Archive: Jul 2012

-- Behind every Olympic victory is an incredible amount of physics, biomechanics, and engineering. With the Olympic Games in full swing, let’s take a look at the science behind three of its most popular events: running, swimming and gymnastics.

Most visits to a doctor or hospital occur when a patient feels under the weather, but is unsure of the cause of the symptoms or the best way to treat them. For example, sniffles and a sore throat could be caused by seasonal allergies or the flu, each of…

-- Two groups of scientists — one based in the Netherlands and the other in the United States — have carried out detailed studies on the experimental evolution of the A/H5N1 virus, more commonly known as the “bird flu”. Public health officials have…

The Turing Centenary Conference was held this June at Cambridge University. Cambridge had special significance for Alan Turing, as he spent his formative undergraduate years there and returned there shortly after his PhD. The conference brought together…

Barbara Liskov is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has spent the past forty or so years finding and describing new ways…

Ann Druyan, an American author and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science, once said For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness, and comet personally. We…

Can we build a functional brain using computers? In order to answer that question, we need to know how the brain is built in nature. The human brain is composed of more than 10 billion cells called neurons that can be electrically activated upon…

Cars that drive themselves. A program that trounces the best human players at Jeopardy! A machine that defeats the world champion at chess. It would seem that the quest to create human-level artificial intelligence (AI) is making astounding progress, and…

“Bruce, did you know that it was an openly gay Englishman who was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans’ Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do –…

Alan Turing’s revolutionary ideas about computation helped launch the field of cognitive science. One of his major contributions to cognitive science was the idea of a Turing machine, a hypothetical contraption capable of carrying out any algorithm or…