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AI already lets machines do things like recognize faces and act as virtual assistants that can track down info on the Web for smartphone users. But to perform even these basic tasks the underlying learning algorithms rely on computer programs written by humans to feed them massive amounts of training data, a process known as machine learning. For machines to truly have common sense—to be able to figure out how the world works and make reasonable decisions based on that knowledge—they must be able to teach themselves without human supervision....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) on the border between Germany and the Czech Republic is a region rich in history and culture connected to the mining industry. For centuries the cities on both sides of the mountain range had sustained themselves and flourished by the extraction of tin, copper, zinc, uranium, and most importantly silver....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Mausoleum of Augustus was actually one of the first of many large building projects undertaken in the reign of Rome’s first emperor. When the Mausoleum was completed in 28 BCE, it was easily the biggest tomb in the Roman world, a record it held throughout the Roman period....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Arch of Titus is a Roman Triumphal Arch which was erected by Domitian in c. 81 CE at the foot of the Palatine hill on the Via Sacra in the Forum Romanum, Rome. It commemorates the victories of his father Vespasian and brother Titus in the Jewish War in Judaea (70-71 CE) when the great city of Jerusalem was sacked and the vast riches of its temple plundered....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The archaeological site of Tel Gezer is located in central Israel at the edge of the western mountains near the Shephelah, about 9 or 10 km southwest of the city of Ramleh. Gezer was one of the famed “Solomonic” cities of the Hebrew Bible, said to have been fortified by Solomon (1 Kings 9:15–17), and the city appears in a number of Biblical accounts....

If I drop a pen, you know that it won’t hover in midair but will fall to the floor. Similarly, if the pen encounters a desk on its way down, you know it won’t travel through the surface but will instead land on top. These fundamental properties of physical objects seem intuitive to us. Infants as young as three months know that a ball no longer in sight still exists and that the ball can’t teleport from behind the couch to the top of the refrigerator....

Solutions: In fact, all these solutions work in basically the same way. If you want to multiply x by y, hold up (x - 10) fingers in your left hand, (y - 10) fingers in your right hand and then calculate as follows: 100 + 10((x - 10) + (y - 10)) + (x - 10)(y - 10) That is, 100 + (10 times the fingers up) + (the product of the up fingers)....

Black holes vary greatly in size, from relatively small ones several times the mass of the sun, which are born of collapsed stars, to supermassive lurkers like the one at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, with the mass of about four million suns. But medium-size black holes—those with hundreds or thousands of times the mass of the sun—have proved an elusive quarry. A study in this week’s Nature identifies a new candidate for this seemingly rare third class about 300 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy ESO 243-49....

One year after President Trump slashed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in half, new research shows that at least 80 species could be harmed. And that’s just the bees. Trump’s proclamation noted President Clinton had declared the Utah wilderness “one of the richest floristic regions in the Intermountain West.” But it asserted that Clinton identified “only a few” species worth protecting—and those few species would still do fine after Trump fractured the monument and shrunk it by 870,000 acres....

Classrooms haven’t changed much in the past few centuries. Students attend class, take notes and do their homework. The teacher lectures and once in a while administers a test. Students get their grades and move on to the next topic. By and large, students—especially the most disadvantaged ones—attend the school or university closest to their home, regardless of its quality. These routines are starting to change. In a small but growing number of schools, students watch lectures online and come to class prepared to tackle assignments and collaborate with teachers and peers....

Over a two-year period, photographer Jamey Stillings documented the transformation of an American landmark. The building of the structure that connects the Arizona and Nevada sides of a concrete arch appears in a coffee table book called The Bridge at Hoover Dam ( Nearly one million people visit the 76-year-old Hoover Dam each year. In 2010 the historic site greeted visitors with a new addition: a 1,900-foot bridge. The Mike O’Callaghan - Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge is a part of the Hoover Dam Bypass Project, which was built to alleviate traffic on Route 93....

Against a purple morning sky, in a cloud of brown smoke, the Monkey King took off. China’s first space-based dark-matter detector — nicknamed Wukong (or Monkey King) after a fictional warrior in a sixteenth-century Chinese novel — rocketed into the air on 17 December, marking the start of a new direction in the country’s space strategy. From Earth’s orbit, the craft aims to detect high-energy particles and γ-rays. Physicists believe that dark matter — a substance so far observed only through its gravitational effects but thought to make up 85% of the Universe’s matter — could reveal itself by producing such cosmic rays as its particles annihilate....

Last November, a Chinese scientist provoked a global outcry when he announced that he had helped create the world’s first genome-edited babies. Scientists swiftly and severely condemned Southern University of Science and Technology’s He Jiankui for bypassing some safety and ethics checks. The revelation also prompted intense discussion about what should be done to block the next gene-editing rogue. Since then, various groups, including two major international organizations, have begun developing new regulatory frameworks to govern human genome editing....

A simple computer made of DNA strands in test tubes can now play a complete game of tic-tac-toe–and will beat or draw you every time. The result demonstrates a new level of complexity in DNA computing, which might be useful for constructing better biomedical detectors or drugs that react only to certain pathogens or cells. Researchers are developing custom DNA molecules to mimic the logical operations carried out in silicon-based computers as a way to improve biomedical technologies or aid in assembling nano-size building blocks into new materials....

Sue Barry is a neuroscientist at Mount Holyoke College. She’s also the author of the newly released book Fixing My Gaze, which tells the story of how Barry, at the age of 48, finally learned to see in 3-D. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Barry about what a flat world looks like and what her own experience can teach us about brain plasticity and education. LEHRER: You begin your new book, Fixing My Gaze, by describing the moment you realized that you lacked stereoscopic vision, which underlies the ability to see in 3-D....

By Virginia HughesThe stunted development common to cystic fibrosis begins at birth – and could be a direct consequence of a growth-hormone deficiency caused by the disease.In both people and pigs, newborns with cystic fibrosis tend to have abnormally low levels of a hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), according to a study published this week in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Unlike in healthy controls, in mutant pigs IGF1 levels do not increase over time....

One of the most impressive, disturbing works of science journalism I’ve encountered is Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, published in 2010. In the book, which I review here, award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker presents evidence that medications for mental illness, over time and in the aggregate, cause net harm. In 2012, I brought Whitaker to my school to give a talk, in part to check him out....

Conotoxins—the chains of amino acids found in the venom of a cone snail—are medical marvels. In 2003 psychiatrist and environmentalist Eric Chivian of Harvard University described these sea creatures as having “the largest and most clinically important pharmacopoeia of any genus in nature.” Scientists believe conotoxins could help treat epilepsy, depression and other disorders by interacting with the nervous system. Why do neuroscientists care about cone snails? Cone snail venom contains neurotoxins that can target specific locations in the brain and spinal cord....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Iconic images of astronomical pillars of gas and dust, views of galaxies soon after they were formed, an accelerating universe driven by Dark Energy… “give us more!” say the public and the taxpayers. The Hubble Space Telescope is undoubtedly one of the most popular science projects today. It was not always thus. Laying the groundwork With its origins dating back to a time when almost all astronomers used photographic plates to record images at ground-based telescopes, the idea of an ambitious and expensive observatory in space was not a popular one....

Concussion, the most common among traumatic brain injuries, which occurs 1.7 million times a year in the U.S., represents a major public-health problem. It occurs when there is a sudden acceleration or deceleration of the head, a process depicted here in this animation. A blow can produce a brief loss of consciousness, headaches and impaired cognition, among other symptoms. Symptoms can last for days or sometimes longer. And a person who experience one risks another and may find recovery takes longer....