Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived from mushrooms, in a trial at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for nicotine addiction. He was 52, and he'd smoked between one and two packs a day for nearly 40 years. After his first psilocybin session, his urge to smoke was gone. During his third and final session, he had the vision that helped him quit for good. He saw lakes, roads, and mountains, and a broad-shouldered man at the helm of a ship, lassoing birds. Was it his dead father? But he remembers giggling and feeling good. Music was playing in his headphones.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created "and then locked into the given form" but have instead been given, he later wrote, a "felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places." A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks--the plasticity that fascinated Goethe. A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology.

The 2020 Democratic candidates are out of the gate and the pollsters have the call! Bernie Sanders is leading by two lengths with Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren right behind, but Cory Booker and Beto O'Rourke are coming on fast! The political horse-race season is upon us and I bet I know what you are thinking: "Stop!" Every election we complain about horse-race coverage and every election we stay glued to it all the same. The problem with this kind of coverage is not that it's unimportant.

With public and academic attention increasingly focused on the new role of machine learning in the health information economy, an unusual and no-longer-esoteric category of vulnerabilities in machine-learning systems could prove important. These vulnerabilities allow a small, carefully designed change in how inputs are presented to a system to completely alter its output, causing it to confidently arrive at manifestly wrong conclusions. These advanced techniques to subvert otherwise-reliable machine-learning systems--so-called adversarial attacks--have, to date, been of interest primarily to computer science researchers (1). However, the landscape of often-competing interests within health care, and billions of dollars at stake in systems' outputs, implies considerable problems. We outline motivations that various players in the health care system may have to use adversarial attacks and begin a discussion of what to do about them.

Film is a universal language of modern societies. Larger-than-life images, stories, ideas, and characters portrayed in films can speak across the globe. This makes science and technology--which have shaped the modern world but remain little understood and poorly integrated into mainstream culture--a rich subject for film and a goldmine for filmmakers. From the mad scientist films of the '20s and '30s to the postnuclear dystopias of the '50s; and from the ecological disaster flics of the '70s and '80s to the space adventures of recent years, films have periodically reflected society's hopes and fears about science. But we can do better when it comes to dramatizing the great, ongoing human enterprise to understand and enhance the world around and inside us.

Physical, chemical, and biological processes interact and have substantial influence on this complex geosystem, and humans interact with it in ways that are increasingly consequential to the future of both the natural world and civilization as the finiteness of Earth becomes increasingly apparent and limits on available energy, mineral resources, and fresh water increasingly affect the human condition. Earth is subject to a variety of geohazards that are poorly understood, yet increasingly impactful as our exposure grows through increasing urbanization, particularly in hazard-prone areas. We have a fundamental need to develop the best possible predictive understanding of how the geosystem works, and that understanding must be informed by both the present and the deep past. This understanding will come through the analysis of increasingly large geo-datasets and from computationally intensive simulations, often connected through inverse problems. Geoscientists are faced with the challenge of extracting as much useful information as possible and gaining new insights from these data, simulations, and the interplay between the two.

Late last year, I picked up John Carreyrou's "Bad Blood," which chronicles the long con pulled by Elizabeth Holmes, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to found Theranos, a company that she claimed would reinvent the biomedical industry. I was instantly engrossed--"Bad Blood" unfolds like a thriller, offering a breathless barrage of details exposing how Holmes deceived her investors and colleagues at nearly every turn. Holmes wanted to disrupt the blood test: she boasted that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called "The Edison" that used nanotechnology and robotics to analyze the sample. In just a few short years, thanks to Carreyrou's investigations and leaks from whistle-blowers, Holmes went from Silicon Valley's golden girl--named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes--to a disgraced fraudster whose company was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Bad Blood" does a formidable job charting the Theranos ordeal, but it doesn't get into Holmes's head.

Apple's AirPods have been staggeringly successful. Although at first some found them strange-looking or were convinced they would fall out of their ears, they quickly became the in-ear wireless headphone to aspire to. Rarely in the two years and three months since launch has demand eased off. As a result, the look has gone from curious to acceptable to – dare I say it – iconic. Now, the second-generation AirPods have been announced, I talked to Greg Joswiak, Apple's Vice President of Product Marketing and Kate Bergeron, Vice President of Hardware Engineering about the new arrivals.

WASHINGTON - The top U.S. military officer plans to meet with Google representatives next week amid growing concerns that American companies doing business in China are helping its military gain ground on the U.S. Gen. Joseph Dunford says efforts like Google's artificial intelligence venture in China allow the Chinese military to access and take advantage of U.S.-developed technology. He told an audience at the Atlantic Council on Thursday that it's not in America's national security interest for U.S. companies to help the Chinese military make technological advances. Last week acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed similar concerns and noted that Google is stepping away from some Pentagon contracts. Google has said it would not renew a defense contract involving the use of artificial intelligence to analyze drone video.

With some new and improved features. The second generation of AirPods have finally arrived. Following a hardware update cycle that saw new iPads on Monday and refreshed iMacs on Tuesday, Apple released the long-awaited update to AirPods Wednesday. Keeping the same name and largely same design as the original AirPods first released in 2016, the new earbuds start at $199 and come with a new wireless charging case, the ability to wirelessly summon Siri and Apple's new H1 chip which promises to add an extra hour of talk time. The wireless charging case, which has a little light on the front to indicate when it is charging, uses the same Qi-standard found on recent iPhones and Android devices.