I write about science & technology, travel, and children's stories. My writing appears in publications of the BBC, US Department of Energy, and numerous global magazines.
Your Facebook friends may be evil bots
How safe is your online social network? Not very, as it turns out. Your friends may not even be human, but rather bots siphoning off your data and influencing your decisions with convincing yet programmed points of view.
A team of computer researchers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia has found that hordes of social bots could not only spell disaster for large online destinations like Facebook and Twitter but also threaten the very ...
Liquid Astronomy
Sky & Telescope magazine feature on the largest liquid-mirror telescope human have built.
Almost Natural
Robot Magazine feature on human-robot interactions.
...and vision, to enable safe human-robot interactions. Neatly stacked bookshelves serve as dividers, and every direction and height sports a scattering of plants and bicycles and cables.
HOW DO YOU DO WHAT YOU DO?
Elizabeth Croft, who directs the CARIS lab, and Dr. Mike Van der Loos, the associate director, show me the lab and describe current research and development. Croft believes that robotics must incorporate both robots and people. “The whole lab is about how people and robots work toge...
Birth of a Giant Telescope
BBC Sky at Night feature on the largest scientific project in the history of Mexico.
Scientists complete array on Mexican volcano
US Department of Energy National Research Laboratories article on high-energy particle detector.
On Thursday, atop Volcán Sierra Negra, on a flat ledge near the highest point in Mexico, technicians filled the last of a collection of 300 cylindrical vats containing millions of gallons of ultrapure water.
Together, the vats serve as the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma-Ray Observatory, a vast particle detector covering an area larger than 5 acres. Scientists are using it to catch signs of some of the highest-energy astroparticles to reach the Earth.
The vats sit at an altitude of...
Digitising the Sky
BBC Sky at Night feature describing the most important telescope on the planet.