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The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence

August 26, 2019

Iyad Rahwan’s radical idea: The best way to understand algorithms is to observe their behavior in the wild.

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A Call for Courage as Physicists Confront Collider Dilemma

August 7, 2019

Carlo Rubbia, leader of the bold collider experiment that in 1983 discovered the W and Z bosons, thinks particle physicists should now smash muons together in an innovative “Higgs factory.”

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His Artificial Intelligence Sees Inside Living Cells

July 24, 2019

The computer vision scientist Greg Johnson is building systems that can recognize organelles on sight and show the dynamics of living cells more clearly than microscopy can.

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Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines

July 11, 2019

Consciousness is a famously hard problem, so Hod Lipson is starting from the basics: with self-aware robots that can help us understand how we think.

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How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It

June 27, 2019

Lee Smolin’s radical idea to reimagine how we view the universe.

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A Mathematician Whose Only Constant Is Change

June 13, 2019

Amie Wilkinson searches for exotic examples of the mathematical structures that describe change.

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In Ecology Studies and Selfless Ants, He Finds Hope for the Future

May 15, 2019

For more than six decades, the influential biologist Edward O. Wilson has drawn connections between evolution, ecology and behavior, often sparking controversies inside and outside of science.

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The Astronomer Who’d Rather Build Space Cameras

April 18, 2019

Jim Gunn shaped the theory of the evolution of the cosmos before building cameras and spectrographs for major observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.

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The Scientist Who Cooks Up the Skies of Faraway Worlds

April 8, 2019

Astronomers will soon take their first glance at the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet. Sarah Hörst is writing the guidebook for these exoplanetary explorers, one that will reveal what a distinctive atmosphere says about the world underneath.

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