Web-crawling computers will soon be calling the shots in science
Within a decade, computers will be able to plough through scientific data looking for patterns and connections – then tell scientists what they should do next Move over scientists – computers will be asking the questions from now on. They will trawl the millions of scientific papers on the web and suggest new hypotheses for humans to test, according to an article in tomorrow's issue of Science . Scientists are drowning in data. Whether it's high-speed genome sequencing, simulating the early universe or testing complex mathematical proofs, there are often more numbers to crunch than there are people to crunch them. But help is on the way in the form of "automatic hypothesis generation", argue James Evans and Andrey Rzhetsky of the University of Chicago.
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Web-crawling computers will soon be calling the shots in science
Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Science writer Simon Singh and Tracey Brown from Sense About Science tell us about Libel Reform Week and the campaign to change Britain's libel laws and protect scientific freedom of expression. Simon is currently locked in a legal battle over a comment piece published in the Guardian . Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8 , is performing an audiovisual study as part of Cambridge Science Festival . We went along to the Institute of Astronomy to hear the telescopes he used as his musical instruments. Ian Sample speaks to Kees van Deemter about the importance of being vague. Kees is trying to program computers to be a little more ... erm ... fuzzy
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Science Weekly podcast: Libel Reform Week and the importance of being vague
Science Weekly: Seth Shostak of Seti discusses the search for alien intelligence
Seth Shostak , senior astronomer at Seti (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) , discusses the latest developments in the project. The topics covered in this extended interview include what form signals from an alien civilisation would take, what ET might look like, the day Seti astronomers thought they had made contact, and what a confirmed signal would mean for planet Earth. Post your comments below. Join our Facebook group . Listen back through our archive . Follow the podcast on our Science Weekly Twitter feed and receive updates on all breaking science news stories from Guardian Science . Subscribe free via iTunes to ensure every episode gets delivered. (Here is the non-iTunes URL feed ). Alok Jha Andy Duckworth Seth Shostak
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Science Weekly: Seth Shostak of Seti discusses the search for alien intelligence
Galileo’s telescope reminds us to celebrate toolmakers
Galileo and his telescope are rightly celebrated. But will the inventors of integrated circuits, DNA sequencing and X-ray crystallography be remembered by future generations? If it weren't for Google, which has transformed its logo into a telescopic doodle to mark the occasion, the 400th anniversary of the first public demonstration of Galileo's revolutionary telescope might have gone unnoticed. How strange that the public – and the media – can be captivated by revolutionary ideas in science, such as evolution and relativity, but fail to be impressed by the invention of new scientific instruments, which have arguably been far more important for human progress.
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Galileo's telescope reminds us to celebrate toolmakers
Video: The inner workings of the Antikythera mechanism
An animation shows how the world's oldest computer helped the Ancient Greeks simulate planetary motions and predict lunar eclipses Click on the first symbol on the bottom right of the player to enlarge the video
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Video: The inner workings of the Antikythera mechanism
Antikythera computer may be even older than thought
New detective work suggests that the ancient mechanism for simulating planetary motions and predicting lunar eclipses was built in the 2nd century BC I thought my capacity for sheer jaw-dropping amazement at the Antikythera mechanism had been well and truly exhausted – until last night. The puzzling instrument is a clockwork computer from ancient Greece that used a fiendishly complex assembly of meshed cogs to simulate the movement of the planets, predict lunar eclipses and indicate the dates of major sporting events. The clockwork technology in the device was already known to be centuries ahead of its time, but new evidence suggests that the enigmatic machine is even older than scientists had realised. "It is the most important scientific artefact known from the ancient world," said Jo Marchant, who has written a compelling book on the find called Decoding the Heavens . "There's nothing else like it for a thousand years afterwards." First, a quick recap. The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by sponge divers in 1901 who chanced upon the wreck of a Roman vessel off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The ship was filled with bronze statues, pottery and glassware – booty that had been plundered from across the ancient Greek world. At first no one noticed the corroded lump of cogs among the treasures, but the mechanism has since attracted the, at times, obsessive interest of a small group of scientists . What we now know about the mechanism and its purpose is a fascinating tale of scientific rivalry, low-down skulduggery and eventual glory. There is much still to learn about where the machine came from, who made it and what it was for, but the best guess seems to be that it was more must-have executive toy than useful gadget. It modelled the state-of-the-art astronomy of the time: a universe with the Earth at the centre with planets following circular orbits that included apparent wobbles called epicycles . The mechanism was probably not used for navigation but perhaps served more as a beautiful representation of an ordered, clockwork universe. "Something to elevate the spirit and get closer to God or the true meaning of things," as Marchant put it during her talk at the Royal Institution in London last night . So what about the new stuff? Research from Prof Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York , which has yet to be published, suggests that rather than dating from the 1st century BC the Antikythera mechanism may in fact have been constructed in the preceding century
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Antikythera computer may be even older than thought
Antikythera computer may be even older than thought
New detective work suggests that the ancient mechanism for simulating planetary motions and predicting lunar eclipses was built in the 2nd century BC I thought my capacity for sheer jaw-dropping amazement at the Antikythera mechanism had been well and truly exhausted – until last night. The puzzling instrument is a clockwork computer from ancient Greece that used a fiendishly complex assembly of meshed cogs to simulate the movement of the planets, predict lunar eclipses and indicate the dates of major sporting events. The clockwork technology in the device was already known to be centuries ahead of its time, but new evidence suggests that the enigmatic machine is even older than scientists had realised. "It is the most important scientific artefact known from the ancient world," said Jo Marchant, who has written a compelling book on the find called Decoding the Heavens . "There's nothing else like it for a thousand years afterwards." First, a quick recap. The Antikythera mechanism was discovered by sponge divers in 1901 who chanced upon the wreck of a Roman vessel off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The ship was filled with bronze statues, pottery and glassware – booty that had been plundered from across the ancient Greek world. At first no one noticed the corroded lump of cogs among the treasures, but the mechanism has since attracted the, at times, obsessive interest of a small group of scientists . What we now know about the mechanism and its purpose is a fascinating tale of scientific rivalry, low-down skulduggery and eventual glory. There is much still to learn about where the machine came from, who made it and what it was for, but the best guess seems to be that it was more must-have executive toy than useful gadget. It modelled the state-of-the-art astronomy of the time: a universe with the Earth at the centre with planets following circular orbits that included apparent wobbles called epicycles . The mechanism was probably not used for navigation but perhaps served more as a beautiful representation of an ordered, clockwork universe. "Something to elevate the spirit and get closer to God or the true meaning of things," as Marchant put it during her talk at the Royal Institution in London last night .
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Antikythera computer may be even older than thought
What the future looks like
As the planet faces the most dangerous century in its 4.5bn-year history, astronomer royal Martin Rees looks into his crystal ball It would be foolhardy to venture technological predictions for 2050. Even more so to predict social and geopolitical changes. The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable
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What the future looks like
‘Eureka machine’ works out laws of nature
The machine, which took only two hours to come up with Newton's laws of motion, marks a turning point in the way science is done Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths. The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.
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'Eureka machine' works out laws of nature