Tech
- Artificial Intelligence
Generative AI grabbed headlines this year. Here’s why and what’s next
Prominent artificial intelligence researcher Melanie Mitchell explains why generative AI matters and looks ahead to the technology’s future.
- Space
A telescope dropped dark matter data from the edge of space. Here’s why
Last May, NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope crash-landed in rural Argentina. Scientists scrambled to recover the dark matter data aboard.
- Physics
Filipino math teacher Emma Rotor helped develop crucial WWII weapons tech
Devoted wife of a famed Filipino writer, Emma Unson Rotor worked on the proximity fuze at a U.S. agency in the 1940s.
- Health & Medicine
50 years ago, X-rays provided an unprecedented look inside the brain
CT scans can now image the whole body and are even used in other scientific fields such as archaeology, zoology and physics.
- Artificial Intelligence
How artificial intelligence sharpens blurry thermal vision images
A thermal imaging technique uses a special camera and AI to create clear images and accurately gauge distances of objects, even in pitch-blackness
- Climate
How one device could help transform our power grid
As coal-fired power plants are retired, grid-forming inverters may be key to a future that relies on solar and wind power.
- Health & Medicine
A new device can detect the coronavirus in the air in minutes
The detector can sense as a few as seven to 35 coronavirus particles per liter of air — about as sensitive as a PCR test but much quicker.
- Physics
Physicists split bits of sound using quantum mechanics
New experiments put phonons — the tiniest bits of sound — into quantum mechanical superpositions and show they are as weird as other quantum entities.
- Tech
How understanding horses could inspire more trustworthy robots
Computer scientist Eakta Jain pioneered the study of how human-horse interactions could help improve robot design and shape human-robot interactions.
- Tech
Deblina Sarkar is building microscopic machines to enter our brains
The ultratiny devices can communicate wirelessly from inside living cells and may one day help cure brain diseases.
- Tech
A flower-shaped soft robot could make brain monitoring less invasive
Once inserted in the skull, the device unfurls flexible sensors that can monitor the brain's electrical activity less invasively than current methods.
- Tech
50 years ago, a balloon circumnavigated the world for science
A 1973 high-altitude flight kicked off an era of useful stratospheric balloon science. Some scientists worry that heightened concerns over alleged spy balloons might hamper that.
