The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will travel to one of Jupiter’s largest moons to look for evidence of conditions that could support life. by Stephen Ornesarchive page February 19, 2024 We’ve known of Europa’s existence for more than four centuries, but for most of that […]
Sculptor merges engineering and art to conjure connections among people and nature Artist Janet Echelman thinks big. One of her recent installations is a 229-foot-long mesh sculpture suspended over a downtown intersection in Columbus, Ohio—the largest public artwork in the city’s history. Unveiled in June 2023 and titled Current, it sweeps down from its highest perch more
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Cryptographers want encryption schemes that are impossible for tomorrow’s quantum computers to crack. There’s only one catch: they might not exist. When we check email, log in to our bank accounts, or exchange messages on Signal, our passwords and credentials are protected through encryption, a locking scheme that uses secrets to disguise our data. It
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The upswing in EV sales means a flood of used batteries in the coming years. What’s the best way to minimize their environmental impact and reuse precious minerals? Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) continue to grow. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, 2.3 million EVs sold worldwide in the first three months of 2023
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Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut cake over the last 15 years. That’s partly because the Harvard computer scientist has three children who among them have celebrated more than two dozen birthdays. He knows what it’s like to stand with a knife before a layered masterpiece, frosted with buttercream and chocolate
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Prime numbers are tricky things. We learn in school that they’re numbers with no factors other than 1 and themselves, and that mathematicians have known for thousands of years that an infinite number of them exist. Producing one on command doesn’t seem as if it should be difficult. But it is. Constructing arbitrarily large prime
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Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors. What movie do these emojis describe? That prompt was one of 204 tasks chosen last year to test the ability of various large language models (LLMs) — the computational engines behind AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. The simplest
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In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a new study shows it’s possible for machines. On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies who lived and worked as American professionals near New York City. The case, which unraveled an intricate system
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Five years ago, computer scientist Alan Fern and his colleagues at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, set out to answer one of the most pressing questions in artificial intelligence (AI): Could they understand how AI reasons, makes decisions, and chooses its actions? The proving ground for their exploration was five classic arcade games, circa 1980,
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Kelly Kashmer credits genetic testing with saving her life. In 2014, during a routine medical appointment, a physician’s assistant began asking questions about her relatives and their experiences with cancer. As she mentally climbed her family tree, she recalled her grandmother on her mother’s side, and an aunt, had both been diagnosed with cancer. The
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