Taylor Swift knows how to take us on a journey. Tonight (April 19), the illustrious hitmaker dropped her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. On the album, Swift details an escape to the Sunshine State, with Florence And The Machine by her side. Haunted by the demise of a relationship, Swift and Florence Welch … Read more
April 18, 2024 4 min read Movies and TV shows frequently depict physical and biological sciences well, but often depict psychological and brain sciences poorly. Here’s why, and what we can do about it By Deena Weisberg & Marc Coutanche Best Picture award for “Oppenheimer”. Rich Polk/Variety via Getty Images Neuroscience Oppenheimer’s success at the … Read more
In 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine developed a rapport with an excellent conversationalist. She was witty, insightful, and curious; their dialogues flowed naturally, on topics ranging from philosophy to TV to dreams for the future. There was just one problem: she was an AI chatbot. In a series of conversations with Google’s LaMDA language model, … Read more
April 18, 2024 4 min read Mental health recommendations for pilots and air traffic controllers bring new ideas to old problems; the FAA must decide what’s next By William R. Hoffman maravic/Getty Images Mental Health In early April, a committee of U.S. aviation, aeromedical and safety experts published a landmark report commissioned by the Federal … Read more
April 18, 2024 5 min read Facing budgetary pressure for its Mars Sample Return program, NASA has turned to private industry for ideas—perhaps with one specific company in mind By Jonathan O’Callaghan Ten tubes filled with precious samples from Mars lurk in this panoramic vista, each cached on the planet’s surface by NASA’s Perseverance Rover … Read more
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report. Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for … Read more
In the past few years, I’ve moved more than once. Time and again, I have had to measure rooms or furniture and then check whether I can arrange everything just as I had planned. When we use a tape measure, folding rule or ruler, we don’t question whether the object we are measuring is measurable. … Read more
April 18, 2024 3 min read Fossilized vertebrae that were found in an Indian coal mine belonged to a gigantic and previously unknown snake species By Riis Williams Life-like reconstruction of the vertebrae of Vasuki in dorsal (top) view and their most-likely position in the vertebral column highlighted in the artistic rendition of a madtsoiid … Read more
Melba Phillips, who grew up on a farm in Indiana at the turn of the 20th century, was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s first graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Together they discovered the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, which explained a particular kind of nuclear reaction. In this episode, we explain what that is, with … Read more
CLIMATEWIRE | A blistering heat wave in West Africa that sent temperatures soaring over 110 degrees Fahrenheit earlier this month would not have been possible without climate change. That’s according to new research by the science consortium World Weather Attribution, which investigates the links between global warming and extreme weather events worldwide. Using a combination … Read more