Science
From Virus-Slaying Air Purifiers To Delivery Robots, How University Inventions Are Fighting COVID-19
With the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) sweeping across continents and affecting many millions, health authorities, policy-makers and scientists, innovators around the world are racing to invent ways to contain the further spread of the virus. It is our unwavering belief that universities are – and should always be – contributing to this collective fight against this …
Breakthrough Listen Scans Milky Way Galaxy For beacons Of Civilization
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative released data from the most comprehensive survey yet of radio emissions from the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy and the region around its central black hole, and it is inviting the public to search the data for signals from intelligent civilizations. At a media briefing in Seattle as part of …
How Memories Are Formed And Retrieved By The Brain Revealed In A New Study
Try to remember that last dinner you went out for. Perhaps you can remember the taste of that delicious pasta, the sounds of the jazz pianist in the corner, or that boisterous laugh from the portly gentleman three tables over. What you probably can’t remember is putting any effort into remembering any of these little …
What Are The Ethical Consequences Of Immortality Technology?
Immortality has gone secular. Unhooked from the realm of gods and angels, it’s now the subject of serious investment – both intellectual and financial – by philosophers, scientists and the Silicon Valley set. Several hundred people have already chosen to be ‘cryopreserved’ in preference to simply dying, as they wait for science to catch up …
Neven’s Law: Why It Might Be Too Soon For A Moore’s Law For Quantum Computers
A new disruptive technology is on the horizon and it promises to take computing power to unprecedented and unimaginable heights. And to predict the speed of progress of this new “quantum computing” technology, the director of Google’s Quantum AI Labs, Hartmut Neven, has proposed a new rule similar to the Moore’s Law that has measured …
See How Our Brains Group Words By Meaning In Surprisingly Complex Semantic Maps
A groundbreaking new study from the Gallant Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley is transforming how scientists understand language organisation in the brain. Published in Nature on 28 April 2016, the paper ‘Natural Speech Reveals the Semantic Maps That Tile Human Cerebral Cortex’ reveals that we use our entire brain – and not just the temporal lobe, as once believed – to group …
The Human Brain’s Bandwidth For Visual Images Is Severely Limited
Imagine you are at Ikea to pick up a sofa for your new flat. You see one you like, a wine-coloured two-seater with big soft cushions. You imagine what it would look like with your current furniture, and decide that’s the sofa you want. As you continue meandering through the store you find a nice …
Remote Control Of The Brain Is Coming: How Will We Use It?
Controlling the minds of others from a distance has long been a favourite science fiction theme – but recent advances in genetics and neuroscience suggest that we might soon have that power for real. Just over a decade ago, the bioengineer Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University published their paper on the optical control …
What Toddlers Can Teach Us About How The Human Brain Does Science
Science as we’ve come to understand it today – that is, conducting experiments using a hypothesis-testing method – has existed only since about the 17th century. But the Homo sapiens brain has been around since the Pleistocene, so how is it that we’ve gotten so good at the kind of science we do in such a short …
Science Has Outgrown The Human Mind And Its Limited Capacities
The duty of man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and … attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into …