Q&A

Manu Prakash works on the world’s most urgent problems and seemingly frivolous questions at the same time. They add up to a philosophy he calls “recreational biology.”

The physicist Sidney Nagel delights in solving mysteries of the universe that are hiding in plain sight.

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results.

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Inside the proton, quarks and gluons shift and morph their properties in ways that physicists are still struggling to understand. Rithya Kunnawalkam Elayavalli brings to the problem a perspective unlike many of their peers.

While some fret about technology’s social impacts, Raj Reddy still believes in the power of artificial intelligence to improve lives.

The mathematician David Bessis claims that everyone is capable of, and can benefit greatly from, mathematical thinking.