You’re running late at the airport and need to urgently access your account, only to be greeted by one of those frustrating tests—”Select all images with traffic lights” or “Type the letters you see in this box.” You squint, you guess, but somehow you’re wrong. You complete another test but still the site isn’t satisfied.

“Your flight is boarding now,” the tannoy announces as the website gives you yet another puzzle. You swear at the screen, close your laptop and rush towards the gate.

Now, here’s a thought to cheer you up: Bots are now solving these puzzles in milliseconds using artificial intelligence (AI). How ironic. The tools designed to prove we’re human are now obstructing us more than the machines they’re supposed to be keeping at bay.

Welcome to the strange battle ...

Red meat has been a part of diets worldwide since early man. It is an excellent source of protein, vitamins (such as B vitamins) and minerals (such as iron and zinc). However, red meat has long been associated with increasing the risk of heart disease, cancer and early death. What may not be so well known is the link between red meat consumption and type 2 diabetes.

A paper published in The Lancet in September 2024 highlighted this link to type 2 diabetes using data from the Americas, the Mediterranean, Europe, south-east Asia and the Western Pacific (20 countries included).

This recent study, with nearly 2 million participants, found that high consumption of unprocessed red meat, such as beef, lamb and pork, and processed meat, such as bacon, sa...

A new artificial intelligence (AI) model has just achieved human-level results on a test designed to measure “general intelligence.”

On December 20, OpenAI’s o3 system scored 85% on the ARC-AGI benchmark, well above the previous AI best score of 55% and on par with the average human score. It also scored well on a very difficult mathematics test.

Creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the stated goal of all the major AI research labs. At first glance, OpenAI appears to have at least made a significant step towards this goal.

While skepticism remains, many AI researchers and developers feel something just changed. For many, the prospect of AGI now seems more real, urgent and closer than anticipated. Are they right?

Generalization and intelligence
To understand ...

If you have visited an island like one of the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti or Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, you may have noticed how small these land masses appear against the vast Pacific Ocean. If you’re on Hawaii, the nearest island to you is more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away, and the coast of the continental United States is more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away. To say these islands are secluded is an understatement.

For me, watching the movie “Moana” in 2016 was eye-opening. I knew that Polynesian people traveled between a number of Pacific islands, but seeing Moana set sail on a canoe made me realize exactly how small those boats are compared with what must have seemed like an endless ocean...