The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies, and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from …
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Last week, an alarming complaint popped up from iPhone owners on Reddit and elsewhere: Old photos, long since deleted, had resurfaced in their Photos app. Vacations, nudes, concerts, all unexpectedly returned like an unwelcome Pet Sematary cat. Today Apple finally acknowledged the bug and pushed out a fix. But the …
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Proponents of artificial intelligence are quick to list the myriad ways their tech will serve as extensions of our busy brains. But as Apple, Google, and other companies race to bring their AI creations onto our phones, we’re being presented with an opportunity to use these next-gen digital assistants to …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. A team of computer scientists has created a nimbler, more flexible type of machine learning model. The trick: It must periodically forget what it knows. And while this new approach won’t displace the huge models that undergird the biggest apps, …
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You probably keep a backup of important personal files, photos, and videos on a flash drive or external hard drive. In the not-too-distant future, you might store that data in DNA instead. French company Biomemory wants to bring personal DNA-based data storage to the public. Today, the company announced the …
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Millions of people over the age of 65 likely have mild cognitive impairment, or MCI—minor problems with memory or decisionmaking that can, over time, turn into dementia. But a pair of recent studies both concluded that 92 percent of people experiencing MCI in the United States are not getting diagnosed …
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The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. On warm summer nights, green lacewings flutter around bright lanterns in backyards and at campsites. The insects, with their veil-like wings, are easily distracted from their natural preoccupation with sipping on flower nectar, avoiding predatory bats, and reproducing. Small clutches …
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