When making hard decisions, do you go with your gut or try to calculate the risks? In many cases going with your gut is fine, but the answers to our February puzzle problems show how explicit probabilistic thinking can outperform intuitive estimates. They also highlight the differences between situations where an intuitive approach succeeds and ones where it fails.
Source: quantamagazine.org
Called CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion), the new crew member is about the size of a medicine ball and will work alongside human astronauts in space. The “floating brain” is equipped with IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence technology and is expected to assist astronauts during the European Space Agency’s Horizons mission in June.
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MIT researchers have come up with a new way to measure electrical activity in the brain. Their new light-sensitive protein can be embedded into neuron membranes, where it emits a fluorescent signal that indicates how much voltage a particular cell is experiencing. This could allow scientists to study how neurons behave, millisecond by millisecond, as the brain performs a particular function.
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