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Fifty Years of AI: From Symbols to Embodiment - and Back

There are many stories to tell about the first fifty years of AI. One story is about AI as one of the big forces of innovation in information technology. It is now forgotten that initially computers were just viewed as calculating machines. AI has moved that boundary, by projecting visions on what might be possible, and by building technologies to realise them. Another story is about the applic...

Health law at fifty years: a look back.

Fire forbids fifty-fifty forest

Recent studies have interpreted patterns of remotely sensed tree cover as evidence that forest with intermediate tree cover might be unstable in the tropics, as it will tip into either a closed forest or a more open savanna state. Here we show that across all continents the frequency of wildfires rises sharply as tree cover falls below ~40%. Using a simple empirical model, we hypothesize that t...

Fifty years to prove Malthus right.

A major question confronting sustainability research today is to what extent our planet, with a finite environmental resource base, can accommodate the faster than exponentially growing human population. Although these concerns are generally attributed to Malthus (1766–1834), early attempts to estimate the maximum sustainable population (ergo, the carrying capacity K) were reported by van Leeuw...

Fifty ways to Notch T-ALL.

The fireworks from the spectacular emergence of Notch as the protagonist in the etiology of T-ALL are not likely to end any time soon. Indeed, in this issue of Blood, Sulis and colleagues describe yet another sophisticated mechanism by which ligand-independent activation of NOTCH1 is achieved in T-ALL. NOTCH1activating mutations mark more than half of all T-ALL cases, underscoring the fundament...