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A painting created by a robot has sold for more than one million dollars, raising new questions about what makes an artist.

The painting received 27 bids at an auction. It ended up selling for $1,084,800, a far higher amount than the predicted selling price of $120,000 to $180,000.

The artwork is a portrait of Alan Turing, an English mathematician who designed a code-breaking machine during World War II. Turing, who could be considered an early computer scientist, predicted that computers and artificial intelligence (AI) would become dominant in people’s lives. It was AI that enabled a humanoid robot named Ai-Da to create Turing’s portrait.

“We’re going into a post-human world where decision-making is not human,” Aidan Meller, who helped build Ai-Da, told CNN. “[The world is] increasingly algorithmic because we’ve seen it’s reliable…Ai-Da’s artwork is really showing you the potential future of where we could go.”

At just 18 months old, a bloodhound named Bo is still in the early part of his career with the Gastonia Police Department in North Carolina, but his ability to help humanity is already being recognized. Bo is the winner of the 2024 American Humane Hero Dog Award.

The award is meant to recognize “often ordinary dogs who do extraordinary things, whether it’s saving lives on the battlefield, lending sight or hearing to a human companion, or helping people achieve their goals,” according to American Humane, an organization founded to promote the welfare of animals. Bo emerged out of a pool of hundreds of nominees for his exceptional service.

Working with his handler, Sergeant David Rowland, Bo has saved multiple lives since he started his work with the Gastonia Police Department in October 2023. Using his keen sense of smell, the bloodhound located several missing people over the past year, including a child who had been kidnapped. He even tracked down suspects who were wanted for robbery, even though the materials he was given to pick up their scent had been contaminated with other scents.

Fourteen-year-old Ellyanne Wanjiku Chlystun remembers the first time she planted a tree.

“I remember at the time eating either an orange or lemon and I took the seed…and put it in the soil and then it started growing and sprouting,” Ellyanne told the BBC. “I fell in love with what I was doing, so I planted more.” Since then, Ellyanne estimates, she has helped get 1.3 million trees planted in her home country of Kenya and beyond. Trees not only absorb excess carbon dioxide but also help reduce the flow of floodwater.

“I feel so sad when it rains and nobody thinks of planting a tree,” Ellyanne told Nation. “When I see water going down the drain in residential areas, thereby causing flooding simply because there is no tree cover, it hurts me to the core,” she explained. Her newest goal is to get one trillion trees planted before she turns 18.

“I was brought up to believe that everything is possible, especially for me as a young person,” Ellyanne told the BBC. 

Ellyanne’s tree-planting campaign has grown into a larger effort to take on climate change and its effects. She has attended several climate change conferences around the globe, giving speeches and meeting world leaders. In a speech at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, she pointed out that climate change brings on weather patterns that increase the spread of diseases such as malaria.

Ellyanne has also appeared in documentaries, including Save Our Wildlife, which features children from all over the world talking about how climate change affects wildlife. Ellyanne speaks about how droughts are threatening the survival of elephants.

Ellyanne says climate change affects everyone—and everyone can be part of the solution.

“[Environmental matters] are universal,” Ellyanne told Nation. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. We can all come together and make this planet a better place to live in than what we found.”

Have you ever known you were dreaming while you were dreaming? According to WebMD, about 50 percent of people have had this experience, which is known as lucid dreaming. Now, a study suggests that a phone app can help boost the chances of having a lucid dream.

Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois built an app that they hoped would encourage lucid dreaming. App users are instructed to listen to a particular sound, such as several beeps, before bed and try to associate the sound with an awareness of their own mind and body. The app then repeats that sound six hours later, while the user is sleeping. The goal is to get the user back into a state of self-awareness so that they come to know when they are dreaming. 

The researchers tested the app on a group of 19 people. They asked the group how many lucid dreams they’d experienced in the previous week and found there was an average of 0.74 lucid dreams. The researchers then asked the 19 participants to use the app every night for one week and found the average number of lucid dreams increased to 2.11.

“That’s a really big increase for lucid dreaming,” Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly told Science News. “Lucid dreaming once a week is a lot.”

To test whether the app was responsible for the increased number of lucid dreams, the researchers gathered 112 people for another experiment. All 112 people were asked to listen to certain app sounds before bed. For one night, the app played these same sounds for everyone in the group while they were sleeping. But the next night, only 40 people heard these sounds. Thirty-five people heard different sounds while sleeping, and another 37 heard no sounds.

On the first night, 17 percent of the group had lucid dreams. On the second night, only 5 percent of the people who didn’t hear the before-bed sounds said they had lucid dreams. This suggests that the sounds people hear and practice with before bed can help train their brains to have a lucid dream when they hear the same sounds while sleeping. In other words, the app might work!

Could a bright yellow powder be the key to curbing climate change? Probably not, but it might help. Invented by a team of chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, the powder has demonstrated an ability to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

Zihou Zhou, a graduate student studying chemistry at the university and one of the inventors of the powder, says the powder is made up of crystalline materials with large pores that can suck up carbon dioxide. Climate change is caused by the presence of too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity. To address the effects of climate change, like warmer temperatures, melting ice, and more severe weather, it’s crucial to reduce the amount of CO2.

“It’s a monumental problem to take [carbon dioxide] out of the air because it’s mixed with other gases and it’s dilute; harmful, but dilute. And that makes it a supremely harder problem,” Professor Omar Yaghi told CBS News. Yaghi runs the lab at the university where he, Zhou, and others are investigating how chemistry can be used to address climate change.

When 14-year-old Sirish Subash’s mom kept insisting that he wash fruit before eating it to remove pesticides, he wondered if washing produce is really very effective. Hoping to find out, he ended up inventing a helpful device.

“My [invention] is called PestiSCAND,” Sirish told USA Today. “[It’s a] device that allows everybody to check for pesticide residues on their produce at home. The pesticide residue [is] a contaminant that’s commonly found on produce items.”

Sirish’s ingenuity paid off. The 9th grader from Georgia recently took home the top prize at the 2024 3M Young Scientist Challenge, an annual competition for middle school students.

In France, the minimum age to get a driver’s license is 17, but that hasn’t stopped teens as young as 14 from getting behind the wheel of the Citroën Ami. Although the electric vehicle looks like a car and mostly drives like a car, it isn’t technically a car at all.

Now available in many European countries and parts of the Middle East, the Ami is considered a “quadricycle,” or a four-wheeled microcar. Due to its classification, a full driver’s license isn’t required to drive it—and what is required depends on the country. In France, a driver must have an AM license (a type of motorbike license), which can be obtained after a few hours of lessons.

With a maximum speed of 28 miles per hour (45 kilometers per hour), the Ami is much slower than a real car. It’s also very basic. There’s no heating or air conditioning, no floor mats, and very little storage. While there’s a USB jack, there’s no radio. Still, the Ami has more features than an electric bike or moped, and it keeps its passengers dry when it’s raining.

The Ami won’t take its driver very far. A single battery charge will power the microcar for up to 47 miles (75 kilometers). But the Ami isn’t supposed to be used on a busy road or for long trips. It’s intended for local driving—a trip to the store or a short ride to work.

John Kinsel, Sr., one of the Navajo code talkers, has died. He was 107. Like the other code talkers, Kinsel played a decisive role in helping the Allies win World War II.

The code talkers were a group of Indigenous (also known as American Indian or Native American) soldiers who used radios to transmit classified (secret) wartime information in their Native language. Most code talkers were Navajo. With Kinsel’s death, just two code talkers are still alive. In a statement, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren offered praise for Kinsel.

“Mr. Kinsel was a Marine who bravely and selflessly fought for all of us in the most terrifying circumstances with the greatest responsibility as a Navajo Code Talker,” Nygren said.

Born in Cove, Arizona, Kinsel was a young man in 1941, when the United States entered World War II. Within months, many Navajo men had gone to work in shipyards and other places where they could contribute to the war effort. Others decided to enlist in the military. Kinsel chose the Marine Corps.

Kinsel saw combat in numerous battles in the Pacific and received a Purple Heart after being wounded in 1945. (The Purple Heart is a military decoration for soldiers who are wounded or killed in battle.)

Kinsel also helped develop the military code that was based on the Navajo language and that the enemy found impossible to break. According to the Navajo Times, his contributions included “rabbit trail” for “route,” “turtle” for “tank,” and “bird carrier” for “aircraft.”

Olin Kieyoomia, the deputy director of the Navajo Nation Veterans Administration, said Kinsel was a hero to many.

“The Navajo Nation has lost a treasure, a hero, a man who shaped history by saving countless lives with our Navajo language and instilled pride within the Navajo Nation and the world,” Kieyoomia said in a statement. “He is an example of the title United States Marine. He will be forever missed and remembered.”

Video game company Firaxis has teamed up with the Shawnee Tribe to develop programmer Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, the latest in the popular gaming series that lets players build civilizations from the ground up. The Shawnee people helped ensure that the game’s portrayal of their history is as respectful and accurate as possible.

Civilization VII is the latest in a series in which gamers build a civilization while playing as famous historical leaders like Cleopatra and Napoleon. The Civilization games have been a hit since the first one debuted in 1991. 

But over the years, Firaxis has been criticized for the way the games portrayed some historical figures, including Indigenous peoples. In 2018, when the company included the Cree people in Civilization VI: Rise and Fall, a Cree leader in Canada complained that the portrayal was disrespectful and not accurate. 

“We learned a lot as time went on,” Meier told the Associated Press. Meier and Firaxis resolved to do better. So when they considered including 19th century Shawnee leader Tecumseh in Civilization VII, they asked the Shawnee Tribe for their input.

Shawnee Tribe Chief Ben Barnes was thrilled.

“I was like, ‘This can’t be true,’” Barnes told the Associated Press. “Do they want us to participate in the next version of Civilization?”

When Adrian Anantawan was in 5th grade, his teacher announced that everyone would be learning to play a flute-like musical instrument called the recorder. Anantawan knew this would be difficult for him. Born without most of his right forearm, Anantawan has only his left hand—and not enough fingers to play the recorder. Now a world-class violinist and music teacher, Anantawan is dedicated to expanding opportunities for musicians with disabilities.

Anantawan is inspired by his own journey with music. When he realized he couldn’t play the recorder, he struggled to think of an instrument he could play. Then he saw violinist Itzhak Perlman on an episode of Sesame Street. Although Perlman has the use of both hands, he requires leg braces to walk due to a childhood case of polio. Watching Perlman play the violin made Anantawan want to try it. 

But while the stringed instrument requires only five fingers to play, it also requires the player to move a bow with their other hand. So Anantawan and his parents went to a hospital near their home in Toronto, Canada, and asked specialists there to make an adaptive cast for Anantawan. The cast the specialists made, called a spatula, allows Anantawan to use his right shoulder muscles to move the bow of his violin. 

“A lot of times, we let fear get in the way of trying anything,” Anantawan told Good Morning America. “For me, my story has always been a result of just trying something, being okay with failure, and then just seeing what the results are.”

It took Anantawan some time to get used to maneuvering the bow. After a while, he says, “my body sort of figured it out on its own. You start from the sound, and a student who is passionate will figure it out.” Anantawan eventually had several teachers, including Itzhak Perlman.

Anantawan has performed at the White House, the United Nations, and two Olympic opening ceremonies.  He’s also a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. At Berklee, he runs the Music Inclusion Ensemble. Made up of students with disabilities, the ensemble works to ensure that all students have the accommodations they need to play their instruments.

“My duty and job is to use this platform in some way to show folks what a person with a visible disability can do,” Anantawan told Good Morning America. “And it’s always an honor to do that.”