Archive: 2012

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…

-- Humans are remarkably close-knit, genetically: of the genetic information that can differ from person to person, less than 10% of this variation is specific to any particular population, while the remaining 90% of differences are seen throughout all…

-- The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is perhaps the model organism with the fastest rising popularity in science right now. Model organisms are not organisms that get dressed up and pose for pictures (although that would be cool). Model organisms are a tool…

Presented by Greg Kestin, Laura Jeanty, and Brian Clark Lecture Part 1 Lecture Part 2 Lecture Part 3

-- From a distance, malaria looks like a disease that we should have eradicated by now. Scientists have known for many years that most dangerous malaria cases are caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. This parasite is transmitted to humans…

Presented by Elizabeth Thomas, Sujit Datta, and Atreyee Bhattacharya During the last three billion years, Earth’s climate has nurtured life. However, records of Earth’s history indicate that climate has changed dramatically with major consequences…

Presented by Jason Silverstein, Jennifer Manne, and Karolina Maciag HD video coming soon! In the meantime, checkout our other videos on our Vimeo page!

-- On any given weekend from March until October, it’s a fair bet that somewhere in your state there’s an event raising money for cancer treatment, prevention and/or research.  It probably seems, at times, like someone should have found a cure by now –…