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…
Author: Stephen Ornes
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…
How to recycle an EV battery
The upswing in EV sales means a flood of used batteries in the coming years. What's the best way to…
Immunotherapy: When is sooner better than later?
JUST AFTER LABOR DAY in 2019, Sascha Roth, who was 38 years old, was diagnosed with stage III rectal cancer. Roth…
Here’s why mathematicians are so interested in cake cutting
Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the…
How to build a big prime number
Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves,…