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Computer Scientists Get Wet

In the summer of 2008, Wired magazine ran a cover story titled “The End of Science.” Former Editor‑in‑Chief Chris Anderson argued that the data deluge had rewritten the scientific method: with enough information and the computational power to analyze it, correlation could outrun causation, theories...

When All Science becomes Data Science

Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at UW, believes that data-driven discovery will become the norm, as he told Science Careers in a recent interview. This new environment, he says, will create and reward researchers (like Loebman) who are...

Pollinating His Own Science

Noah Wilson-Rich began studying the health of honeybees as a graduate student at Tufts University in 2005. Growing up in Connecticut, he was not a nature-loving kid -- he recalls being scared of "creepy-crawlies." An undergraduate course in sociobiology, and a subsequent lab project, changed...

Freedom Isn’t Free

In the acknowledgements section of NW, her 2012 bestseller, Zadie Smith thanked a computer application called "Freedom" for "creating the time" she needed to finish the book. It may be the highest-profile printed acknowledgment of a computer program in a work of fiction—The...

A Scientist Becomes a Social Entrepreneur — In Science

Nina Dudnik, a molecular biologist from Harvard, is the founder and CEO of the Boston-based Seeding Labs. The non-profit organization tries to bridge the resource gap between research labs in the U.S. and the developing world, starting with lab equipment. Dudnik is on the Massachusetts High...

Starry-Eyed Astronomer no more

"Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars." This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt,...