If you’ve found yourself befuddled by extraordinary scientific-sounding claims, you’re not alone. But this centuries-old lesson can help.
Category: science – Page 50
New center merges math, AI to push frontiers of science
With artificial intelligence poised to assist in profound scientific discoveries that will change the world, Cornell is leading a new $11.3 million center focused on human-AI collaboration that uses mathematics as a common language.
The Scientific Artificial Intelligence Center, or SciAI Center, is being launched with a grant from the Office of Naval Research and is led by Christopher J. Earls, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell Engineering. Co-investigators include Nikolaos Bouklas, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell Engineering; Anil Damle, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science; and Alex Townsend, associate professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. All of the investigators are field faculty members of the Center for Applied Mathematics.
With the advance of AI systems – built with tangled webs of algorithms and trained on increasingly large sets of data – researchers fear AI’s inner workings will provide little insight into its uncanny ability to recognize patterns in data and make scientific predictions. Earls described it as a situation at odds with true scientific discovery.
NASA marks the James Webb Space Telescope’s first year of science with release of new image
To celebrate the completion of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first year of science operations, NASA has released a close-up image of the birth of sun-like stars.
The image, captured on Webb’s telescope is a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex – the nearest star-forming region to Earth.
The region’s proximity at 390 light-years allows for a highly detailed close-up, with no foreground stars in the intervening space.
Data-Driven Science: How AI and Open Data will Revolutionize Scientific Discovery
Dr. ryan brinkman-vice president and research director, dotmatics
Scientists have long been perceived and portrayed in films as old people in white lab coats perched at a bench full of bubbling fluorescent liquids. The present-day reality is quite different. Scientists are increasingly data jockeys in hoodies sitting before monitors analyzing enormous amounts of data. Modern-day labs are more likely composed of sterile rows of robots doing the manual handling of materials, and lab notebooks are now electronic, in massive data centers holding vast quantities of information. Today, scientific input comes from data pulled from the cloud, with algorithms fueling scientific discovery the way Bunsen burners once did.
Advances in technology, and especially instrumentation, enable scientists to collect and process data at an unprecedented scale. As a result, scientists are now faced with massive datasets that require sophisticated analysis techniques and computational tools to extract meaningful insights. This also presents significant challenges—how do you store, manage, and share these large datasets, as well as ensure that the data is of high quality and reliable?
The Science of Sleep: How to Get Better Sleep Every Night
We all know the feeling of waking up groggy and exhausted, struggling to find the energy to tackle the day ahead. The key to breaking free from this cycle lies in understanding the science of sleep and adopting evidence-based strategies to enhance its quality. So, let’s explore the stages of sleeping and the role of circadian rhythms in regulating our sleep-wake cycles to transform your habits and embark on the journey to obtain better sleep every night!
Get Better Sleep Every Night: Understand the Science
Sleep is far from being a passive state of unconsciousness. On the contrary, it’s a complex process that plays a vital role in our physical and mental well-being. To improve our sleep quality, we must learn more about its stages.
Lab-grown meat: the science of turning cells into steaks and nuggets
“It tastes like chicken.” That’s a common review of UPSIDE Foods’ new trial product. Perhaps that’s not surprising: it is, after all, chicken — at the cellular level. But the fillets are not from a slaughterhouse. They are grown in bioreactors in an urban factory in California.
Alittle over a decade ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the potential of laboratory-made meat. The world’s first cultured beef burger, which reportedly cost US$325,000, was made by Maastricht University biomedical engineer Mark Post, who ate it at a press conference in 2013. Such products are now much closer to market: more than 150 companies around the world are working on cultured meat (from ground beef to steaks, chicken, pork and fish), milk or related ‘cellular agriculture’ products, including leather.
Companies making cultured meat are attracting billions of dollars of investment. Here are their biggest challenges.
Eric Schmidt: This is how AI will transform the way science gets done
Usual weather prediction systems have the capacity to generate around 50 predictions for the week ahead. FourCastNet can instead predict thousands of possibilities, accurately capturing the risk of rare but deadly disasters and thereby giving vulnerable populations valuable time to prepare and evacuate.
The hoped-for revolution in climate modeling is just the beginning. With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more exciting—and in some ways unrecognizable. The reverberations of this shift will be felt far outside the lab; they will affect us all.
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. — President & Chief Science Officer, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation
Accelerating Effective Treatments To Prevent And Reverse Human Age-Related Disease — Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. — President & Chief Science Officer, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEVF)
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., is President & Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation (https://www.levf.org/), an organization focused on proactively identifying and addressing the most challenging obstacles on the path to the widespread availability of genuinely effective treatments to prevent and reverse human age-related disease.
Dr. de Grey is internationally recognized as a visionary biomedical gerontologist who devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence: a comprehensive set of methods to rejuvenate the human body, thereby preventing age-related ill health and mortality. He has co-founded multiple non-profit organizations – including Methuselah Foundation, SENS Research Foundation, and now LEV Foundation – to specifically enable and accelerate its development and clinical translation.
Dr. de Grey received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. He is the author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999), Ending Aging (2007), and a large number of academic papers.
Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the advisory boards of numerous scientific journals and research organizations. He is a prolific speaker who regularly presents at conferences and events world-wide.