Technology

How Will Humans And Machines Live Together?

Everybody wonders what will happen with artificial intelligence (AI). Truly, it could go in any of several ways. This column lays out possible scenarios. Scenario-building is usually a group activity, however. So I invite your views on the driving forces ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Oct 12 2025 - 6:31pm

Altmetric Will Now Include Your Podcast

In the early days of Science 2.0, blogging did not get a lot of institutional respect. Public outreach was a waste of time, academics were often told, leave that to science journalists and the PIOs at schools who write press releases. It seemed archaic. An ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 17 2025 - 10:42am

AI Helps Doctors Look At Lots Of Data Fast For Diagnostic Clues

Actors, artists, and musicians are rightly worried about the impact of AI on their incomes but doctors and scientists welcome the help. They know typewriters didn't make literature worse than writing in longhand and "AI"- LLMs- likewise remo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 17 2025 - 11:41am

Impostor Participants Are Skewing Epidemiological Surveys

Impostor participants are people who fake data in order to take part in health research or are  automated computer ‘bots’ which mimic human behavior and responses. As claims get promoted in journalism about harms related to PFAS in water, weedkillers causi ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Oct 19 2025 - 11:44am

Air India Flight 171- Flawed EE Bay Water Ingress Theory

Air India Flight 171- Flawed EE Bay Water Ingress Theory Richard Godfrey, in many videos on the YouTube channel Airline News with Geoffrey Thomas puts forward the hypothesis that the Air India Flight 171 tragedy was caused by water ingress into an Electro ...

Blog Post - Patrick Lockerby - Oct 23 2025 - 4:06pm

PAST AS PROLOGUE: An Engineering Legacy

1980s photo of the author, right; his father, center; and his sister, left. ...

Article - Fred Phillips - Nov 7 2025 - 9:18am

The Immortal Life Of Beef Cells

Ranchers and vegans don't agree on much but they agree that lab-grown meat is a bad idea. Not for science ones, for economic and psychological ones. Still, activists are in a war of extinction against the modern world, so they are confident they will ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Nov 14 2025 - 11:23am

Baby Steps In The Reinforcement Learning World

I am moving some baby steps in the direction of Reinforcement Learning (RL) these days. In machine learning, RL is a well-established and very promising avenue for the development of artificial intelligence, and the field is in rapid development. Unfortuna ...

Article - Tommaso Dorigo - Nov 25 2025 - 10:13am