The Lawrence Lab? The Berkeley Lab? Lawrence Livermore Berkeley Lab? Luther Burbank Laboratory? Berkeley Countrywide Laboratory? Nope. Not quite. We’re Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Berkeley Lab for short. But we do understand the confusion — it’s hard to remember names, especially when so many sound alike! So we jammed 90 years of history into less than 3 minutes to help you get it right.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, commonly referred to as Berkeley Lab, is a United States national laboratory that conducts scientific research on behalf of the Department of Energy. Located in the hills of Berkeley, California, the lab overlooks the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.
How Cade got access to the stories behind some of the biggest advancements in AI, and the dynamic playing out between leaders at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
Cade Metz is a New York Times reporter covering artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality, and other emerging areas. Previously, he was a senior staff writer with Wired magazine and the U.S. editor of The Register, one of Britain’s leading science and technology news sites. His first book, “Genius Makers”, tells the stories of the pioneers behind AI.
Topics discussed: 0:00 Sneak peek, intro 3:25 Who is “Genius Makers” for and about? 7:18 *Spoiler alert!* Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 11:01 How the story continues after the book ends 17:31 Overinflated claims in AGI 23:12 Deep Mind, OpenAI, and AGI 29:02 Outsider perspectives 34:35 Early adopters of ML 38:34 Who gets credit for what? 42:45 Dealing with bias 46:38 Aligning technology with nee
Sarah also talks with Wesley Reinhart, of Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute for Computational and Data Science, about why we should be building smart cities from smart materials, such as metamaterials that help solar panels chase the Sun, and living materials like self-healing concrete that keep buildings in good shape.
A computer that can participate in live debates against human opponents.
In this episode:
00:43 AI Debater
After thousands of years of human practise, it’s still not clear what makes a good argument. Despite this, researchers have been developing computer programs that can find and process arguments. And this week, researchers at IBM are publishing details of an artificial intelligence that is capable of debating with humans.
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, the next generation of gravitational wave detectors, and why 2020 was a record-breaking year for near-Earth asteroids.
Science Staff Writer Adrian Cho joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about plans for the next generation of gravitational wave detectors—including one with 40-kilometer arms.
The proposed detectors will be up to 10 times more sensitive than current models and could capture all black hole mergers in the observable universe.
Sarah also talks with Pavani Cherukupally, a researcher at Imperial College London and the University of Toronto, about her Science Advances paper on cleaning up oil spills with special cold-adapted sponges that work well when crude oil gets clumpy.
Science’s Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a 2000-year-old pet cemetery found in the Egyptian city of Berenice and what it can tell us about the history of human-animal relationships.
Also this week, Dipon Ghosh, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talks about how scientists missed that the tiny eyeless roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, which has been intensively studied from top to bottom for decades, somehow has the ability to detect colors.
The pandemic’s unequal toll on the research community, and a newly discovered mitochondria-like symbiosis.
In this episode:
00:48 The pandemic’s unequal toll on researchers
Although 2020 saw a huge uptick in the numbers of research papers submitted, these increases were not evenly distributed among male and female scientists. We look at how this could widen existing disparities in science, and damage future career prospects.
Millions of years ago, a microscopic protist swallowed a bacterium and gained the ability to breathe nitrate. This relationship partially replaced the cell’s mitochondria and allowed it to produce abundant energy without oxygen. This week, researchers describe how this newly discovered symbiosis works.
We discuss some highlights from the Nature Briefing. This time, the weakening of the Gulf Stream, and a new satellite to monitor deforestation in the Amazon.
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