Science, Spoken

It’s easy to watch a baby finally learn to walk after hours upon hours of trial and error and think, OK, good work, but do you want a medal or something? Well, maybe only a childless person like me would think that, so credit where credit is due: It’s supremely difficult for animals like ourselves to manage something as everyday as putting one foot in front of the other. It’s even more difficult to get robots to do the same.

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Instead of figuring out how many Pacific hake fishermen can catch sustainably, as his job demands, scientist Ian Taylor is at home with his four-month old daughter, biding his time through the partial government shutdown. Taylor’s task is to assess the size and age of hake and other commercially harvested fish species in the productive grounds from Baja California to the Gulf of Alaska. These stock assessments are then used by federal managers to approve permits to West Coast fishing boats.

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You, like me, may sometimes (or all the time!) feel that the world is spiraling out of control—trade wars and political strife. And, oh right, climate change, arguably the greatest threat our species has ever faced. Or maybe artificial intelligence and robots will put us all out of work before the world actually ends. “A dirty little secret about autonomous vehicles,” says Edelman, “is there won't be enough people to service them because these are trade skill programs.

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Researchers at the University of Maryland recently announced a potential breakthrough in the fight against "neuropathic" pain—that is, pain that results from malfunctioning or damaged nerves.Neuropathic pain afflicts 100 million Americans and costs the nation over half a trillion dollars every year. WIRED OPINION ABOUT KurtAmsler, Ph.D., is a professor of biomedical sciences at the New York Institute of Technology's College of Osteopathic Medicine.

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The red imported fire ant is one of the world’s most invasive species. Its sting delivers a burning poison that kills living tissue. Together groups of ants devour deer fawns, baby birds, reptiles, and almost any other source of protein they can get their mandibles on. They form acres of crisscrossing tunnels with thousands of cooperative workers. And their territory has steadily been spreading.

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For the past 13 years, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has been bolting away from the sun at speeds in excess of 31,000 miles per hour, charting a course for the fringes of our solar system. In 2015, it made a close pass of Pluto, returning the highest resolution images of the erstwhile planet the world has ever seen.

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Depending on your perspective, 2018 either brought us closer to salvation by way of robots, or closer to doom by way of robots: Where some see the end of meaningless work, others see the end of humanity, also meaningless. (We’re in the former camp, by the way.

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At the beginning of 2018, Elon Musk predicted that SpaceX would pull off 30 launches. The goal seemed far-fetched; among other reasons, some of those flights were planned for the Falcon Heavy, which at the time had yet to fly. Indeed, the company didn’t hit that figure. But the 21 launches it did pull off in 2018 still amount to a staggering achievement for the 16-year-old company.

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Way, way out at the cold, dark edges of the solar system—past the rocky inner planets, beyond the gas giants, a billion miles more remote than Pluto—drifts a tiny frozen world so mysterious, scientists still aren't entirely sure if it's one world or two. Astronomers call it Ultima Thule, an old cartography term meaning "beyond the known world.

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In a chilly warehouse just outside of Boston, the brute toils away. It’s 600 pounds of orange and black metal and whirring motors, a massive robotic arm that picks up car parts and places them on a table. Like its ancestors have done for decades, this industrial robot does the heavy lifting that no human worker could manage, and it does so with extreme speed and precision.

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