The Science Basement

Global cooling or global warming? Follow THIS in the journey towards understanding the temperature cycles of the Earth.

Hurricane Florence arrived on the Carolina coast in September 14th. The once-fierce hurricane has caused at least 47 deaths and billions of agriculture losses. Meanwhile in southeastern Asia Typhoon Mangkhut, the planet’s most intense storm this year, has caused at least 102 fatalities in the Philippines, mainland China and Taiwan.  In THIS No. 7 let’s follow Thisis to discover the formation of these “tropical cyclones”, how we predict and track them and how they might develop in a warmer world.

In THIS No. 6 Thisis is going to reveal what the artistic designer- Pei Yu Lin has been doing in her Masters. As an information design major Pei Yu co-organized the annual conference – Visualizing Knowledge 2018. In THIS NO.6 let’s follow Thisis to explore what information design is and how it shapes our everyday life.

In THIS No. 5 Thisis is going to reveal what he scientific content editor has been doing in her Ph.D. After nearly 5 years of hard work she will move on to the next stage of her scientific career as a post-doctoral researcher this autumn. Let’s follow Thisis to explore how Yongmei uses numerical models to study the movements of glaciers and their fate in the future.

Machine learning technology with less human supervision had been pushed to the spotlight after Google’s AlphaGo Zero outplayed both top human players and other AI programs in the board game Go. This year IBM surprised us with another smart machine.

Monday, June 18th 2018, IBM unveiled its Project Debater – the first AI system that can debate humans on complex topics. The technique used  in developing Project Debater includes numerous cutting-edge machine learning and data mining algorithms. Let’s follow Thisis to have a look at some of the basics about machine learning and Project Debater.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology has been used in genome editing for more than a decade. New applications are discovered all the time. In THIS NO.3 This… Read More »THIS NO.3 – CRISPR

One of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century, Prof. Stephen Hawking, has passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge home in March 14th, 2018. He is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author, and director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge as well as a great science communicator. He is the author of the international bestseller popular science book The Brief History of Time and has appeared in many movies and TV series, including The Big Bang Theory. In THIS NO.2 we invite you to review three of Prof. Hawking’s great contributions to science: The property of the black hole, The quantum origin of the universe and Time traveling with Thisis. Enjoy!