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Exoplanet Science 2.0
From ACM Opinion

Exoplanet Science 2.0

It is more than two decades since we learnt that the Universe is awash with other worlds. Since 1992, more than 3,500 exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars...

Science Fiction When the Future Is Now
From ACM Opinion

Science Fiction When the Future Is Now

AlphaGo, fake news, cyberwar: 2017 has felt science-fictional in the here and now. Space settlement and sea-steading seem just around the bend; so, at times, do...

Five Priorities For Weather and Climate Research
From ACM Opinion

Five Priorities For Weather and Climate Research

Meteorology is entering a new era. Demand is growing worldwide for forecasts of storms, floods and droughts.

Five Ways to Fix Statistics
From ACM Opinion

Five Ways to Fix Statistics

As debate rumbles on about how and how much poor statistics is to blame for poor reproducibility, Nature asked influential statisticians to recommend one change...

Citation Is Not the Only Impact
From ACM Opinion

Citation Is Not the Only Impact

What makes good science? And how do Nature's editors select papers to publish?

The Future of Dna Sequencing
From ACM Opinion

The Future of Dna Sequencing

Forty years ago, two papers1, 2 described the first tractable methods for determining the order of the chemical bases in stretches of DNA. Before these 1977 publications...

Artificial Intelligence: The Future Is Superintelligent
From ACM Opinion

Artificial Intelligence: The Future Is Superintelligent

Max Tegmark is a renowned physicist. He is also the irrepressibly optimistic co-founder of the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts (motto: "Technology...

Metrology Is Key to Reproducing Results
From ACM Opinion

Metrology Is Key to Reproducing Results

Imagine you are a policymaker who needs to know how much carbon is stored in the South American forest.

Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You ThinkĀ 
From ACM Opinion

Quantum Teleportation Is Even Weirder Than You ThinkĀ 

A BBC headline last week, 'First object teleported to Earth's orbit', has to be one of the most fantastical you'll see this year. For once, it seems the future...

Information Technology: A Digital Genius at Play
From ACM Opinion

Information Technology: A Digital Genius at Play

The US mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon, whose life spanned the tumultuous, technologically explosive twentieth century, is often called the...

Image Doctoring Must Be Halted
From ACM Opinion

Image Doctoring Must Be Halted

Seven years ago, a cover of The Economist showed Barack Obama, head down on a Louisiana beach in front of an oil rig—the picture of lonely despair.

Medical Microbots Need Better Imaging and Control
From ACM Opinion

Medical Microbots Need Better Imaging and Control

More than 50 years ago, physicist Richard Feynman spoke of "swallowing the surgeon" in his classic lecture, 'There's plenty of room at the bottom'.

Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century
From ACM Opinion

Artificial Intelligence: Chess Match of the Century

Nearly 20 years ago, I was fortunate enough to play friendly blitz chess against former world champion Garry Kasparov.

Five Hacks For Digital Democracy
From ACM Opinion

Five Hacks For Digital Democracy

The election of a politically inexperienced president in the United States, Britain's vote to leave the European Union and the initial rejection of a peace deal...

Track How Technology Is Transforming Work
From ACM Opinion

Track How Technology Is Transforming Work

Advances in technology pose huge challenges for jobs. Productivity levels have never been higher in the United States, for example, but income for the bottom 50...

Quantum Computers Ready to Leap Out of the Lab in 2017
From ACM Opinion

Quantum Computers Ready to Leap Out of the Lab in 2017

Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be.

2017 Sneak Peek: What the New Year Holds For Science
From ACM Opinion

2017 Sneak Peek: What the New Year Holds For Science

If the United States pulls back on its climate commitments as president-elect Donald Trump has promised, China, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases,...

Good Data Are Not Enough
From ACM Opinion

Good Data Are Not Enough

This summer, I visited the Mayan city of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico.

There Is a Blind Spot in AI Research
From ACM Opinion

There Is a Blind Spot in AI Research

This week, the White House published its report on the future of artificial intelligence (AI)—a product of four workshops held between May and July 2016 in Seattle...

Why Scientists Must Share Their Research Code
From ACM Opinion

Why Scientists Must Share Their Research Code

Many scientists worry over the reproducibility of wet-lab experiments, but data scientist Victoria Stodden's focus is on how to validate computational research:...
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