Engineering, Environment & Energy

Moving Beyond Mimicry in Artificial Intelligence

Nautilus: Imagine asking a computer to make a digital painting, or a poem—and happily getting what you asked for. Or imagine chatting with it about various topics, and feeling it was a real interaction. What once was science fiction is…

Soft ‘NeuroString’ could probe brain and gut

Futurity: A new invention called “NeuroString” is a soft implantable probe that lets researchers study the chemistry of brain and gut health. “The mainstream way people are trying to understand the brain is to read and record electric signals,” says…

Forget Lasers. The Hot New Tool for Physicists Is Sound

Wired UK: Yushun Zeng squishes cancer cells in a petri dish at work. No, not with his ungainly, macroscopic human fingers. Zeng, an engineering graduate student at the University of Southern California, has built a device that traps and compresses the…

New PET-like plastic made directly from waste biomass

PhysOrg: It is becoming increasingly obvious that moving away from fossil fuels and avoiding the accumulation of plastics in the environment are key to addressing the challenge of climate change. In that vein, there are considerable efforts to develop degradable…