The 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry recognized Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker for using machine learning to tackle one of biology’s biggest challenges: predicting the 3D shape of proteins and designing them from scratch.This year’s award stood out because it honored research that originated at a tech company: DeepMind, an AI research startup that was acquired by Google in 2014. Most previous chemistry Nobel Prizes have gone to researchers in academia. Many laureates went on to fo ...read more
If your jaw dropped as you watched the latest AI-generated video, your bank balance was saved from criminals by a fraud detection system, or your day was made a little easier because you were able to dictate a text message on the run, you have many scientists, mathematicians, and engineers to thank.But two names stand out for foundational contributions to the deep learning technology that makes those experiences possible: Princeton University physicist John Hopfield and University of Toronto com ...read more
My Octopus Teacher — a documentary about the smarts of cephalopods — inspired a team of engineers to create materials that can grab and release objects with rough and irregular surfaces. Those novel materials, which have many potential uses — from helping people with disabilities to better grab objects to creating robots to assist in underwater cleanup — are presented in an Advanced Science report.Michael Bartlett, the lead investigator in the study and engineering professor at Virginia ...read more
A series of underwater caves off the southern coast of Sicily holds clues about Ice Age-era human migration. A team of ‘citizen scientists’ — including a tugboat captain and both recreational and Italian navy divers — helped discover them.The findings, reported in PLOS ONE, describe 25 caves and rock shelters that show signs of human occupation from about 17,000 years ago. Many scholars consider Sicily to be among the first islands humans settled in the Mediterranean. In this case, the r ...read more
Hundreds of industrial facilities with toxic pollutants are in Hurricane Milton’s path as it heads toward Florida, less than two weeks after Hurricane Heleneflooded communities across the Southeast.Milton, expected to make landfall as a major hurricane late on Oct. 9, is bearing down on boat and spa factories along Florida’s west-central coast, along with the rubber, plastics, and fiberglass manufacturers that supply them. Many of these facilities use tens of thousands of registered contamin ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine