Ever since IBM supercomputer Watson beat Jeopardy! champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, there’s been a lot of talk about putting the computer’s question-and-answer capabilities to real applications. In addition to consuming massive amounts of information, the supercomputer has been trained to understand literary references, interpret linguistic nuance, generate hypotheses, perform analysis, and score its [...]

The answer is: For its next assignment, this Jeopardy! champion will have to work on its bedside manner. If you replied, "What is Watson?" give yourself a round of applause. With last night’s big game show victory under its belt, IBM has its sights set on applying the high-performance computer’s advanced analytics capabilities to the [...]

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled, the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of [...]

NEW YORK—Academic research and corporate research and development would appear to mix as well as oil and water given their vastly different cultures and objectives. Yet collaborations among universities and businesses are crucial not only to making new discoveries but also to ensuring that breakthroughs in science and technology find their way to the people [...]

A darling stop motion video was released yesterday and is already a big hit. IBM took the challenge of moving 5,000 atoms around in order to create a short stop motion video, capturing the images using a scanning tunneling microscope. How important is the scanning tunneling microscope in science? Half of the 1986 Nobel Prize [...]

I recently interviewed author and inventor Ray Kurzweil about his new book, “How to Create A Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.” The 58-minute segment aired on December 1, 2 and 3 on the C-SPAN2 program “After Words.” The book’s thesis is that it is essentially possible to reverse-engineer the human brain to create [...]