Science

Sunlight + water = hydrogen gas, in a new technique that can convert 60 per cent of sunlight energy absorbed by an electrode into the inflammable fuel.

To generate the gas Thomas Nann and colleagues at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, dip a gold electrode with a special coating into water and expose it to light. clusters of indium phosphide 5 nanometres wide on its surface absorb incoming photons and pass electrons bearing their energy on to clusters of a sulphurous iron compound.

When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond? When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter?

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

TENTACLED monsters, pale skinny humanoids, shimmery beings of pure energy... When it comes to the question of what alien life forms might look like, we are free to let our imagination roam. The science-in-waiting of extraterrestrial anatomy has yet to acquire its first piece of data, so nobody knows what features we will behold if and when humans and aliens come face-to-face. Or face to squirmy something.

After billions of dollars were spent to build, start, shut down and then fix and re-start the Large Hadron Collider, the system has finally produced enough data for some long-awaited scientific analysis.

Scientists around the world are starting to analyze what an Iowa State University professor calls "beautiful" data. The experts are looking for noteworthy particle collisions, along with the paths, energies, and identities of the particles created when protons or lead ions collide at unprecedented energies.

What does playing computer games do to us? A YouGov poll has stirred up familiar worries about the effects of new media on children's communication skills, saying that one in six children under the age of seven in England has difficulty talking – a problem that will have many worried parents looking at games consoles and wondering how far their children's onscreen delights are implicated in this decline.

HIDDEN detail in the natural world could hold the key to future sources of clean energy. So say materials scientists who have created an artificial leaf that can harness light to split water and generate hydrogen.

Plant leaves have evolved over millions of years to catch the energy in the sun's rays very efficiently. They use the energy to produce food, and the central step in the process involves splitting water molecules and creating hydrogen ions.

There’s sort of a guilty pleasure in seeing the ‘masters of the universe’ knocked down a notch or two. So the news that the record for calculating Pi, set by the T2K Open Supercomputer, was not just broken but smashed by a lowly Core i7 machine was warmly received.

The Kepler Space Telescope, a designated planet-hunting satellite, has found its first five planets, among them an odd, massive world only as dense as Styrofoam.

The number of planets now known outside the solar system has risen to more than 400, but none is yet Earth-like enough to harbor life. Right now, Kepler can only detect large planets orbiting close to their stars, which means that these first planets are too hot to hold liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it. But over the next year, the mission’s scientists will be homing in on ever more life-friendly places.

In the shimmering fantasy realm of the hit movie "Avatar," a paraplegic Marine leaves his wheelchair behind and finds his feet in a new virtual world thanks to "the link," a sophisticated chamber that connects his brain to a surrogate alien, via computer.

This type of interface is a classic tool in gee-whiz science fiction. But the hard science behind it is even more wow-inducing.