Artificial intelligence can design an autonomous robot in 30 seconds flat on a laptop or smartphone. It’s not quite time to panic about just anybody being able to create the Terminator while waiting at the bus stop: as reported in a recent study, the robots are simple machines that scoot along in straight lines without… Continue reading AI Designs Little Robots in 30 Seconds, and They Keep Sprouting Legs
The Parties Have Irreconcilably Different Visions for America
“It’s so nice to have Representative Jones, who’s a Republican, and Representative Smith, a Democrat, with us today. Even though they belong to different parties, we know that we all want the same thing for our community, and our nation.” As the former CEO of the Chester County Chamber, I presided at countless events where… Continue reading The Parties Have Irreconcilably Different Visions for America
Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy
So even with his hope renewed, Wichs assumed that any version of these programs that was secure was still a long way off. Instead, he and his co-authors — Wei-Kai Lin, now at the University of Virginia, and Ethan Mook, also at Northeastern — worked on problems they thought would be easier, which involved cases… Continue reading Cryptographers Devise an Approach for Total Search Privacy
NewsGuard: Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool. A self-described “vaccine against misinformation.” NewsGuard Technologies In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as… Continue reading NewsGuard: Surrogate the Feds Pay to Keep Watch on the Internet and Be a Judge of the Truth
In the ‘Wild West’ of Geometry, Mathematicians Redefine the Sphere
If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a rainy afternoon, you’ve probably watched raindrops racing each other down the car window. When pairs of droplets collide, they merge into a new droplet, losing their separate identities. That merging is possible because the water droplets are just about spherical. When shapes are flexible — as… Continue reading In the ‘Wild West’ of Geometry, Mathematicians Redefine the Sphere
This Code Breaking Quaker Poet Hunted Nazis
Known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a master code breaker who played a pivotal role in both World Wars. For many years, no one knew what she had done, not even her own family. Code breaking wasn’t Smith Friedman’s plan to begin with. In the mid-1910s she was a 23-year-old college… Continue reading This Code Breaking Quaker Poet Hunted Nazis
She Decodes Quakes From Undersea Volcanoes (and Taylor Swift)
Quanta Magazine > 0; if (typeof predicate !== ‘function’) { throw new TypeError(‘predicate must be a function’); } var thisArg = arguments[1]; var k = 0; while (k We care about your data, and we’d like to use cookies to give you a smooth browsing experience. Please agree and read more about our privacy policy.Agree… Continue reading She Decodes Quakes From Undersea Volcanoes (and Taylor Swift)
Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better
Nine patients did simple calculations in their heads while researchers recorded their brain activity. Sure enough, in the data, Nieder and Mormann saw neurons firing for their preferred numbers — the first time number neurons had been identified in the human brain. They published their findings in Neuron in 2018. Neuroscientists are of course driven… Continue reading Why the Human Brain Perceives Small Numbers Better
What It Feels Like to Survive an IED Blast
The following is an excerpt from River City One: A Novel (Knox Press; November 7, 2023). I’m laughing now because I can still see him. He’s got his helmet on, the chinstrap dangling and tobacco spit coming off his lip. I tell you the right side of his face was blown up like a puffer… Continue reading What It Feels Like to Survive an IED Blast
A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers
If this hypothesis is correct, that would mean that when you’re sieving up to 1 trillion, you can cross off multiples of 2, then 3, then 5, and keep going until the inclusion/exclusion sum starts to involve divisors over about 1 million — beyond that point, you can’t calculate the terms in your sum. In… Continue reading A New Generation of Mathematicians Pushes Prime Number Barriers