News

Here’s a Top Ten science stories list from a techie science mag I (O’Leary for News) regularly monitor and cite from: This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about the ways we’re influencing our environment and the ways we’re changing ourselves. A whole lot of stuff happened, and last January seems like it was, well, a year ago. Ryan F. Mandelbaum, “The Biggest Science Stories of 2018” at Gizmodo Okay, nothing in particular jumps out at Mandelbaum, who does a good job of gathering the information, and one can see why his tone is muted. Here are some of the Gizmodo picks: – Mars exploration continues, space equipment is retired or commissioned (but still no Read More ›

AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: Software can automatically generate word sequences based on material fed in from existing scripts: In 2016, Ars Technica was proud to be sponsoring “the first AI-written sci-fi script:” As explained in The Guardian, a recurrent neural network “was fed the scripts of dozens of science fiction movies including such classics as Highlander Endgame, Ghostbusters, Interstellar and The Fifth Element.” Sunspring, the title of the AI written play, was computed after the trained neural network was given a “set of prompts.” A Guardian writer terms the resulting script “gibberish.” Here’s a description from sponsor Ars Technica: Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s Read More ›

The mechanome, “the body of knowledge about mechanical forces at work in the molecular, cellular, anatomical, and physiological processes that contribute to the architecture of living structures and their physical properties,” became more prominent this year in discussions of biology (though one story on the physics of biology late last year garnered 354 comments). For so long, the genome ran away with all the interest and publicity but maybe that’s changing. At her blog, science writer Suzan Mazur talks about the way that mechanobiology is becoming mainstream: “When I say mechanobiology is all the rage, I’m not simply referring to lab research and scientific conferences on the subject, although they are, of course, central. But also to: (1) mechanobiology university Read More ›