What happens when machines learn to manipulate us by faking our emotions? Judging by the rate at which researchers are developing human-like AI agents, we’re about to find out. Researchers around the world are trying to create more human-like AI. By definition, they’re developing artificial psychopaths. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – there’s nothing […]
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IBM‘s figured out how to ignore noisy qubits and run machine learning algorithms in quantum feature spaces. Eureka-cadabra! The age of quantum algorithms is upon us. A team of IBM researchers created a pair of quantum classification algorithms and then experimentally implemented them on a hybrid system utilizing a 2-qubit quantum computer and a classical […]
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Mozilla wants to make it easier to create, view, and replicate data visualizations on the web, and toward that end, it today unveiled Iodide, an “experimental tool” meant to help scientists and engineers write and share interactive documents using an iterative workflow. It’s currently in alpha, and available from Github in open source. “In the […]
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Matthew Berninger, the lead singer of the National and prototypical DILF. Photo via The National Facebook page. This article originally appeared on VICE Canada. The vision of the hot dad at the park, doing the one-handed stroller push, is synonymous with ‘DILF’—the less popular term to the ubiquitous ‘MILF’ (the third most searched for term […]
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I don’t know why it took so long to dawn on me – after 20 years of a scientific career – that what we call the “scientific method” really only refers the second half of any scientific story. It describes how we test and refine the ideas and hypotheses we have about nature through the […]
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Marie Curie, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Brenda Milner, Martha Salcudean, Julie Payette, Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson. What do these names bring to mind? They are women whose pioneering work led the fight against cancer, ground-breaking discoveries about how brain cells live and die, and to the unveiling of the secrets of human memory. They are leaders in […]
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Your brain is made up of billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. And how they’re arranged gives rise to the brain’s functionality and to your personality. That’s why scientists in Switzerland recently produced the first-ever digital 3D brain cell atlas, a complete mapping of the brain of a mouse. While this is a […]
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A team of researchers at the University of Cornell recently conducted a study on incarceration rates in the US. It was discovered that nearly half of all Americans have a family member who’s been incarcerated. The other half probably just had better lawyers. The US has the world’s largest prison industrial complex. Our incarcerated population […]
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These days thanks to the advancement of modern medicine, science, and technology, people who contract HIV can still lead relatively normal lives, even if their lives might have been shortened due to the fact that at the moment there is still no known cure for the disease. However there is hope. According to recent reports, […]
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Zebras are famous for their contrasting black and white stripes – but until very recently no one really knew why they sport their unusual striped pattern. It’s a question that’s been discussed as far back as 150 years ago by great Victorian biologists like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Since then many ideas have […]
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Species living on land make up 85 percent to 95 percent of all biodiversity on Earth today. This is especially impressive when we consider that the continents cover only 30 percent of our planet’s surface area. And that most land species are descendants of a small number of pioneering groups that invaded the land about 400m years […]
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Image via Shutterstock NASA is serious about putting people on Mars in the coming years. And after a major study of the biological effects of long-duration space flight, the agency is one giant leap closer to realizing that goal. John Charles, scientist in residence at the NASA Johnson Space Center, presented some findings from that […]
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It’s almost 40 years since scientists discovered what wiped out the dinosaurs: an asteroid hitting Earthnear modern-dayMexico. That was it, or so we thought.A paper published today in Science further supports an alternative hypothesis: that catastrophic events following the impact could have helped cause the end of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life. […]
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By Meredith Salisbury | February 26, 2019, 10:50 AM | Techonomy Exclusive You don’t hear much about rare diseases, except occasionally on primetime medical dramas. But just because they’re “rare” — in the U.S., that refers to diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 Americans — doesn’t mean they don’t affect a lot of lives. Collectively, […]
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The outer region of the solar system may be the least explored, but scientists have managed to unravel several of its mysteries in recent weeks. On New Year’s Day, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons encountered the icy object Ultima Thule for the first time, shedding light on how it formed. Astronomers have also just discovered […]
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Credit: Indiana University School of Medicine It has been more than 65 years since James Watson and Francis Crick, working with Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins discovered that DNA – the basic chemical information code of all life forms – has a double helical structure that played an important role in its function. Since then, […]
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Google says it’s made significant progress toward an efficient, reliable, and scalable means of controlling quantum systems’ electronics — systems it it hopes will someday solve computationally complex problems beyond the reach of classical machines. At the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week, researchers on company’s AI Quantum team unveiled a […]
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Image credit – MIT As humans, we tend to have greater flexibility and adaptiveness compared to robots. For example, if we dropped an orange, we would reach out and attempt to stop it from rolling to the ground. Robots, on the other hand, might not, depending on how they are programmed. However, researchers at MIT […]
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University of Maryland Climate change can be hard to fully fathom, especially because those in power continually seem to downplay alarming reports by scientists and our country’s own institutions. In an effort to help make the conversation more personal by offering real-world climate analogies, researchers Matthew C. Fitzpatrick and Robert R. Dunn decided to create […]
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Maybe you’re a full-time student trying to come up with next month’s ramen budget. Perhaps you’ve just lost your job and you’re trying to earn a few bucks in between interviews. Or it could be you’re just happy to find a career doing something you’re really good at. For whatever reason, thousands of men donate sperm […]
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