Outstanding researchers present their work and share their opinions in Mapping Ignorance.
In 1960, Science, one of the world’s leading science journals, published an article with an unambiguous title: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. It predicted that on this future date —eleven days from today — the human population would approach infinity and effectively annihilate itself. The outlandishness of the claim landed the article widespread public […]
Authors: Chloe Noteboom, student of the European Master’s in Clinical Linguistics, EMCL and Adrià Rofes, associate professor of neurolinguistics, University of Groningen. A hypnotist and a neurosurgeon walk into an O.R…. no, there’s not a punchline coming. Hypnosis is a technique being explored as an alternative to more standard methods of sedation in awake brain […]
A gene identifier enters a spreadsheet and emerges as a date. The transformation can look like a clerical nuisance, remote from the serious business of scientific reasoning. Yet a 2021 study of PubMed Central articles from 2014–2020 found gene name errors in the supplementary Excel files of 3,436 of the 11,117 publications containing such gene […]
Lithium and sodium are neighbours in the periodic table. Both are alkali metals, both have a single electron in their outer shell, and both can be used to shuttle ions between two electrodes to store and release electrical energy. At first sight, replacing lithium with sodium in a rechargeable battery might therefore seem straightforward. There […]
When I taught physics, chemistry and mathematics to secondary-school and sixth-form students, a correct answer was sometimes where the interesting part began. I would ask why they had used a particular equation. A solution that had looked perfectly sound could become much less convincing; occasionally the reverse happened, and a student whose algebra had gone […]
One of the ideas most of us learn early in biology is that only a few specialized cells can communicate through electrical signals. Neurons do it. Muscle cells do it. Epithelial cells, the cells that form our skin and line most organs, supposedly do not. However, a recent study by Yu and Granick demonstrates that […]
Authors: Mary M. Hausfeld, Assistant Professor in Management, University of Limerick and Jochen Menges, Director of the Center for Leadership in the Future of Work, University of Zurich Who comes to mind when you think of someone emotionally intelligent? Someone who can read a room, defuse an argument, and who knows exactly what to say […]
Biotechnology • Chemical engineering • Food processing • Microbiology
Probiotics are part of a rapidly expanding field of research. They are live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, may confer health benefits[1]. Among the most extensively studied probiotics, some species of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium have been associated with the maintenance of gut microbiota balance and with several physiological functions[2]. Producing these microorganisms usually […]
Author: Deven Desai, Professor of Business Law and Ethics; Associate Director for Law, Policy, and Ethics at the Machine Learning Center, Georgia Institute of Technology AI agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do. Nevertheless, a New York Times article – representative of much news coverage of AI – described an OpenAI hacking as […]
Author: Tania Ahmed, Honorary Postdoctoral Associate, Macquarie University Astronomers have catalogued billions of stars and hundreds of billions of galaxies. We have found thousands of planets orbiting stars. We can also map where these galaxies sit and trace how the universe changes over time. The universe also contains objects that are too faint, too far […]