Imagine a team of autonomous drones equipped with advanced sensing equipment, searching for smoke as they fly high above the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once they spot a wildfire, these leader robots relay directions to a swarm of firefighting drones that speed to the site of the blaze. But what would happen if one or more […]

Equiangular lines are lines in space that pass through a single point, and whose pairwise angles are all equal. Picture in 2D the three diagonals of a regular hexagon, and in 3D, the six lines connecting opposite vertices of a regular icosahedron (see the figure above). Mathematicians are not limited to three dimensions, however.  “In […]

When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These “superhuman” AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with them. Can the same technology get along with people? In a new study, MIT Lincoln Laboratory […]

Over a 36-hour period in August, Hurricane Henri delivered record rainfall in New York City, where an aging storm-sewer system was not built to handle the deluge, resulting in street flooding. Meanwhile, an ongoing drought in California continued to overburden aquifers and extend statewide water restrictions. As climate change amplifies the frequency and intensity of […]

If immigrants to the United States formed their own country, their pre-COVID-19 life expectancies would exceed or match those of the world’s leaders in longevity — Swiss men and Japanese women. A new study by USC and Princeton researchers estimates that immigration adds 1.4 to 1.5 years to U.S. life expectancy at birth. In 2017, […]

For some of us, an $80 speeding ticket is an unpleasant inconvenience. Yet for others, particularly those living in poverty, that same ticket can turn into a years-long nightmare of crushing debt and even the loss of their driver’s license altogether. Traffic tickets, infractions, and misdemeanors: these are the lowest level criminal cases. Yet the […]

As the Supreme Court’s fall term begins, a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania finds that more than a third of Americans say they might be willing to abolish the Supreme Court or have Congress limit its jurisdiction if the court were to make decisions they or Congress disagreed with. […]

Mature oak trees will increase their rate of photosynthesis by up to a third in response to the raised CO2 levels expected to be the world average by about 2050, new research shows. The results, published in Tree Physiology, are the first to emerge from a giant outdoor experiment, led by the University of Birmingham in which […]

The first look at a threatened rattlesnake species’ recent genetic history suggests that inbreeding necessitated by limited habitat may not be as detrimental as theory would predict it to be. In fact, scientists speculate that Eastern massasauga rattlesnakes may have pre-adapted to living in small, isolated populations – where the most dangerous genetic mutations that […]

A biochemist and molecular biologist, Julius’s work has focused on how our bodies sense heat, cold and chemical irritants, leading to new insights about the fundamental nature of pain and new targets for pain therapy. To understand how signals responsible for temperature and pain sensation are transmitted by neural circuits to the brain, Julius and his UCSF […]