Remember IBM’s Watson, the AI Jeopardy! champion? A 2010 promotion proclaimed, “Watson understands natural language with all its ambiguity and complexity.” However, as we saw when Watson subsequently failed spectacularly in its quest to “revolutionize […]
The mathematician Ben Green of the University of Oxford has made a major stride toward understanding a nearly 100-year-old combinatorics problem, showing that a well-known recent conjecture is “not only wrong but spectacularly wrong,” as […]
Back in 2020, Cristen Willer, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was leading her laboratory on a search for the genetic underpinnings of an often deadly heart condition […]
Back in 2020, Cristen Willer, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was leading her laboratory on a search for the genetic underpinnings of an often deadly heart condition […]
The latest attempt to rattle the foundations of cosmology appeared as a smattering of dots pulled upward into a cosmic sneer. The arc of distant galaxies, which Alexia Lopez presented at the American Astronomical Society’s […]
In a nearly 400-page paper posted in March, the mathematicians Mohammed Abouzaid and Andrew Blumberg of Columbia University have constructed a major extension of one of the biggest advances in geometry in recent decades. The […]
The first detection of gravitational waves in 2016 provided decisive confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But another astounding prediction remains unconfirmed: According to general relativity, every gravitational wave should leave an indelible imprint […]
Artificial intelligence sees things we don’t — often to its detriment. While machines have gotten incredibly good at recognizing images, it’s still easy to fool them. Simply add a tiny amount of noise to the […]
Last summer a group of Harvard University neuroscientists and Google engineers released the first wiring diagram of a piece of the human brain. The tissue, about the size of a pinhead, had been preserved, stained […]
To look back in time at the cosmos’s infancy and witness the first stars flicker on, you must first grind a mirror as big as a house. Its surface must be so smooth that, if […]
Recent Comments