Robots that can smile in synchrony with people, and what ends up in the letters section
First on this week’s show, a robot that can predict your smile. Hod Lipson, a roboticist and professor at Columbia University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how mirrors can help robots learn to make facial expressions and eventually improve robot nonverbal communication.
Next, we have Margaret Handley, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics and medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She shares a letter she wrote to Science about how her past, her family, and a rare instrument relate to her current career focus on public health and homelessness. Letters Editor Jennifer Sills also weighs in with the kinds of letters people write into the magazine.
Other Past as Prologue letters:
A new frontier for mi familia by Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony
A uranium miner’s daughter by Tanya J. Gallegos
Embracing questions after my father’s murder by Jacquelyn J. Cragg
A family’s pride in educated daughters by Qura Tul Ain
One person’s trash: Another’s treasured education by Xiangkun Elvis Cao
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jennifer Sills
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zy9w2u0
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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Basic geoengineering, and autonomous construction robots
Exascale supercomputers amp up science, finally growing dolomite in the lab, and origins of patriarchy
AI improves weather prediction, and cutting emissions from landfills
The state of Russian science, and improving implantable bioelectronics
Turning anemones into coral, and the future of psychiatric drugs
Making corn shorter, and a book on finding India’s women in science
The consequences of the world's largest dam removal, and building a quantum computer using sound waves
Mysterious objects beyond Neptune, and how wildfire pollution behaves indoors
How long can ancient DNA survive, and how much stuff do we need to escape poverty?
Visiting utopias, fighting heat death, and making mysterious ‘dark earth’
Reducing cartel violence in Mexico, and what to read and see this fall
Why cats love tuna, and powering robots with tiny explosions
Extreme ocean currents from a volcano, and why it’s taking so long to wire green energy into the U.S. grid
Reducing calculus trauma, and teaching AI to smell
The source of solar wind, hackers and salt halt research, and a book on how institutions decide gender
What killed off North American megafauna, and making languages less complicated
Why some trees find one another repulsive, and why we don’t know how much our hands weigh
Tracing the genetic history of African Americans using ancient DNA, and ethical questions at a famously weird medical museum
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