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A Quantum Life

They called him “The Professor.” 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 Power of Language

At the pediatrician’s clinic, a nurse told Viorica Marian, who is a native speaker of Romanian, to use only English with her American-born daughter. Speaking another language would “confuse” the child and hurt her long-term, the woman had said. This was a good decade ago....

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 at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini faced a peculiar problem: commercial face‑recognition software detected her light‑skinned classmates but couldn’t “see” her. Only when she donned a white plastic mask in frustration did the system recognize her face. 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...

Take my taxi to the moon

Susmita Mohanty, the founder of India’s first private space company, Earth2Orbit, wants India to claim bigger piece of the space-launch pie. She is CEO of Earth2Orbit, which recently launched its first client satellite. An aerospace entrepreneur and spaceship designer, she has worked at NASA and...