What science teaches us about breaking bad habits
It’s a new year and many people are in the mood for making a fresh start. And that often means giving something up (cigarettes, alcohol, junk food). Unfortunately, the odds...
Where Australia’s smoke goes to die
Smoke from Australia's megafires has already traveled tens of thousands of miles around Earth. "It circles the globe in roughly a week," said Manvendra Dubey, who researches air pollution and...
Allen Institute for AI’s Incubator expands with $10M fund from high-profile VCs – TechCrunch
The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) started its incubator two years ago, helping launch companies like Xnor.ai, Blue Canoe and WellSaidLabs. Their success has attracted funding from not just local...
Why the extinction of mammoths may have forced us to invent civilization
Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization – harvesting, then domestication of...
The kids climate lawsuit just got thrown out by federal judges
The kids just got some bad news. Twenty-one children, adolescents, and young adults — all between the ages of 11 and 23 (as of June 2019) — sued the federal...
‘PigeonBot’ brings flying robots closer to real birds – TechCrunch
Try as they might, even the most advanced roboticists on Earth struggle to recreate the effortless elegance and efficiency with which birds fly through the air. The “PigeonBot” from Stanford...
AlphaZero beat humans at Chess and StarCraft, now it’s working with quantum computers
A team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark let DeepMind‘s AlphaZero algorithm loose on a few quantum computing optimization problems and, much to everyone’s surprise, the AI was able...