MachineMachine /stream

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Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is…

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Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get. Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp…

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THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music,…

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There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab,…

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Writers have long been fascinated by machinery – what it gives and what it takes away. Tom McCarthy, whose experimental work has been hailed as the future of fiction, charts…

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The structure of the film is that of a heist movie, but if the film were to be slotted into a genre, that genre would have to be science fiction.…

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It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an…

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This Web-only article is a special rich-media presentation of the feature, "12 Events That Will Change Everything," which appears in the June 2010 issue of Scientific American. The presentation was…

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As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the…

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Enter Nicholas Carr, a technology writer and Silicon Valley’s favourite contrarian, whose book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton) has just come out in the…

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The question is pretty simple: in the not-too-distant future you and I will have had our entire genomes sequenced (except perhaps those of you in California) - so how much…

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Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things. In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late…

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The internet: Everything you ever need to know In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown.…

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones.…

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Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed…

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While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with…

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In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned…