Posts Tagged: "science"

Looking at the results of multi-year studies conducted by Google into its own employment practices, including hiring standards and team productivity, Davidson noted Google’s own findings that a hard skills from a STEM education were not as important as softer skills such as curiosity, empathy and emotional intelligence… On January 18th, NBC News THINK published a thought piece penned by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in which Pichai argues that the traditional stance on education, whereby students would graduate from academic institutions with the assumption that they had learned lifelong career skills, is no longer tenable given the rapid changes posed by technology. Pichai argued in favor of moving away from “code and intensive degrees” towards a more “lightweight, focused model” featuring apprenticeship and certification programs, some of which can be completed in less than one year.

One way we use robots is the navigation of dangerous situations, in which robots perform tasks that would put a human worker at high risk of injury or death. A highly radioactive environment is one such example. If robots were able to experience pain, and interpret this type of sensory data as a threat to their physical existence, they would be better able to protect themselves from harm and complete tasks more efficiently. To return to “Star Trek,” Lieutenant Commander Data was able to identify atmospheric and environmental threats to his well-being, even if he was forced to describe them with a machine’s characteristic detachment. Interestingly, there’s also the possibility that pain sensors for robots could in turn protect humans.

Although women have more than quintupled their representation among patent holders since 1977, a pronounced patent gender gap remains. In 2010, according to a new briefing paper by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), fewer than one in five patents had at least one woman inventor named. Although quintupling the number of women inventors over the last 30+ years is impressive, at the current growth rate it is projected that it will take until 2092 for women to reach parity in patenting.

In late March, reports came out that researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland demonstrated the Fredkin gate, also known as the controlled-SWAP gate. First conceived by American digital physicist Edward Fredkin, the Fredkin gate is designed to exchange values between qubits in a quantum computing system based on a value of a third qubit. The Fredkin gate is perhaps a foundational component to quantum computers, replacing circuits requiring five logic operations with circuitry which takes advantage of the quantum principle of entanglement.

On February 11th, 2016, researchers working at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced that, for the first time ever, gravitational waves had been directly observed. The discovery of these waves provides further confirmation of the scientific theory of general relativity, which was first promoted by German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Given today would have been Albert Einstein’s 137th birthday, we wanted to revisit this recent discovery and explore what it means for the future of scientific research.

Superconductivity, and especially room temperature superconductivity, has been a holy grail of sorts, which the scientific community has sought for decades. Superconductors are materials which are capable of conducting electricity for an indefinite period of time without exhibiting resistance. This lack of resistance could revolutionize electricity transmission through a grid’s power lines, where as much as 10 percent to 15…

Only someone who is completely indifferent to the truth, and who has intentionally put on blinders so they don’t see the truth, could ever say that the public does not benefit from federally funded research. It is sad that this even needs to be pointed out, but critics of the patent system and federal research funding can take intellectual dishonesty to bizarre heights. In other words, they are not beyond making outright false statements, which all too frequently go unchecked. Equally ridiculous is the argument that the federal government built every technology that is the result of some funded scientific breakthrough. The fact that the government invested in basic science doesn’t mean that all follow-on innovation that utilizes the discoveries was built and paid for by the government. Such an argument is completely disingenuous.

The very tiniest particles that make up all of the matter that we can’t see are being discovered by the largest single machine ever created on planet Earth. With experiments having begun again at the Large Hadron Collider operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, teams of thousands of scientists are hopeful that discoveries of dark matter and antimatter may yield up important answers, perhaps in the next few months to such fundamental questions as “Why are we here?”