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When a clogged artery landed Peter Szolovits in the hospital for a coronary bypass operation in mid-October, he noticed a few incongruities other patients might not have. Machines that performed intertwined functions—dosing and delivering medication, for example—did not communicate with one another, and patient statistics detailed on paper were not in the hospital’s electronic medical records. As head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Clinical Decision Making Group, which works to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine, Szolovits knew that intelligent systems could optimize care by working together better to eliminate errors as well as avoid repetition of medical tests....

As the World Cup races forward in South Africa a different kind of soccer tournament recently kicked off in Asia. And whereas debates in Cape Town and Johannesburg may center on the Jabulani ball’s aerodynamics or the vuvuzela’s “unique” sound, in Singapore coaches are more likely to worry whether their favorite player has blown a fuse, so to speak. RoboCup 2010 marks the 14th year that hundreds of roboticists pit their mechanized creations against each other in five different soccer leagues....

IS IT POSSIBLE to have sex with a computer? Well, not exactly, but people can use their computers to engage in a variety of online sexual activities, including hooking up with partners (both virtually and in the flesh) and finding fodder for kinky obsessions. Online porn is accessible, affordable and often anonymous, and viewing it has become a popular pastime. A survey of college students in 2008 by psychologist Chiara Sabina of Penn State Harrisburg and her colleagues found that more than 90 percent of the men and 60 percent of the women had watched Internet pornography before age 18....

In this age of looming bioterrorism, keeping chemical warfare vapors off of soldiers is a primary military concern. A group of Colorado scientists may have just come up with a solution that can keep troops safe while giving them the comfort of breathability. In the past, military personnel had two choices: they could wear a breathing apparatus along with a full-body suit of cross-linked butyl rubber, or a garment fortified with activated carbon....

Tesla Motors Inc. frontman Elon Musk unveiled the company’s Model X sport utility vehicle in California last night. The midsized crossover and newest option in the electric automaker’s lineup has several new selling points—a HEPA filter, blazing acceleration, agile “falcon wing” doors, a low center of gravity that reduces rollover risk, a panoramic windshield and the highest crash safety rating federal regulators can give—as well as an old marketing problem: price....

Road tripping used to feel like it broke the bank, with gasoline prices in many places hovering above $3.50 per gallon or higher. Today, filling up for more than $2 per gallon in some places feels jarring. Crude oil prices tumbled into an unexpected free fall in 2014, pushing gasoline prices down with them. Solar power prices continued their dive, too, helping usher in a new gold rush in renewables worldwide and predictions that rooftop solar could assist in a major transformation of the U....

Despite an active vaccination program to stop polio, India still accounts for half the world’s cases of the crippling childhood disease. And now scientists may finally have determined why. After comparing records of Indian children who were paralyzed by polio with those who staved off the disease, researchers inferred that the key causes of ongoing polio transmission are high population density and poor sanitation. And those are surmountable problems, the group says....

Robots or advanced artificial intelligences that “wake up” and become conscious are a staple of thought experiments and science fiction. Whether or not this is actually possible remains a matter of great debate. All of this uncertainty puts us in an unfortunate position: we do not know how to make conscious machines, and (given current measurement techniques) we won’t know if we have created one. At the same time, this issue is of great importance, because the existence of conscious machines would have dramatic ethical consequences....

In the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election, polls across the country predicted an easy sweep for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. From Vanuatu to Timbuktu, everyone knows what happened. Media outlets and pollsters took the heat for failing to project a victory for Donald Trump. The polls were ultimately right about the popular vote. But they missed the mark in key swing states that tilted the Electoral College toward Trump....

In March, with the help of other organizations, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) launched Ask a Scientist to enable the public to literally ask a scientist any question related to SARS-CoV-2. The site is loaded with information from reputable scientific and public health sources such that it recognizes questions and provides an automated response. But for more custom-made questions, the public can send an email to a network of hundreds of scientists and get a response back in their inbox....

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia ranks high in global charts of shark attacks and is currently running an aggressive culling drive against the marine predator, but a new survey says many Australians aren’t really that worried about them. The survey of 583 visitors to the Sydney aquarium found 77 percent of the respondents were “not at all frightened” or only “moderately frightened” by sharks. Some 87 percent said they shouldn’t be killed despite the threat they pose....

Fuel from the weed jatropha powered an Air New Zealand jet on a two-hour flight today—the world’s second flight of a commercial jet on biofuel. One out of the four Rolls Royce engines on an Air New Zealand Boeing 747-400 burned a 50-50 blend of regular jet fuel and a bio-version made from jatropha. The flight more than doubled the air time of the first biofuel flight—a 40 minute jaunt between London and Amsterdam in February....

Goldman returned home with a conviction that there had to be a better way to meet widespread demand for household lighting among the world’s poor. That idea grew into Silicon Valley-based business, d.light, which will deliver affordable solar lighting to its 50 millionth customer this month. More importantly, d.light and other entrepreneurial firms are showing how to bring power to many of the planet’s 3 billion energy-poor citizens without costly construction of electric grids or the destructive growth of greenhouse gas emissions....

In one well-known episode of The West Wing a line about an astronomical effort to “cure cancer” gets cut from the president’s State of the Union. In real life, however, someone wrote the speech that the fictional president Josiah Bartlet never got to give. On January 12 Pres. Barack Obama laid out an aspirational plan in his final State of the Union to “cure cancer.” He did not put forth a specific time line for this effort or the metrics that would measure success but did say that he was putting Vice Pres....

Dennis Flanagan, whose nearly four-decade tenure as editor of Scientific American transformed science journalism and educated untold millions about the wonders of science, passed away on January 14. The cause of his death was prostate cancer. Flanagan’s death falls only a few months after that of the man with whom he was long professionally linked, Gerard Piel, Scientific American’s former publisher and chairman. Flanagan and Piel, along with a small group of investors, purchased the magazine in 1947 and changed it from a rather quirky mix of science, inventions and mechanical hobbycraft into the world’s premier voice of authoritative, intelligent science coverage....

Alex, the African gray parrot, died young. For three decades he redefined our understanding of animal intelligence with his humanlike ability to count, describe objects and express his desires—but he was expected to live another 20 years when an undetected arterial disease took his life. Still, the legacy Alex leaves is remarkable. According to all but the most stubborn critics, he demonstrated skills far beyond mere mimicry, suggesting that he was, in fact, a thinking being who truly understood the meaning of his words....

What do child slavery in Ghana, Somali piracy and the illegal global ivory trade have in common? Their root causes can all be traced back to declining wildlife populations. At least that’s the theory of a group of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who looked at how wildlife loss impacts conflict in places where people depend on wildlife to survive. Justin Brashares and his colleagues say that the way governments and international organizations respond to crimes like poaching often do not address the full “ecological, social and economic complexity of wildlife-related conflict....

Amazing masters of disguise, octopuses can essentially vanish, right before your eyes, into a complex scene of colorful coral or a clump of kelp waving in the currents. How do these invertebrates manage this quick-change feat? Small pigment-filled cells, called chromatophores, and reflective ones, called iridophores and leucophores, in the skin of most octopuses allow them to create nuanced patterns of color and luminosity and even to harness polarized light to fool other ocean life....

We yearn to believe that we can get fit without effort. We build “ab belts” to electrocute our muscles to give us six-packs. We invent chocolate-chip cookie diets to make us thin while eating fat. We wish to get fit from doing absolutely nothing. We wish to lie in bed, think about going to the gym and then, poof, obtain the body of a Greek god. Well, a remarkable new study from Brian Clark at Ohio University shows that sitting still, while just thinking about exercise, might make us stronger....

Kirby Brown was not afraid to take risks. The 38-year-old decorator learned to ride horses as a child and surfed giant waves in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez as an adult. She was not reckless, though. “She loved adventure, but she was very safety-conscious,” says her mother, Virginia Brown. So when Kirby decided in 2009 to take part in a spiritual retreat in the Arizona desert organized by well-known self-help guru James Arthur Ray, she probably did not think her life was in danger....