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Featured articles from Futurism highlighting today's trending content.
Walter Pitts: The Young Man Who Imagined a Thinking Network
Introduction Today, artificial intelligence can recognise speech, identify objects in photographs and produce convincing passages of writing. The machinery behind these achievements is enormously complex, but one of its early ideas was surprisingly simple. What if a brain could be studied as a network of small units, each responding to signals from other units?
By Alan Spencer10 days ago in Futurism
Yunqing Tang and the Mystery of Numbers That Would Not Settle Down
Introduction Most of us stop thinking about fractions once we leave school. We remember that the number beneath the line is called the denominator, and we hope never to meet a particularly complicated one again. For mathematician Yunqing Tang, denominators became part of a much deeper question: could the fractions appearing in a certain kind of mathematical pattern remain under control, or would they inevitably grow more complicated?
By Alan Spencer10 days ago in Futurism
Does a Photon Know Which Slit We Are Watching?
Introduction Richard Feynman offered a remarkable way to think about how light travels. To work out where a photon might be detected, his method considers every possible route between its source and its destination. The routes contribute to a calculation, and their contributions can reinforce or cancel one another.
By Alan Spencer12 days ago in Futurism
Challenger: The Small Seal That Exposed a Much Bigger Failure
Introduction On 28th January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger rose from its launch pad in Florida. Seventy-three seconds later, the vehicle broke apart, and all seven people aboard lost their lives. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher whose planned lessons from space had brought particular attention to the flight.
By Alan Spencer13 days ago in Futurism
The Conjecture That Fooled Mathematicians for a Century
Introduction Mathematics contains many conjectures that appear correct because they work for every number anyone has tested. However, an infinite sequence can behave perfectly for an extraordinarily long time before producing an unexpected result.
By Alan Spencer13 days ago in Futurism
The old man with the map was having a great day
The silence came at 2:14 on a Tuesday. I was standing in line at the coffee shop on 4th Street, waiting for a cold brew, watching the guy in front of me tap his phone screen over and over. Behind the counter, the barista was holding an iPad, tapping the glass with a sharp clack-clack-clack.
By Annam M Gordon17 days ago in Futurism
My $50,000 Dream
I walk the streets of my hometown I haven’t visited in several years, reminiscing about my childhood and youth spent here. I stop near my former home, a five-story apartment block, and look at the windows of my apartment. I had a pretty good life there with my mom and sister, and now I’m trying to imagine who lives there and if they enjoy the apartment as much as we did.
By Lana V Lynx29 days ago in Futurism
The Truth About Data Centers
Every time we send a message, stream a movie, ask an AI assistant a question, upload a photo, or buy something online, there is a good chance a data center is involved. Yet these enormous facilities are mostly invisible to us. They sit behind the scenes, quietly processing, storing, and moving the information that powers modern life.
By AnthonyBTVabout a month ago in Futurism
