Dan Vergano: You’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Dan Vergano.
For the past decade, reports of UFO sightings have filled headlines and news broadcasts, and some of these have come from a surprising place: the…
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Why Is Superconductivity Research Plagued by Controversy?
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…
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A Camera-Wearing Baby Taught an AI to Learn Words
February 1, 2024
5 min read
A Camera-Wearing Baby Taught an AI to Learn Words
Most machine-learning models rely on mountains of data to replicate human text, but new research suggests the recipe for learning language might be simpler
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Forgotten Electrical Engineer’s Work Paved the Way for Radar Technology
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…
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Science Is Using Mechanical Moss to Fight Climate Change on the Canary Islands
This story was generously supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
TRANSCRIPT
Gustavo Viera Ruiz: The foggy areas of the Canaries support a very special forest, which is Laurisilva.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this…
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An Alliance Calling For More Open AI Should Heed Their Own Call
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,”…
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AI’s Climate Impacts May Hit Marginalized People Hardest
January 31, 2024
2 min read
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
CLIMATEWIRE…
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Computers Sculpt Hopping Gelatinous Robots
January 1, 2024
2 min read
Computers Sculpt Hopping Gelatinous Robots
These bloblike bots have been optimized for speed
Most robots are designed by human engineers, who must painstakingly arrange every joint and artificial muscle…
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Will Quantum Computers Upend Cryptography as We Know It?
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…
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These Numbers Look Random but Aren’t, Mathematicians Prove
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…
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