Google has a new director of AI: The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean. The lean 50-year-old computer scientist joined the company in 1999, when it was a startup less than one year old. He earned a reputation … Continue reading →
This is an important and sobering article about brain function. Here’s an excerpt: At TIRR, [Kothari, an assistant professor of rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine] estimates nine out of 10 patients who come to him with a vegetative label … Continue reading →
That’s the clickbait headline for this BBC article. I thought it might be something about Neanderthal genes, or perhaps mitochondria. But no; it’s about bacteria, mainly gut bacteria: Human cells make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count. … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Today’s news is so depressing and appalling that I wanted a respite from it by going big. This is about as big as it gets.] Maria Popova writes: In our recent On Being conversation, NASA astrophysicist and exoplanet researcher … Continue reading →
A great many people know that earth has a North and South pole, and that the poles are not just geographic but magnetic as well. Fewer (but probably still a great many) are aware that the geographic and magnetic poles … Continue reading →
No, but it will seem longer. That’s my attempt at a joke. But maybe it’s not a joke. Maybe it’s true. For many years there’s been an idea—derived initially from animal research—that restricting caloric intake makes a person live longer. … Continue reading →
The extreme conditions of climbing Mt. Everest, and the risks involved, hardly seem worth it to us regular folks who can’t even imagine voluntarily subjecting oneself to such an ordeal: Just ahead of them, a man from another party was … Continue reading →
Every now and then there’s a side discussion in the comments section where I respond to someone at such great length, and with so much research involved, that I figure it makes sense to turn my comment into a post. … Continue reading →
This seems a bit far-fetched (or at least premature) to me, but wouldn’t it be nice?: The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion … Continue reading →
This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me: …[A] new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan…can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at. To generate its captions, … Continue reading →
As you can see. I especially like the short sequence that begins around 5:35: Why do parrots parrot? See this. It turns out that not only do they have a well-developed vocal apparatus as vocal learners, but they also want … Continue reading →
I keep reading online discussions in which people assume that there’s been a big increase in teen killings, both murder and suicide. It’s taken almost as a given, but I rarely if ever see anyone citing statistics to back up … Continue reading →