CSI: Cretaceous. A reptile body farm is shedding light on how dinosaurs died.
Here’s how scientists are solving the “dinosaur death pose” mystery and others. One bright day in April 2023, Hannah Maddox…
Author: Stephen Ornes
Can neuromorphic computing help reduce AI’s high energy cost?
Artificial intelligence systems, and large language models (LLMs) in particular, have become almost ubiquitous. The implications are many. Among them:…
Fast, mysterious clouds swarm around our galaxy
The Milky Way’s forecast: mostly cloudy. But the origin of these cosmic clouds is unclear This composite image shows Smith’s…
These ultra-long experiments outlive their scientists — on purpose
On a snowy night in 2021, four shivering scientists in Michigan set down their shovels and studied a hand-drawn map…
The AI Was Fed Sloppy Code. It Turned Into Something Evil.
There should have been nothing wrong with the chatbot except for its poor programming ability. Yet something was amiss. “Tell…
The Lives of Dead Trees
MARK HARMON CROUCHES LOW next to log number 219: a moss- covered western hemlock tree trunk, five meters long, lying…
See how fractals forever changed math and science
Fifty years ago, “fractal” was born. In a 1975 book, the Polish-French-American mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot coined the term to…
Europa Ho!
The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will travel to one of…
Sculptor Janet Echelman
Sculptor merges engineering and art to conjure connections among people and nature Artist Janet Echelman thinks big. One of her…
Inside the quest for unbreakable encryption
Cryptographers want encryption schemes that are impossible for tomorrow’s quantum computers to crack. There’s only one catch: they might not…