Their winter survival trick is a months-long power-save mode--and scientists think it could help humans, too. This bear woke up like this. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For many animals that live in cold climates, winter means low-power mode. But no creature is more tied to the image of a long, cozy winter than hibernating bears all snuggled up in their dens.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At the US Army Corps of Engineers' research facility in central Alaska, a unique tunnel descends underground. They were hunting for something much smaller--and smellier. "The first thing you notice when you walk in there is that it smells really bad. It smells like a musty basement that's been left to sit for way too long," geological scientist Tristan Caro recounted in a statement .

In George Lucas's classic 1980 film'The Empire Strikes Back', hero Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is frozen in carbonite by the evil Darth Vader. The fictional metal hardened around the heroic space smuggler as it cooled – sealing him in a state of'perfect hibernation'. Carbonite is of course a fictional material, consigned to the realms of the Star Wars galaxy far, far away. But according to one scientist, this scene is not completely the stuff of science-fiction. Dr Alex Baker, a chemist at the University of Warwick, thinks humans could potentially be frozen like Solo with a real-life equivalent.

In the article "The Transhuman Future is here" we explored "virtual" humans powered by an AI digital brain, already rolling out in customer service applications, no to mention Balmain campaigns too. This is happening in parallel with the fast expansion of neurotech and cyborgs, bringing us closer to heightened human performance. But what if you could beat death? As a global and modern society, we now have the opportunity to live post-death via griefbots or avatars, now having generated enough data streams to replicate ourselves. If in our digital afterlife we take the form of a virtual human, do we need to rethink death, the mourning process and the circle of life as we know it? In recent years, the idea that ageing is a disease that can be cured is gaining ground, along with its controversial and ethical implications.

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 when the term was first coined. Those in the industry know that there has been previous hype and then disillusionment around AI. The period of decline of interest in AI is known in the industry as an AI winter, and has happened twice before. An AI winter is a point at which research, investment, and funding for AI goes into a period of decline and it's hard to get funding for research or other projects that have to do with artificial intelligence, and talent and companies focus their efforts elsewhere. Today, there is a lot of hype surrounding artificial intelligence, but is AI around to stay or will it see its period of interest peak and wane as it has in the past?

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 when the term was first coined. Those in the industry know that there has been previous hype and then disillusionment around AI. The period of decline of interest in AI is known in the industry as an AI winter, and has happened twice before. An AI winter is a point at which research, investment, and funding for AI goes into a period of decline. Today, there is a lot of hype surrounding artificial intelligence, but is AI around to stay or will it see its period of interest peak and wane as it has in the past?

One of the problems with working out how close we are to creating a replicant, is that it's not clear what these human-like beings are. Director of the new Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, has described them as "synthetic humans", which are "not very far from humans". What's clear from the original film is that they are some kind of biorobotic form. Let's for a moment assume they are more like robots than clones and, indeed, in the original Philip K Dick account they are explicitly rogue androids. How close are we to creating an android? Sethu Vijayakumar, Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh, observes that there are two elements to this.

Computers have got much better at translation, voice recognition and speech synthesis, says Lane Greene. But they still don't understand the meaning of language I'm afraid I can't do that." With chilling calm, HAL 9000, the on-board computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey", refuses to open the doors to Dave Bowman, an astronaut who had ventured outside the ship. HAL's decision to turn on his human companion reflected a wave of fear about intelligent computers. When the film came out in 1968, computers that could have proper conversations with humans seemed nearly as far away as manned flight to Jupiter. Since then, humankind has progressed quite a lot farther with building machines that it can talk to, and that can respond with something resembling natural speech. Even so, communication remains difficult. If "2001" had been made to reflect the state of today's language technology, the conversation might have gone something like this: "Open the pod bay doors, Hal." "I'm sorry, Dave.

The best science fiction blends reality and imagination, so a viewer walks away contemplating the limits of human possibility. The worst take leaps of faith that toss a viewer into an oblivion of head scratching. Passengers, a space thriller directed by the Imitation Game's Morten Tyldum and starring Hollywood mainstays Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, begins in the first category before rocketing into the second. In the film, Avalon -- a commercial starship -- ferries more than 5,000 colonists on a voyage from Earth to a new home world called Homestead II. To survive the 120-year trip, the travelers are placed into induced hibernation, but an accident rouses Chris Pratt's character -- mechanical engineer Jim Preston -- 90 years early.

On cold, dark days it is tempting to imagine shutting yourself away until the warmer weather returns. Many animals do it by entering a state known as torpor, which reduces their bodily functions to a minimum and uses fat stores in their body for energy, but could humans ever hibernate in the same way? Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Oxford has explained what torpor does to the body and how it could affect the human body in an article for The Conversation. An expert has explained what torpor - or the act of shutting the body down during hibernation - does to the body and how it could affect humans. A'therapeutic torpor' could make a manned mission to Mars more feasible.