The Conversation

Forensics is changing in the digital age, and the legal system is still catching up when it comes to properly employing digital evidence.Broadly speaking, digital evidence is information found on a wide range of electronic devices that is useful in court because of its probative value. It’s like the digital equivalent of a fingerprint or a muddy boot.However, digital evidence tendered in court often fails to meet the same high standards expected of more established forensics practices, particularly in ensuring the evidence is what it purports to be.

Last week, prominent tech site Gigaom ceased operations with the terse note “Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time”. Started in 2006 by Om Malik, the site had raised about $40 million over that period to create a technology news site, an IT analysis business and another business running IT events. None of them could make enough money to cover the $400,000 a month needed to keep the business going.

I’ve probably lost count of the number of ‘WATER ON MARS’ and related headlines I’ve read over the years. It’s an interesting case study of how a scientific theory gains support as more evidence is collected, until it becomes something ‘that is known’.But last week we heard evidence that Mars has lost some water – an entire oceans worth in fact.

Pi Day – on March 14th – will be particularly memorable this year: the date can be written 3/14 by those who opt for the month then day format, which is Pi to two decimal places, 3.14. If you include the year this year then that gives 3/14/15, which is Pi to four decimal places, 3.1415.This happens only once a century, and the Museum of Mathematics in New York City, among others, is taking Pi Day 2015 one step further, by celebrating at 9:26 pm, adding three more digits to Pi, 3.1415926.

Speech problems in early childhood are common.

Why do people cooperate? This isn’t a question anyone seriously asks. The answer is obvious: we cooperate because doing so is usually synergistic. It creates more benefit for less cost and makes our lives easier and better.Maybe it’s better to ask why don’t people always cooperate. But the answer here seems obvious too. We don’t do so if we think we can get away with it. If we can save ourselves the effort of working with someone else but still gain the benefits of others’ cooperation. And, perhaps, we withhold cooperation as punishment for others’ past refusal to collaborate with us.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of cisplatin’s accidental discovery as an anti-cancer drug. Despite its horrible side effects, and the ability of cancers to become resistant to it, the drug remains as relevant now as it was when it first reached the market.And the good news is that the drug can, and is, being made better. New formulations are being designed to make it more effective and less toxic.

How should scientists interpret their data? Emerging from their labs after days, weeks, months, even years spent measuring and recording, how do researchers draw conclusions about the results of their experiments?

Since they were pioneered by Robert Hooke 350 years ago, microscopes have been extending our vision. In the 21st century, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal microscopy, which uses a pinhole to remove out-of-focus light and allows 3D structures to be built from multiple images, have pushed the boundaries of resolution.

When there’s a report in the news about the latest science on climate change, the source is very often the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.This body plays a very important role in global climate change policy around the world. Its reports, five of which have been published since 1990, enjoy a degree of credibility that renders them influential for public opinion. And more important, the reports are accepted as the definitive source by international negotiators working under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

By Temple Grandin, Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State UniversityWhen I was an awkward teenager who did not fit in with the other kids, the logical Mr. Spock was a character I could really identify with. At this time, I did not know why I related to Spock because when I was a teenager, I did not know that my thinking process was different from that of most other people. I assumed that my logical picture-based thinking was the way that everybody thought.

Amid all the dire warnings that machines run by artificial intelligence (AI) will one day take over from humans we need to think more about how we program them in the first place.The technology may be too far off to seriously entertain these worries – for now – but much of the distrust surrounding AI arises from misunderstandings in what it means to say a machine is “thinking”.One of the current aims of AI research is to design machines, algorithms, input/output processes or mathematical functions that can mimic human thinking as much as possible.