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Magazine
In the Sept. 15 SN: The plant microbiome revolution, Parker probe’s stellar tech, the first RNAi drug approved, video fakery, a puzzling lemur fossil, how elephants dodge cancer, supersmooth desalination, really old cheese and more.
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Film
Hidden Figures highlights three black women who were vital to the U.S. space program
12/23/2016 - 06:00 Numbers, History of Science, ComputingView trailer
Hollywood space flicks typically feature one type of hero: astronauts who defy the odds to soar into space and back again. But now a group of behind-the-scenes heroes from the early days of the U.S. space program are getting their due. Black female mathematicians performed essential calculations to safely send astronauts to and from Earth’s surface — in defiance of flagrant...
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Feature
Year in review: AlphaGo scores a win for artificial intelligence
12/14/2016 - 07:33 Computing, TechnologyIn a hotel ballroom in Seoul, South Korea, early in 2016, a centuries-old strategy game offered a glimpse into the fantastic future of computing.
The computer program AlphaGo bested a world champion player at the Chinese board game Go, four games to one (SN Online: 3/15/16). The victory shocked Go players and computer gurus alike. “It happened much faster than people expected,” says...
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Science Ticker
AI system learns like a human, stores info like a computer
10/14/2016 - 07:00 Computing, NetworksA GPS app can plan the best route between two subway stops if it has been specifically programmed for the task. But a new artificial intelligence system can figure out how to do so on the fly by learning general rules from specific examples, researchers report October 12 in Nature.
Artificial neural networks, computer programs that mimic the human brain, are great at learning patterns...
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News in Brief
AI system learns like a human, stores info like a computer
10/14/2016 - 07:00 Computing, NetworksA GPS app can plan the best route between two subway stops if it has been specifically programmed for the task. But a new artificial intelligence system can figure out how to do so on the fly by learning general rules from specific examples, researchers report online October 12 in Nature.
Artificial neural networks, computer programs that mimic the human brain, are great at learning...
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Science Ticker
Digital rehab exposes Biblical roots of ancient Israeli scroll
09/21/2016 - 14:00 Archaeology, ComputingResearchers have digitally unwrapped and read an ancient Hebrew scroll that’s so charred it can’t be touched without falling apart. It turns out the document contains the oldest known Biblical text outside of the roughly 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls, the investigators say.
Archaeologists discovered the scroll’s remnants in a synagogue’s holy ark during a 1970 excavation in Israel of...
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Feature
Jeremy Freeman seeks to simplify complex brain science
Jeremy Freeman, 30NeuroscientistHoward Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Research Campus09/21/2016 - 11:05 Neuroscience, Cells, ComputingJeremy Freeman loves clean, simple lines. To see his bent toward aesthetic minimalism, you need look no further than his spare, calm website that slowly shifts colors.
In the past, this fixation with style has occasionally veered toward the extreme. In graduate school at New York...
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Feature
Shayan Oveis Gharan finds the shortest route to success
Shayan Oveis Gharan, 30Theoretical computer scientistUniversity of Washington09/21/2016 - 11:04 Computing, NumbersIt’s a problem that sounds simple, but the best minds in mathematics have puzzled over it for generations: A salesman wants to hawk his wares in several cities and return home when he’s done. If he’s only visiting a handful of places, it’s easy for him to schedule his visits to create the shortest round-...
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Feature
What Donkey Kong can tell us about how to study the brain
08/23/2016 - 15:31 Neuroscience, ComputingBrain scientists Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording had grown skeptical. They weren’t convinced that the sophisticated, big data experiments of neuroscience were actually accomplishing anything. So they devised a devilish experiment.
Instead of studying the brain of a person, or a mouse, or even a lowly worm, the two used advanced neuroscience methods to scrutinize the inner workings of...
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Science Visualized
Supersmall device uses individual atoms to store data
08/15/2016 - 07:00 Computing, Physics, TechnologyThese orderly patterns of dark blue dots indicate where individual chlorine atoms are missing from an otherwise regular grid of atoms. Scientists manipulated these vacancies to create a supersmall data storage device.
The locations of vacancies encode bits of information in the device, which Sander Otte of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and colleagues describe July 18...
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News
Monitoring online groups offers insight into ISIS attacks
06/16/2016 - 14:21 Networks, ComputingSocial media supporters of the Islamic State, or ISIS, form online groups that may provide clues crucial to predicting when terrorist attacks will take place, a new analysis finds.
These virtual communities drive ISIS activity on a Facebook-like site called VKontakte, say physicist Neil Johnson of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., and colleagues. VKontakte, a social...