Payal Dhar

In recent years, scientists have been using biomimetic tissue models—reconstructed tissues designed to replicate the attributes of living tissue—to study disease and development in the human body. The heart, however, is a different story. Even though advances in stem cell research now make it easier to grow cardiac tissue, replicating a functioning human heart in a lab remains complicated.

India is no stranger to high temperatures but they don't normally occur in March and April, when many people aren't used to dealing with extreme heat.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 10 might be considered the longest freelance assignment in history—commissioned in 1817 by the Philharmonic Society of London and finally performed in October 2021. When the maestro died in 1827, he left behind an incredible musical legacy of nine symphonies, but the tenth existed only in the form of some random notes and scribbles. That is, until two centuries later, when historians, musicologists, composers and computer scientists came together to finish it.

When legality trumps ethics it is society’s loss. A court case in India, pitting the upstart pirate websites Sci-Hub and Libgen (Library Genesis) against the global giants of peer-reviewed publishing, could help decide a critical issue: whether scientific information should be available only for a fee, or available free to citizens who are already funding it with their tax money and to the rest of the world.

[Future-Proof Freelancer Series]
In the early days of Bitcoin, freelance writer and content marketing specialist Dawn Allcot had clients who wanted to pay her in crypto. Back then, she turned them down. “In the beginning, I thought crypto was a joke,” she said. But by November 2021, Allcot wasn’t laughing anymore. The crypto market had hit an estimated value of more than $3 trillion.

[From C&EN's 2022 special issue celebrating trailblazing LGBTQ+ chemists]

Charlie Wand was always going to be a scientist. When he was 4, he would set up “experiments’’ all around the house—things like dishes of water to see which would evaporate first. His mother, a university lecturer in mathematics, “put up with me doing all sorts of things like that,” Wand says. She encouraged him, telling him anyone can do science.

[From C&EN's 2022 special issue celebrating trailblazing LGBTQ+ chemists]

For David Smith, a professor of chemistry at the University of York, the personal, political, and professional are inextricably interwoven. As an out gay man leading a team of student researchers, Smith knows that visibility is critical to diversity. If you can’t be authentic about who you are, you thrive less at work, he says, which is not conducive to belonging in the workplace or to good science.

If there is one myth that’s been dispelled over the past two years, it’s the notion that work can only happen in offices. In this brave new world of remote technologies, the possibilities offered by extended reality seem particularly promising.

A recent survey has revealed that 99 percent of computer vision engineers have had a machine learning project completely canceled due to insufficient training data. Researchers have already been looking towards synthetic data to fill this breach. In fact, Gartner foresees that by 2024, more than half of data used for AI and analytics projects will be synthetically generated.

One of the main impediments in harnessing solar energy is storage. Solar batteries work as a short-term solution, but not when it comes to long-term storage or to power, say, an entire city. A possible answer, though, might lie in oil wells. The California-based Hyperlight Energy will be piloting an installation where they plan to use existing oil wells as solar thermal wellsprings, with the stored energy being converted back to clean electricity when required.

The country says that more open access to terrestrial data will help rural farmers. More likely, will make it easier for corporations to control their land.

A team of North American researchers is developing a statistics-based technique to weed out falsehoods from social media platforms, with implications for election integrity, cybersecurity and COVID-19.

Astronauts at the International Space Station today depend on pre-packaged, freeze-dried food, plus some fresh produce thanks to regular resupply missions. This supply chain, however, will not be available on trips further out, such as the moon or Mars. So what are astronauts on long missions going to eat?

In September 2020, the Guardian published a piece titled, “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” The story, composed by GPT-3, an artificial intelligence (AI) language-prediction platform, added fuel to a fiery debate: If AI is capable of creating coherent copy, does it mean that we—journalists, novelists, and wordsmiths of all kinds—are on our way to redundancy?

When Joy Buolamwini was a student, she had to interact with a social robot that couldn’t detect her face. This was because the robot’s artificial intelligence had only been trained on white skin tones and facial structures, and Buolamwini is Black. Repeated experiences of not being “seen” by AI inspired Buolamwini — a self-described “warrior artist, computer scientist” — to take creative action in addressing this problem. And she’s not alone.