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 […]
Once upon a time, in a world very far from ours, there were a group of scientists devoted to the study of bacteria, or prokaryotes, who called themselves ‘biologists’, and a different group of researchers, who studied eukaryote organisms, and who received the name of ‘organismologists’. Organismologists were very proud of the obvious differences between […]
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 […]
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 […]
Water is H₂O. Few scientific formulas look more familiar, more compact, or more final. Two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen: the phrase seems to say what water really is beneath the shifting appearances of ice, vapour, rain, rivers and the liquid in a glass. Yet that little subscript was not easy to earn. By […]
By 1800, water had already changed once. It was no longer one of nature’s simple terms, but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen (see Is Water H₂O? (1) From Element to Compound). The new chemistry had a powerful account of that change. What it still wanted was a more direct experiment: water itself, giving up […]
Take a walk in London’s Trafalgar Square this summer and wilting under the heat will be all sorts of body sizes, some tall, some short: a real mix of sizes. Picking just two from the crowd to represent the whole human species would be a tall order. But that is exactly what we do when […]
Take a glass of water. Nothing about it seems to ask for a theory. It has no colour worth naming, no dramatic smell, no visible architecture. It runs, freezes, boils, evaporates, dissolves, erodes, circulates and nourishes. It belongs to weather, geology, physiology, cooking and plumbing before it belongs to chemistry. Then science gives us the […]
Artificial Intelligence • Mathematics • Philosophy of science
Author: Melissa Lee, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, Monash University Some weeks ago, artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced ten advances in mathematics and computer science made with their as-yet unreleased model Astra. The discoveries cover a wide range of mathematical fields, including geometry, cryptography and coding theory. These ten are just the latest in a […]
Authors: Kai Riemer, Professor of Information Technology and Organisation, University of Sydney and Sandra Peter, Director of Sydney Executive Plus, Business School, University of Sydney “We are now, like, in the singularity”. These are the words of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking on the Relentless podcast on July 25. He added: “I’ve been waiting […]