Citizen Science Isn’t Just About Collecting Data
By Jason Lloyd The earthquake near Washington, D.C., five years ago in August 2011—the one that damaged the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral but had little other noticeable impact—caught
How a Volcano Helped Inspire Frankenstein
By Kent Linthicum Two hundred years ago this June, during a dreadfully cold and wet summer, Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Since then Frankenstein has become iconic, spawning a legion
Paolo Bacigalupi Uses Fiction and Law to Debate Whether Robots Are Capable of Murder
Law prof ponders: If a highly advanced robot kills, is it murder or product liability?
Future Tense Fiction: “Mika Model,” by Paolo Bacigalupi
“The girl, the robot … this thing—I’d seen her before, all right. I’d seen her in technology news stories about advanced learning node networks…”
Algorithms Are Like Kirk, Not Spock
By Ed Finn When technologists describe their hotshot new system for trading stocks or driving cars, the algorithm at its heart always seems to emerge from a magical realm of
Firefight in Oregon
By Stephen J. Pyne Who should control fire on landscapes? It’s an ancient question given new spark by the confrontations at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. The Hammonds,
What Algorithms Want
By Ed Finn We spend an awful lot of time now thinking about what algorithms know about us: the ads we see online, the deep archive of our search history,
If There Is Water on Mars, Who Gets to Use It?
By Rhett Larson Humans settle around water, especially in the desert. Indeed, our earliest civilizations developed around desert water bodies like the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates. With NASA’s recent discovery
How I Became a Science Diplomat
By Marga Gual Soler When I finally finished my Ph.D. program after 11 years of training for a research career in the biomedical sciences, I couldn’t help feeling that something