by Heather Zeiger | Apr 3, 2015 | Science, Society, Technology
What is artificial intelligence? It turns out there is a bit of a debate over what exactly defines “intelligence” and how we can know if something is artificially intelligent. There are some people who think that we have already achieved AI, citing Google’s algorithms...
by Heather Zeiger | Feb 24, 2015 | Science
Last week’s Nature was devoted to the results of the NIH’s Roadmap Epigenetics Project, marking the conclusion of this eight-year endeavor to investigate the “stuff” around (i.e., epi-) DNA that tells the genome what to do. I have used the analogy in the past that...
by Heather Zeiger | Feb 13, 2015 | Ethics, Salvo, Society, Technology
My recent post on Salvo’s Blog, Signs of the Times, addresses the not-so-accurately-named “three-parent” IVF vote. The House of Commons in the UK approved a technique that allows scientists to replace the nucleus of one woman’s egg to with the...
by Heather Zeiger | Jan 21, 2015 | Science
Here is a summary of some recent studies on Alzheimer’s disease. Glial cells, from the Greek for “glue” are the new focus of neuroscientists looking for a way to combat Alzheimer’s disease. Two studies, one out of Stanford University and the other from...
by Heather Zeiger | Dec 19, 2014 | Ethics, Science
One of the tricky things about science writing is news cycles move quickly while research moves slowly. Research in the biomedical and health fields rarely involves one, big, “Eureka!” moment. Usually it starts with “hey that’s an interesting correlation we found,”...
