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High-temperature superconductivity is one of the holy grails of physics. It also seems to attract a steady stream of controversy, with a recent string of retracted papers and provocative claims that haven’t held up to scrutiny.

Superconductivity…

By the time most children are two years old, they can understand about 300 words. By the age of four, the average vocabulary has ballooned to more than 1,000 words. Our species’ incredible capacity to quickly acquire words isn’t fully…

Sallie Pero Mead was first hired at AT&T in 1915 as a “computer”—a human calculator—shortly after completing her master’s degree in mathematics at Columbia University. Before long she started working on the company’s transmission…

Recently, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, along with IBM and over 50 other founding members, announced an AI Alliance to “advance open, safe, responsible AI.” The group would be committed to “open science and open technologies,”…

AI’s Climate Impacts May Hit Marginalized People Hardest

By Thomas Frank & E&E…

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…