Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are a revolutionary technology that allows direct communication between the brain and external devices like computers or prosthetics. These interfaces interpret brain signals to control actions—whether it’s moving a computer cursor or controlling an artificial limb. While the concept has been around since the 1960s, recent advancements have dramatically improved its potential, […]
We’ve looked at the road as a fantasy of freedom, and the driver as a fantasy of masculinity, but what about the cars themselves? What can we learn from looking at the cars that achieve their own level of fame? America has a large collection of famous fictional automobiles, from the hot to the homey […]
This article contains potentially distressing details about conversion therapy and makes references to suicide. At the beginning of 2022, the practice of conversion therapy was banned in Canada. Conversion therapy, or also known as reparative therapy, is a range of techniques that falsely claim to be able to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender […]
If you’ve never heard of Mad Libs before, it is a game that presents the player with a skeleton of a short story, with blank spaces interspersed throughout that are each labelled with certain types of words (noun, verb, adjective, etc.). The player fills in the blanks with words of their choice, and is generally […]
Last month, the world experienced the 2024 Summer Olympics, hosted in Paris, France, with reports of an estimated 34.5 million viewers across the world tuning in for the opening weekend. On August 27th Paris will also host the 2024 Summer Paralympics – however, the Olympic committee estimates only 1.5 million people will tune in to […]
Sitting comfortably in the corner of the conference room at ComSciCon 2024, a whirlwind of thoughts raced through my mind. It was fascinating—and somewhat surprising—how much I could grasp from research presentations by astrophysicists, neuroscientists, and experts from fields far removed from my own. The ComSciCon flagship workshop was held at Emerson in Boston, MA, […]
If I double your salary, will you work twice as hard? Maybe, but likely not. What if I just increase your salary by a substantial amount, will you work any harder? Some people will for some finite time before reverting to their prior level of exertion; other people will accept the raise but not work […]
With the increasing complexity of the data we can obtain from behaving systems, among which Homo sapiens, as a species, tends to be one of the most well studied, machine learning pipelines have now become routine for both predicting behavior by decoding physiological signals and the opposite – detecting functional abnormalities (disease) based on subtle […]
In 2022, Merriam-Webster crowned gaslighting, defined as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one’s own advantage,” as the Word of the Year. It felt like one day, we were thinking “What’s gaslighting?” and the next, we can’t open social media without reels and posts and media articles warning us of the […]
Imagine being able to study marine life without disturbing it or even seeing it. That’s what environmental DNA, or eDNA, allows scientists to do. eDNA is a groundbreaking tool that helps us learn more about the creatures living in our oceans, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest fish, without ever needing to lay eyes […]