“[The robots] are expanding skills, moving up the corporate ladder, showing awesome productivity and retention rates, and increasingly shoving aside their human counterparts”

You might think — or hope, if you’re a nerd deep inside — that this excerpt belongs to an unpublished novel from Isaac Asimov. Sadly, at least for sci-fi lovers, it actually comes from “The Rise of the Robots”, a book that explores the impact of technology on the future of our society.

The role of sleep changes with every stage of life, from infancy to old age. The latest neuroscience is discovering how crucial sleep is to an infant’s growing brain, while the latest epidemiology is discovering how irregular sleep doubles the risk of death as we grow older. To mark National Sleep Week, Thrive Global spoke with some of the top researchers in sleep science to give you a map of how sleep changes through your lifespan.

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Could advances in technology, genetics and artificial intelligence lead to a world in which economic inequality turns into biological inequality? asks the historian and writer Yuval Noah Harari. Inequality goes back at least 30,000 years.

Hunter-gatherers were more equal than subsequent societies. They had very little property, and property is a pre-requisite for long-term inequality. But even they had hierarchies. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, however, something changed. Equality became a dominant value in human culture, almost all over the world. Why?

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A British inventor, who built an Iron Man-style flight suit, has flown it at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver. Richard Browning’s short flight took place outside the Vancouver Convention Centre in front of a large crowd.

Since he posted the video of his maiden flight in the UK, Mr Browning has had huge interest in his flying suit. But he insists the project remains “a bit of fun” and is unlikely to become a mainstream method of transportation.

Another March for Science is tomorrow and no one in their right mind would say they are against it because of its name. First of all, you are standing against the right of people to march for whatever cause they wish. Second, you would be portrayed as someone who is against science.

I am all for science. I think the climate changes. It always has and always will. Yet I have been portrayed as anti-science and a climate change “denier” by many who will be marching for things I certainly believe in.

Image copyright: SAN DIEGO NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

A study that claims humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago – much earlier than previously suggested – has run into controversy. Humans are thought to have arrived in the New World no earlier than 25,000 years ago, so the find would push back the first evidence of settlement by more than 100,000 years. The conclusions rest on analysis of animal bones and tools from California. But many experts contacted by the BBC said they doubted the claims.

Earlier this month, the first installment in the accumulating list of hundreds of new peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting a skeptical position on climate change alarm was made available. Included on the list were 38 papers linking climate changes to solar forcing: 38 Sun-Climate Scientific Papers, January-March 2017

Just in the last few weeks alone, another 20 scientific papers were identified which link solar variations to climate changes, which means 58 papers have already been published in 2017.

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Doing moderate exercise several times a week is the best way to keep the mind sharp if you’re over 50, research suggests. Thinking and memory skills were most improved when people exercised the heart and muscles on a regular basis, a review of 39 studies found. This remained true in those who already showed signs of cognitive decline.

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The Cassini spacecraft is sending data back to Earth after diving in between Saturn’s rings and cloudtops. The probe executed the daredevil manoeuvre on Wednesday – the first of 22 plunges planned over the next five months – while out of radio contact.

Nasa’s 70m-wide Deep Space Network (DSN) antenna at Goldstone, California, managed to re-establish communications at 06:56 GMT (07:56 BST) on Thursday.

The Biobag may not look much like a womb, but it contains the same key parts: a clear plastic bag that encloses the fetal lamb and protects it from the outside world, like the uterus would; an electrolyte solution that bathes the lamb similarly to the amniotic fluid in the uterus; and a way for the fetus to circulate its blood and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. Flake and his colleagues published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.

Despite Saturday’s so-called “March for Science,” the almost simultaneous release of a Second Edition of a Research Report showing the exact opposite of what some of the marchers claim to be the conclusions of climate science has brought home the Orwellian reality that the marchers have gotten their claims concerning what the science says exactly backwards. The Climate March website says their forces of “The Resistance” won’t tolerate institutions that try to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.” If the marchers really support science, they should be supporting climate skeptics, not the climate alarmists. How Orwellian can you get? The science is clear.

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Many people are unsure about exactly what machine learning is. But the reality is that it is already part of everyday life. A form of artificial intelligence, it allows computers to learn from examples rather than having to follow step-by-step instructions.

The Royal Society believes it will have an increasing impact on people’s lives and is calling for more research, to ensure the UK makes the most of opportunities. Machine learning is already powering systems from the seemingly mundane to the life-changing. Here are just a few examples.

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A caterpillar that munches on plastic bags could hold the key to tackling plastic pollution, scientists say. Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the larvae of the moth, which eats wax in bee hives, can also degrade plastic.

Experiments show the insect can break down the chemical bonds of plastic in a similar way to digesting beeswax. Each year, about 80 million tonnes of the plastic polyethylene are produced around the world.

It was probably the trip of a lifetime. In 2012, biologists on an expedition to East Timor in southeast Asia spotted a brahminy blind snake wriggling out of somewhere quite unexpected: the rear end of a common Asian toad.

Mark O’Shea from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK and his colleagues witnessed the unusual event by chance after finding the pair under a rock. It is the first account of prey surviving digestion by a toad and of an animal as big as a blind snake emerging from a digestive tract alive.

The world is in the grip of global warming. Everything will keep getting hotter and hotter. Then we’ll all die. That’s the consensus from the scientific “community.” That’s the “settled science” always talked about.

But getting to the point that any science is actually “settled” – as in 100 percent accurate – is very difficult. There may be strong evidence to point to one conclusion, but it may turn out that we didn’t have all the information needed to arrive at the correct finding, or, data may change over time, leading us down a different path.