Frances Haugen is testifying before the Senate Commerce subcommittee today. Brooke Erin Duffy, professor of communication, studies the intersection of media, culture and technology. Duffy says that today’s hearings signal a growing awareness that algorithms – and the platforms that govern them – are anything but neutral.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an extended outage yesterday. Nate Foster is a professor of computer science who works to develop languages and tools that make it easy for programmers to build secure and reliable systems.
On the island of Kaua‘i, six native bird species recently experienced collapses coinciding with a sharp increase in mosquitoes and malaria. Dr. Katherine McClure is working to save Hawai’i’s native bird populations from this disease, specifically the Hawaiian honeycreepers.
Researchers created a system that uses combustion to inflate silicone membrane “dots,” which could someday serve as a dynamic braille display for electronics.
Carlos Jay Espinosa was awarded the Dean’s Scholarship from Cornell University Precollege Studies to take a biology course with Cornell faculty and earn college credit.
“As a first-generation student, and one who didn’t come from a well-off household, I always dreamt of attending international opportunities like this, since programs of this kind are scarce in my country,” Espinosa said. “I thought of that dream as something impossible.”
Considered an ultra-hot Jupiter – a place where iron gets vaporized, condenses on the night side and then falls from the sky like rain – the fiery, inferno-like WASP-76b exoplanet may be even more sizzling than scientists had realized.
