We often come across advertisements for products labeled “with artificial intelligence”. But very rarely, if ever, is the user informed of more details. Who guarantees us that, effectively, this product works based on artificial intelligence (AI)? Who certifies that the answers it offers us are the correct ones? What code of ethics does it obey? Without knowing anything about it, when for […] … learn more→

Atomic clocks combined with precise astronomical measurements have recently revealed that the length of a day on Earth is suddenly getting longer . This phenomenon has critical implications not only for our measurement of time, but also for things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives. In recent decades, the rotation of […] … learn more→

Society is constantly changing, which means there’s always going to be new ways to do things. The innovations of technology have made things that were once considered impossible possible. In fact, not only has technology made life easier in general, it’s also one of the most bustling careers to date. There’s always going to be […] … learn more→

This past June, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced a probe into Tesla’s autopilot software. Data gathered from 16 crashes raised concerns over the possibility that Tesla’s AI may be programmed to quit when a crash is imminent. This way, the car’s driver, not the manufacturer, would be legally liable at the moment of […] … learn more→

Ceramic pots for filtering water, techniques for solar cooking, wind turbines, breeding edible crickets: these are some of the low tech (or “low” technologies) documented by the Nomad of the Seas . A veritable “laboratory boat”, the Nomade des Mers has experimented and documented around fifty low tech boats around the world. After six years of travel and 25 […] … learn more→

Blake Lemoine could have been the hero of a science fiction film. Employed at Google, his mission was to ensure that LaMDA , a robot created to converse with humans (or chat bot), did not present biased comments to users and avoid sexist or racist comments, for example. But, over the course of his exchanges with artificial intelligence, the engineer […] … learn more→

READER QUESTION: I am 59 years old, and in reasonably good health. Is it possible that I will live long enough to put my brain into a computer? John Wilson We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to […] … learn more→

Winston Churchill said that criticism will not be pleasant, but it is necessary. However, it seems that current neuroscience points to the importance of developing another look. Neuroscience has found a negative effect of criticism on people, starting with self-criticism. We are continually judging ourselves and criticizing the people and systems of which we are a part. This […] … learn more→

As a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, one of the most frequent questions I am asked is “When are you going to find something?”. Resisting the temptation to sarcastically reply “Aside from the Higgs boson, which won the Nobel Prize, and a whole slew of new composite particles?”, I realise […] … learn more→

Almost 400 years ago, in The Assayer, Galileo wrote: “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe … [But the book] is written in the language of mathematics.” He was much more than an astronomer, and this can almost be thought of as the first writing on the scientific method. We do not know who […] … learn more→