A band of Seattle computer scientists is on a mission to make artificial intelligence actually intelligent.
Nestled among Seattle’s gleaming lights on a gloomy September day, a single nonprofit wants to change the world, one computer at a time. Its researchers hope to transform the way machines perceive the world: to have them not only see it, but understand what they’re seeing. At the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), researchers are working on just that. AI2, ...read more
Sample Drill
Like the Mars Curiosity rover, AREE’s drill would let scientists see into Venus’ interior — and past.
Wind Turbine
Venus’ winds would spin AREE’s fan blades, generating energy that’s stored in a spring.
Seismometer
Astronomers know little about Venus’ interior, and that impedes our understanding of how planets form. So one prime objective is to set up “Earth’s Twin” with a seismometer, which measures geologic activity. ...read more
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Tracing each illness back to the start of symptoms, Frankovich has managed to find clusters: groups of children from the same school or neighborhood who had all come down with the condition in the same month; individuals with a true, physical connection, like the family of three brothers Swedo had studied years before. In the course of her investigation, a host of alternate infections have emerged: not just strep, but bacterial mycoplasma, influenza, sinusitis, pneumonia and others.
By 2015, Fra ...read more
Modern Death: How Medicine Changed the End of LifeBy Haider Warraich
Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of LifeBy Jessica Nutik Zitter
Two physicians, each gifted, thoughtful observers, tackle a subject that’s rarely discussed ahead of the event: death. Zitter, whose work in an Oakland ICU was the subject of the recent Netflix documentary Extremis, has a deft directness. She presents multiple perspectives — the anxious family, a confused patient, clashing opinions bet ...read more
Armadillos are expanding their range northward.
Armadillos roamed the Western Hemisphere during the Ice Age. But by the time naturalist John James Audubon first noted their presence in 1854, the mammals had just a tiny toehold north of the U.S.-Mexico border along Texas’ hot Rio Grande Valley, with a broader range across Mexico and countries farther south. Since then, armadillos have been ceaselessly marching north and east, with scientists citing climate change as a likely factor. Th ...read more
Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and other New Ways of Engaging the World by Sharman Apt Russell. Oregon State University Press. 2014.
From the very first pages, Russell’s diary pulls the reader into experience. Vivid descriptions, lively metaphors, and breathless narrative bring together her diary entries into a larger story of becoming a scientist. Russell and her tiger beetles are revealed within her first entry—these are indeed the main characters in the ...read more
The hum of insects pollinating plants could one day be joined by a decidedly different buzz.
Researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Institute in Japan have developed a system for transferring pollen between plants using a tiny commercial drone armed with an adhesive gel. They say that their sticky drone solution could one day help ailing pollinator populations ensure crops keep having sex.
Helping Plants Get It On
For their artificial Cupid they used an off-th ...read more
Yeast cells up close. (Courtesy Jef Boeke, NYU Langone)
Scientists are five steps closer to synthesizing the entire genome of baker’s yeast, a feat that, once accomplished, will push the field of synthetic biology into a new frontier.
An international team of researchers led by NYU Langone geneticist Jef Boeke on Thursday announced it constructed and integrated five “designer” chromosomes into Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This collaboration, known as the Synthetic Yeast 2.0 proj ...read more
