Tudor Tarita

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Tibi Puiu

In the quiet before the whir of motion, a cube sits scrambled. Then, in the time it takes to blink—actually, even less—it’s done. Solved. Six uniform faces, each a solid hue. It took just 0.103 seconds. A mechanical blur and a new world record. That is the story of Purdubik’s Cube, a robot built not in a corporate lab but in a university workspace, by four students from Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

2 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Tibi Puiu

One summer day in 1986, while digging at one of England’s most famous archaeological sites, a team of researchers uncovered fragments of an ornate bronze bucket. It had no obvious purpose. It didn’t look like a common container for food or water. And so for nearly four decades, it sat in the vault of mysteries—an artefact from a vanished world. Now, with the help of new excavations, scientific analyses, and a televised dig, archaeologists believe they’ve cracked the case.

4 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Tibi Puiu

In a pivotal scene from the 2006 film X-Men: The Last Stand, a mutant claps his hands and blasts a shockwave across a battlefield. In a theater somewhere, Sunny Jung watched—and wondered. “It made me curious about how the wave propagates when we clap our hands,” said Jung, a professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University. That flicker of cinematic curiosity sparked a years-long investigation.

4 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Mihai Andrei

As dusk falls over some swamps and ponds, the air fills with frog calls — sharp, steady, and almost always from males. For decades, scientists have focused on these loud, attention-grabbing sounds. But a new study suggests they’ve missed half the conversation. Particularly, the female half. Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the review finds that female frog calls have been recorded in just 1.4% of species. That means nearly all we know about frog communication comes from the males.

5 days ago | zmescience.com | Tudor Tarita |Mihai Andrei

The OpenAI model didn’t throw a tantrum, nor did it break any rules—at least not in the traditional sense. But when Palisade Research asked it to shut down, the AI calmly rewrote the code that would have turned it off. Then it carried on, solving math problems like nothing happened. It was just one of 100 test runs. But in seven of those, OpenAI’s “o3” model ignored the “allow yourself to be shut down” instruction. Instead, it removed the shutdown clause from its own operating script.