developing diseases or dying - but they're not all they are cracked up to be, says columnist Graham Lawton You may be chronologically older than your "true age" When I first started writing about ageing years ago, there was a buzz around something called biological clocks, also known as ageing clocks or "true age" measurements. In principle, these are quite simple: we all have a chronological age, the number of years since birth, but this doesn't necessarily reflect how far we are down the slippery slope from birth to decrepitude. On average, this follows a fairly predictable trajectory, with gradual declines in almost every physical and mental attribute throughout adulthood. When we judge how old somebody is, we are intuitively totting up many of these tell-tale signs we see - the wrinkles and grey hair, or changes in posture, gait, voice, mental acuity and so on. The goal of measuring biological age is to capture this decline in a single metric, evaluated scientifically and expressed in years. The results tell us something we intuitively know: some people age better than others.

Let's nitpick about the physics of Stranger Things, not its ending Feedback has seen all the fuss about the finale of Stranger Things, but would like to point out that if we're going to dissect the plot, we have bigger things to worry about In common, it seems, with a substantial fraction of the human species, Feedback spent part of our holiday watching the final episodes of Stranger Things . We laughed, we cried, we wondered if it would have even more endings than The Return of the King (it did). As is almost inevitable these days, a group of fans vocally disliked the finale, and went so far as to create a conspiracy theory about it. According to "Conformity Gate" (don't blame us, we didn't name it), the finale wasn't the real finale - despite lasting more than 2 hours, costing an enormous amount of money and being shown in cinemas. No, a super-secret final episode was going to air in January, which would reveal the true ending.

Imposing order on the world is seductive, but it flattens out the diversity and rich messiness of human life. Oddly, playing by the rules may help us fight back, argues C. Thi Nguyen in The Score THIS time last year, I wrote an article for New Scientist about the perfect way to cook the classic pasta dish cacio e pepe, according to physicists. The meal's smooth, glossy emulsion of black pepper, pecorino cheese and water is hard to make lump-free. Ivan Di Terlizzi at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany and his colleagues cooked cacio e pepe hundreds of times until they produced an exacting and foolproof method. The story proved popular with readers.

The most powerful artificial intelligence tools all have one thing in common. Today's most powerful AI tools - the ones that can summarise documents, generate artwork, write poetry or predict how incredibly complex proteins fold - all stand on the shoulders of the "transformer" . This neural network architecture, first announced in 2017 at an unassuming conference centre in California, enables machines to process information in a way that reflects how humans think. Previously, most state-of-the-art AI models relied on a technique called a recurrent neural network . This worked by reading text in tight windows, left to right, remembering only what came just before.

You have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One feels the trunk and says it's a snake, another feels a leg and claims it's a tree. It warns of how focusing on single parts can obscure the whole. Neuroscience made the same mistake for decades, viewing the brain as a collection of specialised regions, each working on a distinct function. Our understanding of what each region did often stemmed from incredible accidents, like the case of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker who survived having an iron rod blown through his brain.

Battery life has long been a key limiting factor in drone use. Although there are commercial models that can stay aloft for 45 minutes or longer on a single charge, being able to keep drones in the air for longer would be helpful for many purposes. Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark have been working on that issue for several years by developing drones that can recharge directly from power lines. This time around, the scientists attached a gripper system to a Tarot 650 Sport drone, which they customized with a electric quadcopter propulsion system, an autopilot module and other components. When the drone's systems detect that the battery is running low, the device employs its camera and millimeter-wave radar system to pinpoint the closest power line, as New Atlas notes.

Playing The Medium, a new horror game on Xbox and PC from developer Bloober Team, is like watching The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix. The Medium has some fun ideas that it executes well, but the overall experience is bland and forgettable. Like Sabrina and a thousand other shows on Netflix, The Medium is inoffensive. It's a pleasant way to pass the time, but you probably won't finish it and you won't remember it a month after you put it down. It's the perfect game for Xbox's Game Pass, the service that seeks to be Netflix but for video games.

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – Elton John might have said it best in his iconic song "Rocket Man" – "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." More than 50 years after we sent humans to the moon – the closest celestial body to Earth – the plan is still to head to Mars, something many astronauts who have flown in space thought we would have already accomplished. "I just assumed by the time I got to be old enough to go into the space program, you know we'd be living on Mars or I'd be working on Mars just as a scientist," Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space, told university students at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in December 2019. But despite the fact humankind has been unable to send anyone to another place in the universe besides the moon, there are still many with the hopes and expectation that we will become a multi-planetary species in the near future, starting with our red next-door neighbor. Billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and aspiring young astronauts like Alyssa Carson, a sophomore studying astrobiology at Florida Tech, hope to one day live on Mars. "Eventually the sun will run out of fuel to burn … and conditions on Earth are going to be very different from our normal regular life now," Carson told Florida Today, part of the USA TODAY Network.

No startup is easy to grow, and with more and more artificial intelligence (AI) companies being founded around the world, the reality is that they can't all lead the way. Some will struggle along for years, unable to find any real traction, while others will perish completely shortly after they're funded. As a founder or marketer, you need to be able to effectively communicate your value proposition. People respond to great products, so it's crucial to understand that product is the new marketing. Only the strongest, smartest, and most creative will survive and thrive.