The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality. The term artificial intelligence is also used to describe a property of machines or programs: the intelligence that the system demonstrates. AI research uses tools and insights from many fields, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, operations research, economics, control theory, probability, optimization and logic. AI research also overlaps with tasks such as robotics, control systems, sched...

University of Chicago scientists are part of an international research team that has discovered superconductivity -- the ability to conduct electricity perfectly -- at the highest temperatures ever recorded. Using advanced technology at UChicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory, the team studied a class of materials in which they observed superconductivity at temperatures of about minus-23 degrees Celsius (minus-9 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a jump of about 50 degrees compared to the previous confirmed record. Though the superconductivity happened under extremely high pressure, the result still represents a big step toward creating superconductivity at room temperature -- the ultimate goal for scientists to be able to use this phenomenon for advanced technologies. The results were published May 23 in the journal  Nature ; Vitali Prakapenka, a research professor at the University of Chicago, and Eran Greenberg, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago, are co-au...

Most people don’t give a second thought to using their  cell phone everywhere , from their morning commute to the  dinner table  to the doctor’s office. But research shows that cell phones are far dirtier than most people think, and the more germs they collect, the more germs you touch. In fact, your own hand is the biggest culprit when it comes to putting filth on your phone. Americans check their phones about 47 times per day, according to a  survey by Deloitte , which affords plenty of opportunities for microorganisms to move from your fingers to your phone. “Because people are always carrying their cell phones even in situations where they would normally wash their hands before doing anything, cell phones do tend to get pretty gross,” says Emily Martin, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Research has varied on just how many germs are crawling on the average cell phone, but a  recent study  f...

N euroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds. It works through a combination of electroencephalograms (EEGs), for recording the electrical impulses that indicate brain activity, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where neurons are stimulated using magnetic fields. The researchers behind the new system have dubbed it BrainNet, and say it could eventually be used to connect many different minds together, even across the web. But apart from opening up strange new methods of communication, BrainNet could actually teach us more about how the human brain functions on a deeper level. "We present BrainNet which, to our knowledge, is the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative probl...

In a study published November 21 in  PLOS ONE , three clinical trial participants with tetraplegia, each of whom was using the investigational BrainGate BCI that records neural activity directly from a small sensor placed in the motor cortex, were able to navigate through commonly used tablet programs, including email, chat, music-streaming and video-sharing apps. The participants messaged with family, friends, members of the research team and their fellow participants. They surfed the web, checked the weather and shopped online. One participant, a musician, played a snippet of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on a digital piano interface. "For years, the BrainGate collaboration has been working to develop the neuroscience and neuroengineering know-how to enable people who have lost motor abilities to control external devices just by thinking about the movement of their own arm or hand," said Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a senior author of the paper and a Stanford University...

Spanish scientists managed to create a wheelchair that a person can control by simply thinking about the desired destination. People who have disabilities that prevent them from using the joystick can control this latest invention in technologyby simply thinking where they want to go. The wheelchair features a laser scanner that helps create a 3D image of the surroundings. The image that shows the area around is displayed on a screen installed in front of the user, who needs to concentrate on the part of the screen where they wish to go and the wheelchair acts in response. In order to identify the brain activity of the user, researchers use askullcapthat helps work out the destination they want to go to. The engineer, who came up with the idea of developing a wheelchair that can be controlled by the mind, is Dr Javier Minguez from theUniversity of Zaragozain Spain. He mentioned that it took only 45 minutes for the study participants to learn to control the device. ...