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Scent!

Worldwide, the COVID 19 virus affected millions of patients’ ability to smell – and the symptom persisted in some, months after the infection passed. The pandemic put a spotlight on this spectrum of olfactory impairment. Anosmia is the clinical term for an inability to perceive...

Drunk!

A good book can take you to some unexpected places. The whiskey room at a giant tech company furnished with colorful beanbags and foosball tables is one. When coders at Google hit a creative wall, they can apparently, pop into this room on campus for...

A Quantum Life

They called him “The Professor” because by the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test. But, by the time he was in his teens, the...

The New Breed

BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a robot called Marty patrols looking for spills, summoning employees loudly...

Coded Bias

IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn’t “see” her face. Until, that is, she donned a white plastic mask in frustration. Coded Bias is...

Leopards in Mumbai City

So, can people and leopards coexist in Mumbai? I ask Vidya Athreya, an ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society-India. She studies human-leopard interactions in heavily populated areas. Her research formed the plot of the Bollywood movie Ajoba, released in Mumbai this summer. She says wildlife...