January 31, 2024
2 min read
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AI’s Climate Impacts May Hit Marginalized People Hardest
A Brookings Institution report warns that energy-hungry artificial intelligence tech will worsen the climate crisis

January 31, 2024
2 min read
Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm
AI’s Climate Impacts May Hit Marginalized People Hardest
A Brookings Institution report warns that energy-hungry artificial intelligence tech will worsen the climate crisis

Most robots are designed by human engineers, who must painstakingly arrange every joint and artificial muscle to make the bot accomplish a specific task. The process is slow and limited by human imagination; having an algorithm do it instead…

Jeffery DelViscio: Quantum and cryptography: those are two words that might strike fear in the minds of the uninitiated. But in February’s issue of Scientific American, we have a story about how they’re colliding—double whammy.
Here to walk…

In the real world, probability is a tough thing to characterize. If I roll a die, what does it mean to say that it has a one-sixth chance of coming up 5? We say that the outcome is random because we lack the information needed to predict which…

The headlines in early January didn’t mince words, and all were variations on one theme: researchers think there’s a 5 percent chance artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity.
That was the sobering finding of a paper posted on the…

Experts have long warned of a future where artificial intelligence makes it impossible to tell digital fact from fiction. Now that future is here. A recent case of a recording that sounds like a high school principal making racist comments shows…

The einstein tile can cover an infinite plane only with a nonrepeating pattern. A material based on it has features of both crystals and quasicrystals.

NASA JPL Unveils Rover Operations Center for Moon, Mars Missions
5 min read
The center…

In Nigeria, one community that has never had potable water finally gets it.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Spirit and Opportunity’s landing on Mars, part of a mission whose legacy will extend far into the future.
In January 2004, twin NASA rovers named Spirit and Opportunity touched down on opposite sides of…