Coronavirus

Artist’s illustration shows a computer pushing a human away from a computer workstation, representing the concept of combining neural nets with symbolic AI.

AI’s next big leap

The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI. It’s taking baby steps toward reasoning like humans and might one day take the wheel in self-driving cars.

Starry night sky over a closed telescope unit at the Very Large Telescope in Chile

Society

How researchers are making do in the time of Covid

The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered labs and sidelined scientists all over the world. Here’s a look at how some of them have coped.

A classic mural displays a host of human figures of varied ages, affluence and ethnicity, including Native Americans, against a backdrop of ships, locomotives, buildings under construction and a covered wagon.

Society

American individualism and our collective crisis

Our national and social identity is deeply rooted in values like freedom, equality and order. A political scientist explores how these ideas affected the US response to the pandemic.

A falsely colored image combines a time-lapse image of the trajectory of larger droplets and the still image showing the distribution of a diffuse gas cloud of saliva and mucus. Most of the larger droplets are pulled down by gravity well before the smaller droplets carried in the gas cloud.

Physical World

To understand airborne transmission of disease, follow the flow

Viruses and bacteria travel in fluids, such as the air we breathe. Studying exhalations, toilet flushes and rain drops, with math and modeling, can sharpen the big-picture view of how to prevent infections.

Conceptual illustration showing a mouse and virus particles

Health & Disease

Building a mouse squad against Covid-19

It began with an email from Wuhan, a Maine laboratory and mouse sperm from Iowa. Now that lab is on the verge of supplying a much-needed animal for SARS-CoV-2 research.

Conceptual illustration of a hallucinogenic state.

The Mind

Psychedelics open a new window on the mechanisms of perception

Some neuroscientists think psychedelic drugs and the hallucinations they induce could help reveal how the brain generates our perceptions of the world around us — and of ourselves

An image of the globe oriented to show Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, with moving green lines showing the movement of wind at Earth’s surface.

Physical World

Out of Antarctica, churnings of climate change

The interplay of carbon dioxide, winds and Southern Ocean waters could be reaching an environmental tipping point

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