It's 3am. You wake up hot and clammy. A cactus withered and died in your mouth. Joints you never knew you had scream for WD-40. Breathing hurts. Blinking hurts. You can feel your fingernails growing, and that hurts. Did you get the flu? Zika? Are you patient zero for the latest emerging plague? You could go see a doctor, but you're a graduate student with rudimentary health insurance whose coverage documentation you barely skimmed because c'mon, you're young and healthy and you don't plan on getting sick--no, you don't … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Dr. Internet, MD
artificial intelligence
Science Corner: Go with God
Almost 20 years after IBM's Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess, Google's AlphaGo has proven superior at the game of Go. If you are unfamiliar with the relative complexity of the two games, know that each achievement employed cutting edge artificial intelligence research. Now consider how far computers have come in two decades in general; for reference, Google was still over a year away from being founded when the chess match took place. The primary challenge with Go is the astronomical number of possibilities; … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Go with God
Science in Review: The World of Tomorrow, Today
Note: I'm departing a bit from my usual schedule to bring you another sci-fi movie review, this time for Tomorrowland; there will be spoilers. I consider these films to be both contributions to and barometers of the public science conversation. As I watched Tomorrowland with my kids, I kept coming back to the increasingly puzzling notion that it had been "refuted" by Mad Max: Fury Road. While I can certainly understand how a post-apocalyptic story can have a hopeful subtext, I don't see why we can't also have … [Read more...] about Science in Review: The World of Tomorrow, Today
Science Corner: A Vision of Science
Note: This is a spoiler-free comment on Avengers: Age of Ultron. If you have seen any trailers for the film or are at all familiar with the character of Ultron, none of this should be news. Assuming a single weekend doesn't allow for many repeat viewings, roughly 25 million people in the US alone have already seen Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's hard to imagine any other science topics getting wider exposure. Films like this are great opportunities to glimpse how the broader public approaches various scientific topics, … [Read more...] about Science Corner: A Vision of Science
Science Corner: Which bird gets the LEGO worm?
The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans has been a boon to science. Adult worms have a consistent number of cells, and we have been able to work out where each one comes from during the developmental process. They also have a consistent set of neurons, and the way that they connect to each other has been mapped out as well. So, naturally, someone reproduced those connections in a software simulation and got that running on a LEGO Mindstorm robot kit. The robot sensors were set up to correspond to certain sensory inputs on … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Which bird gets the LEGO worm?