Innehållsförteckning för July/August 2022 från Discover

Several years ago, I had the pleasure of editing a Discover special issue focused on medical mysteries and breakthroughs — a topic of perennial interest for our readers. We had an item in that issue about IBM’s Watson, the buzzy, bedroom-sized computer possessed of artificial intelligence. Initially deploying Watson’s AI to dominate Jeopardy! champions, IBM ultimately had loftier goals for the system, particularly in medicine, where Watson Health was predicted to revolutionize how patients were treated. It all sounded wonderful and futuristic. Except it wasn’t. As you may have seen on the news earlier this year, Watson Health’s medical career came to a somewhat ignominious end as IBM announced they were shutting it down and essentially selling it off for parts. It seemed like that might be the end of AI…

Reclining on a therapist’s couch as they scribble away on a notepad may soon become more of a rarity. For starters, a growing shortage of mental health professionals could make conventional therapy more difficult to find: Right now, the U.S. needs over 6,300 additional providers to accommodate the current demand. And as of spring 2021, over a third of Americans lived in regions with relatively low access to such care, a phenomenon that’s more pronounced in rural areas. But a growing crop of artificial intelligence technologies might be able to address those needs. Today, anyone with a smartphone can access conversational agent phone apps, or chatbots, meant to help users cope with the anxieties of daily life. These AI language-processing systems can imitate human discussion via text — in this…

The Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military with an insignia shaped like a Star Trek communicator, was launched in December 2019 with a continuing mission “to protect U.S. and allied interests in space.” To justify the establishment of the Space Force, military planners and members of its predecessor, Air Force Space Command, frequently offer the mantra, “Space is no longer a benign environment.” But space has never been a benign environment — and not just because of the bug-eyed monsters imagined by early science fiction writers. While robotic rovers on Mars indicate a thirst for scientific knowledge and the International Space Station (ISS) symbolizes cooperation, peaceful and purely scientific aims in outer space have always contended with military. And no one better embodied the tension between militarism…

FOSSIL FAMILY (“2021’s Hottest Fossil Was Actually Found Over 85 Years Ago,” Jan/Feb 2022) I read with great interest your article on a skull belonging to an elusive type of ancient human found in China. Does Homo longi, or Dragon Man, have any correlation to Peking Man? Peking Man’s complete skeletal remains went missing in 1941 while being guarded and transferred by the U.S. Marine Corp. in China. No further inquiries were conducted at the time because the Japanese were invading China. Tom Fitzgerald AUTHOR BRIDGET ALEX RESPONDS: Tom, thanks for your interest in the Dragon Man discovery. Peking Man is thought to belong to the ancient species of human ancestor known as Homo erectus. This species lived across Africa, Europe and Asia, starting around 1.9 million years ago until…

The artwork we are attracted to can give insight into our personality, such as whether we are impulsive or deliberate, even-tempered or moody. Studies into art preferences date back to the 1930s — most of them examining the extent to which people like or dislike different paintings. Research shows that a person’s interest in art is more strongly correlated to certain personality traits than to social class, age, or gender. In particular, a personality trait called “openness” is the best predictor of whether individuals are interested in art. On the flip side, those who identify as “conscientious” are often less drawn to the arts. These traits are part of the Big Five, a widely accepted personality theory based on nearly a century of research. The model asserts that each personality…

Looking at the mammogram image, with its spiderweb of faint gray lines showing dense breast tissue, you wouldn’t suspect anything was amiss. No human radiologist would hesitate to give this Massachusetts General Hospital patient a clean bill of health. But the Mirai artificial-intelligence system, created at MIT, thinks differently. When it scanned the mammogram, it flagged the patient as high risk for getting breast cancer in the next five years. Ultimately, the machine’s hunch proved correct: The patient indeed developed breast cancer, just four years after the image was taken. Since about 90 percent of people who develop breast cancer don’t have a known genetic mutation, the disease’s emergence can be highly unpredictable. Regina Barzilay, an MIT computer scientist now working on Mirai, was blindsided when she got her own…

Life or death decisions don’t come around very often — unless you’re a doctor. Even the routine choice of whether or not to order another test could mean the difference between detecting a cancerous tumor early or letting it spread. During the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors were forced to decide which patients should get access to ventilators in short supply. Big or small, decisions like these require ethical considerations that are rarely simple. Now, with the rapid ascent of AI in medicine, an urgent question has emerged: Can AI systems make ethical medical decisions? And even if they can, should they? Today, most AI systems are powered by machine learning, where data-hungry algorithms automatically learn patterns from the information they’re trained on. When new data is input into the algorithms, they…

Just speaking the word suicide — or reading this story headline — might make your stomach drop. There’s no gentle way to broach the subject. But the sheer number of people who are taking their own lives demands a closer look. At least 700,000 people die by suicide each year, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. In the U.S., well over 45,000 people become victims annually. That’s more than the yearly count of deaths from breast cancer, leukemia or prostate cancer. These numbers fit into a concerning trend: Americans are now killing themselves at a rate roughly 30 percent higher than just 20 years ago. 30% THE INCREASE IN THE U.S. SUICIDE RATE OVER THE LAST TWO DECADES. The broader factors driving the uptick over the past two decades…

HOW PHOTOS SAVED YELLOWSTONE HEALTH BENEFITS OF NATURAL WINE? ART AND YOUR PERSONALITY THE DISCOMFORT OF THE UNCANNY VALLEY MIRROR, MIRROR Right now, this multibillion-dollar telescope is floating through the cosmos about a million miles away. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sports 18 hexagonal, gold-coated mirrors — just part of its many movable pieces — seen here during final tests on Earth in 2021. The microscopic layer of bling reflects up to 99 percent of infrared light, which enables the JWST to capture distant glows from the universe’s first stars. It didn’t take much gold to do the job: Only about five wedding bands’ worth was melted down and distributed across the mirrors in a layer thinner than a single human hair.…

Now a staple at trendy restaurants, natural wine has been described as funky and unusual tasting. Some say it has similar flavors to cider. While it doesn’t suit everyone’s palette, natural wine has undeniably made its mark in the past decade. In fact, some sustainability- and health-oriented consumers say they’re willing to pay more for it than conventional varieties. WHAT IS NATURAL WINE? The answer is complicated. Technically, the drink lacks any legal definition, which gives companies free rein in what they deem as “natural.” (The French government did recognize a certification system for natural wine in 2020, though it’s unclear whether any companies will pursue it.) Still, the industry tends to agree on several factors in the natural wine making process: The grapes should ideally be grown without pesticides…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI): The science and development of smart computer systems that can perform tasks much as humans do — through reasoning, problem-solving and learning from past experiences. ALGORITHM: A set of steps that a computer can follow to complete a task. CHATBOT: A computer program that mimics human conversation, either through text chat or voice commands. DATA SET: A collection of individual bits of data that algorithms can use to find patterns and make predictions. MACHINE LEARNING: A method of training a computer so that it learns from the data being input, without explicit programs for every situation.…

If a heart attack isn’t documented, did it really happen? For an artificial intelligence program, the answer may very well be “no.” Every year, an estimated 170,000 people in the United States experience asymptomatic — or “silent” — heart attacks. During these events, patients likely have no idea that a blockage is keeping blood from flowing or that vital tissue is dying. They won’t experience any chest pain, dizziness or trouble breathing. They don’t turn beet red or collapse. Instead, they may just feel a bit tired, or have no symptoms at all. While the patient might not realize what happened, the underlying damage can be severe and long-lasting: People who suffer silent heart attacks are at higher risk for coronary heart disease and stroke, and are more likely to…