Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

Nov 19, 2020

Scientists are recreating the smell of 16th-century Europe

History is written, read, told — but rarely ever is it smelled. Historians and scientists across Europe have now gotten together with perfumers and museums for a unique project: to capture what Europe smelled like between the 16th and early 20th centuries. A European street today may smell like coffee,...

Dec 1, 2020

AI system solves 50-year-old protein folding problem in hours

An artificial intelligence company that gained fame for designing computer systems that could beat humans at games has now made a huge advancement in biological science. The company, DeepMind, which is owned by the same parent company as Google, has created an AI system that can rapidly and accurately predict...

Mar 1, 2021

Photos of Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and others come alive (creepily), thanks to AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) can now transform photos of people into short, highly realistic animations, much like the moving pictures in the newspapers and posters of Harry Potter's magical world. In these AI-animated clips, faces that were once frozen in time blink, turn their heads and even smile, their movements wavering...

Apr 21, 2021

Mysterious second writer of Dead Sea Scroll uncovered by AI

A famous Dead Sea Scroll manuscript was written by not just one but two scribes, according to a new study that used artificial intelligence (AI) and statistics to detect subtle differences in handwriting on the ancient document. The two scribes wrote in such a similar manner that the differences between...

Jun 3, 2021

AI drone may have 'hunted down' and killed soldiers in Libya with no human input

At least one autonomous drone operated by artificial intelligence (AI) may have killed people for the first time last year in Libya, without any humans consulted prior to the attack, according to a U.N. report. According to a March report from the U.N. Panel of Experts on Libya, lethal autonomous...

Jun 7, 2021

Expect an Orwellian future if AI isn't kept in check, Microsoft exec says

Artificial intelligence could lead to an Orwellian future if laws to protect the public aren't enacted soon, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith. Smith made the comments to the BBC news program Panorama on May 26, during an episode focused on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) and the...

Jul 29, 2021

DeepMind says it can predict the shape of every protein in the human body

The artificial intelligence (A.I.) company DeepMind says it will soon release a database of the shape of every protein known to science — more than 100 million. That's every structured protein in the human body, as well as in 20 research species, including yeast and E. coli bacteria, fruit flies...

Oct 6, 2021

William Shatner 'AI' will chat with you about the 'Star Trek' actor's life

Got a question for Star Trek actor William Shatner? You could see it answered in an interactive conversation powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and using video responses that Shatner prerecorded. This two-way conversational video platform was developed by StoryFile, and the company recently introduced the conversation with Shatner on its...

Dec 6, 2021

DeepMind cracks 'knot' conjecture that bedeviled mathematicians for decades

The artificial intelligence (AI) program DeepMind has gotten closer to proving a math conjecture that's bedeviled mathematicians for decades and revealed another new conjecture that may unravel how mathematicians understand knots. The two pure math conjectures are the first-ever important advances in pure mathematics (or math not directly linked to...

Mar 4, 2022

Nuclear fusion is one step closer with new AI breakthrough

The green energy revolution promised by nuclear fusion is now a step closer, thanks to the first successful use of a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system to shape the superheated hydrogen plasmas inside a fusion reactor. The successful trial indicates that the use of AI could be a breakthrough in the...

Jun 13, 2022

Google AI 'is sentient,' software engineer claims before being suspended

A senior software engineer at Google was suspended on Monday (June 13) after sharing transcripts of a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) that he claimed to be sentient, according to media reports. The engineer, 41-year-old Blake Lemoine, was put on paid leave for breaching Google's confidentiality policy. Google might...

Jul 29, 2022

DeepMind AI has discovered the structure of nearly every protein known to science

The artificial intelligence group DeepMind has unraveled the structures of nearly every protein known to science. Researchers achieved the feat using the program AlphaFold, which DeepMind first developed in 2018 and released publically in July 2021. The open-source program can predict a protein's 3D structure from its sequence of amino...

Feb 7, 2023

AI is deciphering a 2,000-year-old 'lost book' describing life after Alexander the Great

A 2,000-year-old lost book discussing the dynasties that succeeded Alexander the Great may finally be deciphered nearly two millennia after the text was partially destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and, centuries later, handed off to Napoleon Bonaparte. The reason for the breakthrough? Researchers are using...

Apr 21, 2023

AI's 'unsettling' rollout is exposing its flaws. How concerned should we be?

The CEO of Google and Alphabet is warning that society needs to move quickly to adapt to the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI). This is going to impact every product across every company, Sundar Pichai said April 16 in an interview with 60 Minutes. Last month, Google released its...

Jun 9, 2023

AI chatbot ChatGPT can't create convincing scientific papers… yet

The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT may be a decent mimic of human workers in several fields, but scientific research is not one of them, according to a new study that used a computer program to spot fake studies generated by the chatbot. But the AI is still capable of...