Ever hear of the Turk—the 19th-century mechanism topped by a turbaned head that played chess against all comers? In fact, hidden inside was a diminutive chessmaster, one you might imagine deadpanning, “Eh, It’s a living.” Then there’s its namesake, the Mechanical Turk—a 21st-century service offered by Amazon to mark up images on the Web with […]
Last week Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, directly accused Hans Niemann, a U.S. grandmaster, of cheating during their game at the Sinquefield Cup, in St. Louis, Mo. He thus made plain an accusation he had been hinting at for weeks. Carlsen has so far provided no evidence to back up his charge, nor has […]
The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) is well known in bipedal robotics circles for teaching very complex humanoid robots to walk. Since 2015, IHMC has been home to a Boston Dynamics Atlas (the DRC version) as well as a NASA Valkyrie, and significant progress has been made on advancing these platforms toward […]
High-fidelity simulations in science and engineering are widely used in industrial, seismic, weather/climate, and life sciences applications. However, traditional simulations remain computationally expensive and impractical for real time applications. They are discretization dependent, meaning they do not easily assimilate either measured or synthetic data from various sources. Due to rapid developments in AI for science […]
“I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I had anything to do with it,” the physicist Erwin Schrödinger supposedly said of the quantum theory. He was so sorry that he worked to prove it nonsensical with the most famous thought problem in physics, one that involves putting a cat in a box that would fill […]
In 2022, cars in many countries must start carrying automatic emergency braking. The technology has been around for years, but requiring it marks a major safety milestone for active safety. That’s the sort that prevents a crash instead of protecting you from its effects. The European Transport Safety Council, a not-for-profit advocacy group in Brussels, […]
Even chip shortages and supply-chain snafus haven’t stopped the Pyrenees-worthy ascent of e-bikes, whose sales are leaving traditional bikes in their dust. If more evidence were needed that e-bikes and micromobility are a cool defense for a toasting planet, consider this: Porsche, the venerable sports-car purveyor, recently acquired a majority stake in Greyp. That’s the […]
Hypersonic flight may sound futuristic, but it’s been around for at least 70-odd years—since the nose cones of ballistic missiles first began to regularly re-enter the atmosphere at better than Mach Five. (Five times the speed of sound is the commonly accepted definition of such speeds.) In the 1960s the United States and the Soviet […]
Cancer treatments have come a long way. In just the past few decades, monoclonal antibody treatments have become increasingly common, harnessing the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. But there’s one place that this therapy can’t effectively reach—the brain. That may be changing. In a new study, researchers temporarily made the blood-brain barrier […]
The Internet was designed to move data worldwide, and to do so in spite of disruptions from natural disasters, nuclear attacks, or other catastrophes. At first the goal was just to increase the volume of data moving over networks. But with the rising importance of real-time applications like videoconferencing and online gaming, what now matters […]