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Number's Up: Calculators Hold Out against AI

Calculators are more affordable than phones, and run on batteries and solar power. Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP
Calculators are more affordable than phones, and run on batteries and solar power. Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP
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Number's Up: Calculators Hold Out against AI

Calculators are more affordable than phones, and run on batteries and solar power. Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP
Calculators are more affordable than phones, and run on batteries and solar power. Lillian SUWANRUMPHA / AFP

The humble pocket calculator may not be able to keep up with the mathematical capabilities of new technology, but it will never hallucinate.

The device's enduring reliability equates to millions of sales each year for Japan's Casio, which is even eyeing expansion in certain regions.

Despite lightning-speed advances in artificial intelligence, chatbots still sometimes stumble on basic addition.

In contrast, "calculators always give the correct answer," Casio executive Tomoaki Sato told AFP.

But he conceded that calculators could one day go the way of the abacus.

"It's undeniable that the market for personal calculators used in business is on a downward trend," Sato said in Tokyo.

Smartphones and web browsers can handle everyday sums, while AI models achieved gold-level scores for the first time this year at a prestigious global maths contest.

But calculators are more affordable than phones, and run on batteries and solar power -- a plus for schools in developing countries, a potential growth area for Casio, Sato said.

And people who do buy calculators prefer the way they feel, he argued.

Thitinan Suntisubpool, co-owner of a shop selling red bags and beckoning cats in Bangkok's Chinatown, said she loves how durable her big calculator is, having dropped it several times.

"It's more convenient in many ways," the 58-year-old told AFP.

"We can use it to press the numbers and show the customer," avoiding language-barrier misunderstandings.

But at a nearby street stall selling clocks, torches and calculators, the vendor, who gave her name as Da, said calculator sales were "quiet".

'Optimised tools'

At a Casio factory in Thailand, assembly line workers slotted green circuit boards into place and popped cuboid buttons labelled "DEL" from a plastic tub onto pastel-blue calculator frames.

"Calculators are still in demand," said Ryohei Saito, a general manager for Casio in Thailand.

"Not everywhere in the world has smartphone connectivity, and calculators are optimised tools focused on necessary functions," he said.

In the year to March 2025, Casio sold 39 million calculators, general and scientific, in around 100 countries.

That compares to 45 million in 2019-20, but is still up from the 31 million that sold the following year after the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

The company has come a long way from the 1957 invention of the desk-sized "14-A", which it says was the first compact all-electric calculator.

Calculator history even made headlines recently when Christie's suspended the Paris sale of an early calculating machine, "La Pascaline", after a court said it could not be taken abroad.

The auction house called the ebony-decorated 1642 device "the first attempt in history to substitute the human mind with a machine".

Those attempts have accelerated with AI.

Scoring gold

In July, AI models made by Google, OpenAI and DeepSeek reached gold-level scores at the annual International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO).

But neither attained full marks at the annual contest for under-20s, unlike five human participants who achieved perfect scores.

IMO president Gregor Dolinar called the progress of artificial intelligence in the field "fascinating".

"When we talk about scientific calculators, in the past you needed them, but nowadays it's easier to just ask AI," he told AFP.

"If you pose the question in the right way," artificial intelligence can crunch abstract, logical questions and show how it reached its conclusion, Dolinar said.

Dolinar, a professor in engineering at the University of Ljubljana, thinks physical calculators are likely to "slowly disappear".

Something that has already happened for his students.

"They can calculate everything on a phone," he said.

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Varieties

Glasgow Building Fire Closes Scotland’s Busiest Train Station and Disrupts Rail Services

Floors collapse inside the building as fire fighters work at the site of a large fire in Glasgow City center on March 8, 2026. (AFP)
Floors collapse inside the building as fire fighters work at the site of a large fire in Glasgow City center on March 8, 2026. (AFP)
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Glasgow Building Fire Closes Scotland’s Busiest Train Station and Disrupts Rail Services

Floors collapse inside the building as fire fighters work at the site of a large fire in Glasgow City center on March 8, 2026. (AFP)
Floors collapse inside the building as fire fighters work at the site of a large fire in Glasgow City center on March 8, 2026. (AFP)

A major fire in the heart of Glasgow crippled Scottish train services Monday as firefighters worked to douse the blaze that destroyed a four-story building near Scotland's busiest railway station.

Glasgow Central Station was closed and all travel to, from and through the station was expected to be disrupted, National Rail said. There was no estimate when the station would reopen.

The fire broke out Sunday in a vape shop on Union Street, next to the station. It burned through the night and part of the building that dates back to 1851 collapsed.

Overnight footage of the blaze showed the building and its dome-like roofing structure completely engulfed in flames. That section of roofing later appears to have collapsed.

There were no reported casualties, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said.

Varieties

World’s Oldest Icebergs is Nearly at an End

 A drone captured the spectacular caves and arches of A23a in 2023 (British Antarctic Survey) 
 A drone captured the spectacular caves and arches of A23a in 2023 (British Antarctic Survey) 
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World’s Oldest Icebergs is Nearly at an End

 A drone captured the spectacular caves and arches of A23a in 2023 (British Antarctic Survey) 
 A drone captured the spectacular caves and arches of A23a in 2023 (British Antarctic Survey) 

The story of one of the world’s oldest icebergs is nearly at an end, after a breathtaking 40-year journey that has captivated scientists.

The iceberg, known as A23a, was once the largest on Earth, covering an area more than twice the size of Greater London, according to BBC.

But after a path full of twists and turns, A23a has melted, fractured and spectacularly disintegrated over the past year.

Now, far from the icy seas of Antarctica, what’s left of A23a is being eaten away by warmer waters. It’s in its death throes, not expected to last more than a matter of weeks.

All icebergs melt eventually, but scientists have been looking at how it's disintegrated for clues about how other parts of Antarctica might respond as the climate changes.

“It’s been an extraordinary journey,” said Prof Mike Meredith of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. “But it is on its last legs now.”

This is the story of A23a’s final months.

But first we have to go back to 1986. That year, a nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in what is now northern Ukraine, Gary Lineker won the golden boot at the Fifa World Cup in Mexico, and Whitney Houston received her first Grammy award.

Away from the world’s gaze, the Filchner Ice Shelf - a massive floating tongue of ice extending from the Antarctic continent and into the Weddell Sea - was changing dramatically. One of the icebergs to break off - or calve - was A23a, then about 4,000 sq km.

It soon became anchored in the muds of the Weddell Sea, where it remained stuck for more than 30 years. It wasn’t until 2020 that scientists noticed signs that A23a was on the move again.

While it’s likely icebergs have lived longer in the Earth’s distant past, A23a is thought to be the oldest iceberg in the world today, at least among those picked up by satellites and tracked by scientists.

“Its journey is really pretty impressive, just for sheer longevity,” said Dr Christopher Shuman, a retired scientist formerly with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in the US. He likens tracking its path to watching a TV drama “where you don't know what you're going to see next.”

As A23a moves across the vast South Atlantic Ocean, it can be hard to grasp its scale - but if you could drop it into the English Channel its size would be much more striking.

At the start of 2025 - even after 39 years - A23a was still a collosus. It would have almost stretched between the Isle of Wight and Normandy in France. Now, it wouldn’t even reach halfway from Dover to Calais.

“To watch it be so stable for so long, and then just disintegrate over one year, has been fascinating,” said Dr Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, who was born the same year as A23a.

Over the past two weeks A23a has been carried by ocean currents in a near-complete clockwise loop. This could be its final dance.

Recent satellite images suggest further hydrofracturing of what was left of it - “tantalizing evidence of sudden disintegration”, according to Prof Adrian Luckman of Swansea University.

While other icebergs have travelled further in the past, A23a is the furthest north of any Antarctic iceberg being tracked by scientists today. It’s closer to the equator than London.

The prolonged exposure to sea warmth means the berg’s remains will inevitably fragment and eventually melt away, even though the Southern Hemisphere winter is on the horizon.

By 5 March, A23a had shrunk to approximately 180 square km, although estimates can vary slightly.

Once it gets to roughly 70 square km, scientists will stop tracking it. That moment’s not far away, according to Luckman.

“All traces will probably have disappeared in a matter of weeks now, at most,” Luckman said.

 

 

 

Varieties

Digital Reconstruction Reveals Face of ‘Little Foot,’ A 4 Million-Year-Old Human Ancestor

The Sterkfontein caves have yielded many hominin fossil discoveries. Emmanuel Croset/AFP/Getty Images 
The Sterkfontein caves have yielded many hominin fossil discoveries. Emmanuel Croset/AFP/Getty Images 
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Digital Reconstruction Reveals Face of ‘Little Foot,’ A 4 Million-Year-Old Human Ancestor

The Sterkfontein caves have yielded many hominin fossil discoveries. Emmanuel Croset/AFP/Getty Images 
The Sterkfontein caves have yielded many hominin fossil discoveries. Emmanuel Croset/AFP/Getty Images 

Scientists can now come face to face with an early human ancestor nicknamed Little Foot who lived 3.67 million years ago, thanks to digital reconstruction technology, according to CNN.

Renowned paleoanthropologist Ronald Clarke identified four tiny bones in the University of the Witwatersrand’s museum collection and went on to discover Little Foot’s nearly pristine fossil in the 1990s in the Sterkfontein Caves northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Full excavation of the remains took a painstaking 20 years, but it was worth it.

At 90% intact, the specimen is the most complete known skeleton belonging to Australopithecus, chimpanzee-like ancestors who were able to walk upright on two feet but also adept at climbing trees to escape from predators like saber-toothed cats.

The skeleton represents the oldest evidence of human evolution in southern Africa, said Dr. Amélie Beaudet, an honorary researcher in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, who has studied the fossil unearthed from the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site for years.

However, Little Foot’s skull, which became crushed as surrounding cave sediment grew heavier and shifted over time, has been difficult to study. The skull distortion was so extensive that physical reconstruction wasn’t possible.

Now, Beaudet and her colleagues have digitally rearranged the facial bones to their rightful places, providing a clearer look at Little Foot’s face — and hinting at features that may be shared across the human family tree.

“Only a handful of Australopithecus fossils preserve an almost complete face, making Little Foot a rare and valuable reference point,” said Beaudet, lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol, in a statement. “Little Foot’s face preserves key anatomical regions involved in vision, breathing and feeding, and its skull will offer further key elements for understanding our evolutionary history.”

Little Foot’s fossilized remains left South Africa for the first time so researchers could capture precise images of the inner structures of her face, which had never been seen.

The skull was shipped to England so it could go through high-resolution scanning at the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

The size of Little Foot’s face fell between that of a gorilla and an orangutan, while the shape was closer to what is seen in orangutans and bonobos.

The team was surprised to find that the face size, as well as the shape and measurements of her eye sockets, were also more similar to the East African Australopithecus fossils, despite the fact that Little Foot was found in South Africa.

Little Foot’s skeleton is 50% more complete than the famed Lucy fossil, found in Ethiopia in 1974 by paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray.

Next, the team wants to use digital reconstruction methods to correct deformation on other parts of the skull, such as the braincase, to reveal insights about the brain size of Little Foot — and potentially unlock clues about the cognitive abilities of our early human ancestors.