MEDIEVAL DNA SLEUTHING
A TWELFTH-CENTURY Gospel of Luke and an even older York Gospels are giving today’s bookworm biologists an opportunity to study the actions of actual 900-year-old book worms in these medieval … Continue reading
ARE YOU (STILL NOT) TALKING TO ME? PART 2
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE bots are learning to chat with each other in their own language. Using deep-learning skills to screw on bottle caps is one thing, but language is decidedly more … Continue reading
ARE YOU (NOT) TALKING TO ME? PART 1
FOR YEARS, science fiction has depicted computers developing their own lives and adversely affecting ours. Think of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. Now, however, Artificial Intelligence has reached … Continue reading
CELEBRATING TWO VERY SPECIAL MATHEMATICIANS
MATHEMATICIANS MARINA Ratner and Maryam Mirzakhani passed away within a week of each other, on July 7 and July 14, 2017, respectively. That they were successful women in a predominately … Continue reading
THOUGHTS ON COMMUNICATION
COMMUNICATION AND lady friend miscommunication have been in the news a lot these days. E-mails and tweets, leaked, deleted and otherwise, are part of this. Nathan Heller’s article in the … Continue reading
ICELAND AND ALUMINUM
ICELAND IS a greater producer of aluminum than the United States. This and other tidbits are gleaned from The New York Times article, “American Companies Still Make Aluminum. In Iceland,” … Continue reading
CELEBRATING MATHEMATICIAN PARLIAMENTARIAN CÉDRIC VILLANI
EARLIER THIS year, the French had strikingly different candidates in their national elections and voters exhibited rare wisdom. The brand-new centrist Emmanuel Macron and his Le République en Marche! party … Continue reading
SPOOKY ACTION AT (REALLY) AFAR
CHINESE RESEARCHERS have sent entangled photons from a satellite to two ground stations 745 miles apart. This distance is by far a new record for what Einstein called “spooky action … Continue reading
HERMANN THE GERMAN JOINS THE GREATER HUMAN RACE
MIGRATION, ETHNICITY, and racial purity have been much in the news these days. Fortunately, so have the stabilizing influences of scientific research. In particular, goodbye to a favorite myth believed … Continue reading
WHAT IF ROBOTS UNIONIZE? PART 2
YESTERDAY, I shared robotic tidbits from Isaac Asimov and an Automotive News story about mirror specialist Gentex’s closure of its Mexico facility. Today, we pick up with Gentex’s business in … Continue reading
Simanaitis Says 