Author : Emma Russell

Last August, looking up from the edge of an ancient river delta on Mars, the Perseverance rover’s electronic eye spied an oblong shadow crossing the distant, glowing Sun. Phobos, the Martian moon named for the Greek god of fear and panic, was transiting the solar disk. Too small to darken......

The sun hangs low over the plains of Castile and León, in the north-central region of Spain. But from a slope of the mountain Pico Trigaza, it appears that a few puffy white clouds have started to block the sun. That’s vexing. A group of researchers, some wearing cardboard eclipse......

In the cockpit of Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300, pilot Chris Caputo steers onto Runway 33 at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Cleared for takeoff, he releases the brakes and nudges the throttle forward. At the back of the aircraft, the five-blade pusher propeller snaps awake, and the Alia......

Science has a spam problem. And the spam filter is getting clogged up. According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence......

Agility Robotics, the company I cofounded out of my robotics lab at Oregon State University in 2015, has just launched Digit 5. It’s designed to be the first humanoid robot that can safely and economically do useful work at scale, allowing us to bring tens of thousands of humanoid workers......

The global campaigns to break China’s dominance of vital rare-earth markets are shaping up into one of the signature geostrategic struggles of the early 21st century. Hundreds of mining companies, government agencies, and industrial facilities scattered across North America, Australasia, and Europe are striving to wrest share from Chinese firms,......

Seventeen years ago, cell biologist Donald Ingber and his colleagues at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering submitted a paper to the journal Science describing their model human lung. It was smaller than a USB stick and made of a clear polymer slab containing narrow channels, which were......

It’s 6 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2002 in New Delhi. It’s still dark outside, and I’m in the kitchen preparing breakfast, packing lunches, and getting my two children ready to catch the school bus when, for the third time in a week, the power goes out. No......

Since about 2020, AI has largely focused on training bigger and better models. Large language models (LLMs) ballooned from millions of parameters to trillions. This proved effective: The largest version of OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, correctly answered just 43.9 percent of questions on a popular knowledge-and-reasoning benchmark. Just four......

In 2003, Martin Eberhard, a cofounder of Tesla Motors, decided it was time to start wooing investors. To do that, however, he needed an electric car. So he talked to Alan Cocconi and asked if he could borrow the tZero, the revolutionary and blazingly fast electric roadster that Cocconi had......