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Computer Science

Sold: A Rare Copy of Ada Lovelace’s Groundbreaking Computer Algorithm

The manuscript includes Lovelace’s translation of an Italian paper, her copious notes and a formula that is often recognized as the first computer program

Leif Erikson pointing toward North America. Did he use a sunstone to navigate the open seas?

New Research

Simulation Suggests Viking Sunstones of Legend Could Have Worked

If they existed, the crystals—used to locate the sun’s position on cloudy days—could have helped Vikings sail to far away places

Guy Satat, a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab, at the fog machine

This New System Can See Through Fog Far Better Than Humans

Developed by MIT researchers, the technology could be a boon for drivers and driverless cars

Ten Summer Camps For Little Innovators

Forget swimming and archery. These camps will have your kids building robots, pitching business ideas, even fighting zombies!

Why We Should Test Heart Drugs On a ‘Virtual Human’ Instead of Animals

Thousands of animals are used for heart drug tests each year—but research shows that computer-simulated trials are more accurate

This Texas Company Is Fighting Hollywood’s Gender Inequality With Hard Data From Movie Scripts

StoryFit uses artificial intelligence to analyze film scripts for how characters are portrayed by gender

New Research

New Study Finds Fake News Spreads Faster and Deeper Than Verified Stories on Twitter

Looking at 126,000 stories sent by ~3 million people, researchers found that humans, not bots, were primarily responsible for the spread of disinformation

A test subject watching faces while hooked up to an EEG

A New Study Brings Scientists One Step Closer To Mind Reading

Researchers have developed a technique that uses the brainwaves captured by EEG machines to reconstruct the images you see

A decline in women authors and named characters has subtly shaped our understanding of literary history, says study author Ted Underwood.

Women Were Better Represented in Victorian Novels Than Modern Ones

Big data shows that women used to be omnipresent in fiction. Then men got in the way

A printed ring through the color-change process

These 3D-Printed Objects Can Turn Any Color You Want

MIT researchers hope a process that uses a special photochromic dye to change an object’s color in response to light will one day reduce waste

Can you tell which is the face of someone who is sick? Take a good look. Images of 16 individuals (eight women) photographed twice were averaged, during experimentally induced (a) acute sickness and (b) placebo.

The Next Pandemic

Could AI One Day Detect the Flu…Before You Even Feel Sick?

New research into the subtle facial signs of illness could one day help train artificial intelligence systems to scan for infections

New Research

This Is the Largest Known Prime Number Yet

The newly discovered prime is 23 million digits long

Drummers in Benin

New Research

Big Data Traces the World’s Most Distinctive Musical Traditions

An analysis of 8,200 recordings from 137 nations shows nations in sub-Saharan Africa have the most unique rhythms and melodies

Trending Today

Belgium Ends Telegram Service After 171 Years

The end of Belgian telegrams isn’t the end of the service across the world, but it’s getting close

Travelers walk in the departure hall of Hong Kong International Airport.

The Rise of Indoor Navigation

You may never get lost in a mall again with these new technologies, designed to help you navigate inside places traditional GPS-based mapping apps can’t

Turing standing next to the Mark I

Cool Finds

Listen to Alan Turing’s First Computer-Generated Christmas Carols

In 1951, the BBC played two carols from Turing’s computer, which have now been recreated by New Zealand researchers

Janelle Shane's neural network needs a lot of first lines before it can teach itself to write good ones.

This Neural Network Can (Maybe) Start a Novel Better Than You

As the end of NaNoWriMo draws near, take a look at one researcher’s effort to help find that perfect first line

Stanford radiologist Matthew Lungren, left, meets with graduate students Jeremy Irvin and Pranav Rajpurkar to discuss the results of detections made by the algorithm.

Can an Algorithm Diagnose Pneumonia?

Stanford researchers claim they can detect the lung infection more accurately than an experienced radiologist. Some radiologists aren’t so sure.

The way a fruit fly fires neurons could inform machine learning.

How Fruit Fly Brains Could Improve Our Search Engines

Fruit flies have a unique way of matching data, which could teach scientists to create better, faster search algorithms

The herbarium of Washington, D.C.'s Natural History Museum teems with pressed specimens of thousands of distinct plants.

How Artificial Intelligence Could Revolutionize Archival Museum Research

A new study shows off a computer program’s specimen-sorting prowess

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