Einstein

According to developmental psychologists, as infants, we learn to govern our bodies through a process of random experimentation and feedback. We contort our faces into weird shapes, watch our parents react, and then switch up our movements accordingly.

Now, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego are applying this same strategy to robotics research. Through the use of machine learning, they’ve made it possible for their robot–an Einstein lookalike–to teach itself to make realistic facial expressions.

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What's cooler than a black hole? Two of them, rotating around and then crashing into one another. And what could be more entertaining than that cataclysmic cosmic dance? Why, one more, of course.

A team of scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has simulated the merger of three black holes.

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Scientists are exploiting one of Einstein's predictions to find Earth-like planets around other starsplanets that might even support Earth-like life. Let the evacuation plans begin!

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Two of the most Popular Science-themed TV shows, Cosmos and NOVA, air this fall, bringing big ideas-life, the universe and everything-back to the small screen.
Cosmos
September 27, the Science Channel
"Billions and billions of stars."
So goes the old Johnny Carson impression of Cosmos creator and narrator Carl Sagan. And since the show´s debut on PBS 25 years ago, a billion TV viewers have experienced Cosmos´s jaunt through the history of our universe.

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Every branch of science has at some point been confronted by a daunting question that stumps progress for years, even decades. How did the continents form? What causes fever? Is there intelligent life beyond Earth?

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The papers Einstein wrote in 1905 covered a broad swath—special relativity, electrodynamics, Brownian motion, light quanta. Churned out in less than a year, these ideas had lasting impact: scientists today still devote their lives to evaluating Einstein´s work on gravity, space and time. Einstein isn´t the only scientist, however, to pull off such compacted productivity. Newton, Galileo and others had their own superproductive 12-month stretches—but as far as we can tell, no post-Einstein scientist has managed one. Why? Read on.
Galileo Galilei: 1609-1610

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1. Einstein showed that light travels in bundles called quanta, which are at
the heart of the light-emitting diode. When electrons in a semiconductor-based diode move from one side to another, they shift to a less excited state, releasing energy in the form of photons. Channel these, and you get a bright, long-lasting light source.

2. In 1917 Einstein demonstrated that when a photon comes into contact with an atom, it can trigger a chain-reaction release of additional photons from

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