George Johnson argues that the assumption of human fallibility lies at the root of the current drive to automate military weaponry.
Researchers at an underground laboratory in Japan have made the most persuasive case yet that particles called neutrinos ? wisps of near nothingness that course from the sun ? are capable of changing identity in midflight.
George Johnson argues that humanity's reliance on machine intelligence is doomed to cause fatal accidents, like the recent collision of two airliners, because the machines are as fallible as humans are.
A good summary of how the distributed computing phenomenon has benefitted science so far.
In an important milestone toward making powerful computers that exploit the mind-bending possibilities of calculating with individual atoms, scientists at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif., are announcing today that they have performed the most complex such calculation yet: factoring the number 15.
Particle physicists are speculating that the next generation of particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, may be able to produce miniature black holes on demand.
Researchers at Los Alamos are using radio waves to carry out an experiment in quantum computing. By using radio waves to manipulate atoms like so many quantum abacus beads, the Los Alamos scientists will coax a molecule called crotonic acid into executing a simple computer program. The researchers are aiming for a computer that can carry out a calculation involving 10 atoms which would result in an invisibly tiny computer that can carry out 1,024 (210) calculations at the same time.
In fact, as research on so many fronts is becoming increasingly dependent on computation, all science, it seems, is becoming computer science. There are computational chemistry, computational neuroscience, computational genetics, computational immunology and computational molecular biology. Even fields like sociology and anthropology are slowly succumbing to the change. At the Santa Fe Institute, computer models are used to study the factors that might have led to the rise and fall of complex cultures like the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde ? a kind of artificial archaeology.
As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.
Physicists have come up with a way to test superstring theory using existing particle accelerators.