Researchers risk fire, explosion or poisoning by allowing AI to design experiments, warn scientists. The use of AI models in scientific laboratories risks enabling dangerous experiments that could cause fires or explosions, researchers have warned. Such models offer a convincing illusion of understanding but are susceptible to missing basic and vital safety precautions. In tests of 19 cutting-edge AI models, every single one made potentially deadly mistakes. Serious accidents in university labs are rare but certainly not unheard of.

Latin inscriptions from the ancient world can tell us about Roman emperors' decrees and enslaved people's thoughts – if we can read them. Now an artificial intelligence tool is helping historians reconstruct the often fragmentary texts. It can even accurately predict when and where in the Roman Empire a given inscription came from. "Studying history through inscriptions is like solving a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, only this is tens of thousands of pieces more than normal," said Thea Sommerschield at the University of Nottingham in the UK, during a press event. "And 90 per cent of them are missing because that's all that survived for us over the centuries."

Morrisons has unveiled its newest staff members - in the form of aisle-roaming robots. The retail giant is trialling'Tally' robots at three stores in Wetherby, Redcar and Stockton, to monitor how products are being displayed on shelves. Using advanced AI and computer vision technology, Tally is designed to spot out-of-stock items, pricing errors, and misplaced products. Morrisons' technology manager, Katherine Allanach, called this a'crucial' role. 'It is a crucial but time-consuming task and so Tally aims to allow more time for colleagues to focus on customer service,' she told The Grocer.

Scientists are one step closer to reading people's minds after developing new technology that can decode internal speech with nearly 80 per cent accuracy. Some people are unable to speak due to disease or injury, but devices called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) can help patients communicate again. Also known as'speech decoders', BMIs can capture brain activity during inner speech – words thought within the mind without making any movement or sound – and translate it into language. Until now, it has been difficult to achieve highly accurate results. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology implanted tiny devices in specific areas of the brains of two participants.

Men's brains tend to be larger than women's, which makes them difficult to compare Are men's and women's brains all that different? A new way of investigating this question has concluded that they are – but it takes artificial intelligence (AI) to distinguish between them. The question of whether we can measure differences between men's and women's brains has long been contentious, with previous research coming up with contradictory results. One problem is that men tend to have slightly larger brains than women, probably because they generally have larger bodies, and some previous studies that compared the size of different small regions of the brain failed to adjust for the overall brain volume. However, even doing so hasn't previously resulted in clear-cut findings.

For centuries, humankind has been captivated by the thought of life on other planets. But how will we recognise it when we see it? Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can detect signs of life with 90 per cent accuracy. And they say it signifies a'significant advance' in our abilities to discover life across the solar system and beyond. Many of the components necessary for life, such as amino acids and nucleotides needed to make DNA, have been detected in space.

From clucks to squawks and even'growling', the meanings behind chicken sounds have always been a mystery, even to farmers. Not any more, however, because artificial intelligence (AI) technology from Japan has finally been able to translate them – giving a unique insight into a chicken's wellbeing. Experts trained an AI model with about 100 hours of chicken recordings until it could identify with 80 per cent accuracy if a bird was happy, sad or frightened. The scientists used machine learning (ML), a specific subset of AI which allows systems to learn and come to informed conclusions. Audio clips released by the experts show the wide range of noises that the birds make – but can you identify a chicken's emotion as efficiently as an AI? Humans can look forward to more'meaningful' interactions with chickens thanks to the study results, according to researchers Mother hens are such caring parents that they'feel' their chicks' pain The research was led by Professor Adrian David Cheok at the the University of Tokyo, who is known for his expertise in the area of sex robots. 'It's a cluckin' great leap for science and this is just the beginning,' Professor Cheok said.

Pressing different keys on a keyboard generates different sounds, which may enable an AI to detect what you're typing Be careful what you type during Zoom meetings: a deep learning AI algorithm can identify the keys pressed on a keyboard with 93 per cent accuracy, based on the sounds of your keystrokes. Joshua Harrison at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues trained the CoAtNet deep learning AI model, most commonly used to classify images, to "hear" which keystrokes correlated to the letters and numbers pressed on a keyboard by feeding …

Family doctors already have patients turning to'Dr Google' for a diagnosis. But Google has now developed AI which could perform as well as a doctor when answering questions about ailments. The tech giant reports in the journal, Nature, that its latest model, which processes language similarly to ChatGPT, can answer a range of medical questions with 92.6 per cent accuracy. That is on a par with the answers provided by nine doctors from the UK, US and India, who were asked to respond to the same 80 questions. Researchers at Google say the technology does not threaten the jobs of GPs. Google has now developed AI which could perform as well as a doctor when answering questions about ailments.

Music moguls like Simon Cowell may find their days are numbered. Artificial intelligence can now identify a surefire hit with almost 100 per cent accuracy, a study has found. Simply asking people which songs they liked best is a terrible way to identify a hit, researchers found, after recruiting 33 volunteers to listen to 24 recent songs. But interpreting their brain signals, then getting AI to interpret the results, can distinguish a hit song or a flop with 97.2 per cent accuracy. The AI can spot a hit with an impressive 82 per cent accuracy after hearing only one minute of the song. Its results were checked against the modern definition of a hit - whether a song was listened to on internet streaming services more than 700,000 times.