César de la Fuente is on a mission to combat antimicrobial resistance by looking at nature's own solutions. César de la Fuente is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he leads the Machine Biology Group. When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world's biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list. Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away.

Researchers now think at least two more groups joined the macabre custom. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Archaeologists have spent years puzzling over evidence of severed head rituals among Iron Age communities in the northeast Iberian Peninsula. Multiple groups of the Indigetes and Laietani peoples from present-day Spain and Portugal practiced these violent public displays at least as far back as the first millennium BCE. And sometimes, they did so with elaborate preparation techniques such as driving iron nails through the skulls .

Tucker Carlson's friendly interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes has led to a major reckoning in the Republican party. Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist known for his deeply antisemitic, racist, and misogynist worldview, just might be tearing the Republican party apart. The schism was triggered last Tuesday when former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released an in-depth interview with Fuentes, the leader of the so-called America First movement who has denied the Holocaust, praised Hitler, and shared deeply misogynistic views. During the interview, Fuentes waxed antisemitic about the threat apparently posed by "organized Jewry" in America, while Carlson slammed figures like senator Ted Cruz and former president George W. Bush as being "Christian Zionists" who have been "seized by this brain virus." Carlson was criticized by, among others, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee for giving Fuentes a platform, and the argument kicked into overdrive after Kevin Roberts, president of ...

A viral video shows a high school principal engaging in a seemingly risqué dance with the school's mascot during the back-to-school rally. A high school principal in central California has been placed on administrative leave as an investigation is underway into a video showing him dancing in what some have called an inappropriate manner with the school's mascot during a back-to-school rally. The Merced Union High School District shared a statement with Fox News Digital that said Robert Nunes, principal of Buhach Colony High School in Atwater, was on administrative leave effective Aug. 19. The district said this action is in response to an incident at the back-to-school rally on Aug. 16. "The District is conducting a comprehensive review of the situation. While the investigation is ongoing, Mr. Nunes will not be participating in any school-related responsibilities or activities," Viviana Fuentes, director of communications for the school district, said in the statement.

Three robots are growing vegetables on the roof of the University of Melbourne's student pavilion. As I watch, a mechanical arm, hovering above the crop like a fairground claw machine, sprays a carefully measured dose of water over the plants. The greens themselves look fairly terrestrial – cos lettuce, basil, coriander and moth-eaten kale – but they are actually prototypes for a groundbreaking research mission to grow fresh food in outer space. The project leader, Prof Sigfredo Fuentes, leans over and picks a tiny caterpillar from a kale leaf. "We had a real plague of cabbage moths last week, but it's OK; the kale's just here to distract them from the other vegetables." Prof Fuentes is part of the wonderfully named Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space – a seven-year collaboration between five Australian universities – which has partnered with 38 organisations, including Nasa, to crack the code of fresh, nutritious "space food".

Drones, hidden cameras, thermal vision scopes--these are just a few examples of the high-tech equipment recommended by the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, according to a manual released by the organization this week. The document, which was reviewed by WIRED, is a rare glimpse into how the organization is using tech to target factory farms in often brazen operations that have rescued pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens. Extremist groups are experimenting with generative AI to flood social media with propaganda and misinformation, researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have told WIRED. A new report from the group details how, in recent months, terrorists and other extremist organizations have been using artificial intelligence to manipulate imagery and thwart content moderation. As platforms have struggled to keep up with this flood of extremist content, a new tool called Altitude, built in collaboration between Tech Against Terrorism and Google, is seeking to address the problem.

In 2016, Oskarina Fuentes got a tip from a friend that seemed too good to be true. Her life in Venezuela had become a struggle: Inflation had hit 800 percent under President Nicolás Maduro, and the 26-year-old Fuentes had no stable job and was balancing multiple side hustles to survive. Her friend told her about Appen, an Australian data services company that was looking for crowdsourced workers to tag training data for artificial intelligence algorithms. Most internet users will have done some form of data labeling: identifying images of traffic lights and buses for online captchas. But the algorithms powering new bots that can pass legal exams, create fantastical imagery in seconds, or remove harmful content on social media are trained on datasets--images, video, and text--labeled by gig economy workers in some of the world's cheapest labor markets. Appen's clients have included Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, and the company's 1 million contributors are just a part of a vast, hidden industry.

There's always been something seductive about a nanobot. Comic books and movies implore you to imagine these things, thousands of times thinner than a human hair and able to cruise around a body and repair a bone or heal an illness. Their scale is unfathomably finite. Their possibilities, sci-fi will have you believe, wildly infinite. While that incongruity makes it perfect for the denizens of a writers' room figuring out how to kill James Bond, it's also a sort of curse.

When members of the scientific community gathered at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February, they did so in front of laptops and tablets from their home offices and dining tables. They presented over Zoom, submitted questions via chat, and caught up with colleagues over social media. The 2021 AAAS Annual Meeting was unlike any other in the meeting's 187-year history, but the fully virtual setting did not dampen enthusiasm for sharing science in keeping with the “Understanding Diverse Ecosystems” meeting theme. Dozens of scientific sessions shared new research in areas ranging from microbiomes to space travel. More than 40 workshops offered attendees the opportunity to discuss strategies for working in the ecosystems of academia and science policy. Plenary and topical lecturers covered timely topics, including Ruha Benjamin on how technology can deepen inequities, Anthony Fauci on the next steps for COVID-19 response, Mary Gray on research ethics, and Yalidy Matos on immigration policies. “The quality of the speakers was absolutely undeniable, and the diversity of the speakers—across gender, race, region—was just extraordinary,” said Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the Science family of journals. “That is what our vision of the world looks like in a place where science is done with creativity and innovation and excellence.” Selecting a diverse meeting program is grounded in AAAS's values, but it is not without concerted effort, according to Claire Fraser. Fraser, who served as AAAS president through February and now serves as chair of the AAAS Board of Directors, selected the meeting theme and led the AAAS Meeting Scientific Program Committee, which oversees selection of the meeting's speakers. “The diversity doesn't happen by accident. I think it reflects the very strong commitment on the part of the Scientific Program Committee to make sure that not only is the science presented timely and excellent, but the diversity of speakers and participants is as broad as it possibly can be,” said Fraser, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Diversity isn't an afterthought—it's a deliberate part of the very first review of potential scientific sessions, according to Andrew Black, chief of staff and chief public affairs officer. When hundreds of volunteer reviewers evaluate the quality of the submissions before sending the best for consideration by the Scientific Program Committee, they are also looking for diversity across many dimensions, Black said. Among those dimensions are diversity of scientific discipline—befitting AAAS's multidisciplinary membership—but also gender, race and ethnicity, geographic diversity, career stage, and type of institution, including all types and sizes of universities, industry, and government. “Who do you see, who do you hear, and what kind of voices are in dialogue with each other? That's part of our assessment process,” said Agustín Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and a member of the Scientific Program Committee. The review process offers opportunities for applicants to diversify their sessions. Applicants are often encouraged to look beyond their own networks to add a range of voices to their presentation to best communicate their ideas to the broader scientific community, Fuentes said. “We need to think very carefully in this moment in time about how do we not only redress past biases and discriminatory practices but how do we create a space, a voice, and a suite of presenters that is very inviting to a diverse audience,” Fuentes said. Added Fraser, “What you end up with is even better because you have such broad perspectives represented.” The committee also emphasized the importance of ensuring that a diverse group of decision-makers have a seat at the table. Members of the Scientific Program Committee, who are nominated from across AAAS and its 26 disciplinary sections and approved by the AAAS Board, represent a broad range of groups and perspectives, Fraser said. “What I firmly believe is that you can't come up with a diverse program like we had this year and like we've had in previous years without that diversity in the program committee,” Fraser said. Commitment to diversity across many axes is part of AAAS Annual Meeting history. In the 1950s, AAAS refused to hold meetings in the segregated South. In 1976, under one of AAAS's first female presidents, Margaret Mead, the Annual Meeting was fully accessible to people with disabilities for the first time. According to the AAAS Project on Science, Technology, and Disability, wheelchair ramps were added to the conference hall, programs were made accessible for hearing-impaired and visually impaired attendees, and Mead's presidential address was simultaneously interpreted in sign language. In 1978, AAAS's Board of Directors voted to move the following year's Annual Meeting out of Chicago because Illinois had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1993, AAAS moved its 1999 meeting from Denver after Colorado voters adopted a constitutional amendment to deny residents protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Leaders at AAAS note that there is always more work to be done in the present and future—both at the Annual Meeting and year-round. AAAS continues to focus on its own systemic transformation in areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion and on the breadth of initiatives in its new Inclusive STEM Ecosystems for Equity & Diversity program, all to ensure that the scientific enterprise reflects the full range of talent. That goal resonated with many 2021 AAAS Annual Meeting speakers, too. A more diverse group of scientists creating artificial intelligence systems can improve those systems, said Ayanna Howard, a roboticist who leads The Ohio State University's College of Engineering, during her topical lecture, “Demystifying AI Through the Lens of Fairness and Bias.” Said Howard, “We as people are diverse and we're different and it makes us unique and beautiful, and our AI systems should be designed in such a way.” Nalini Nadkarni, a University of Utah biologist who delivered a topical lecture on “Forests, the Earth, and Ourselves: Understanding Dynamic Systems Through an Interdisciplinary Lens,” shared how she reaches young girls to let them know that science—and her own scientific specialty—is a space where they can thrive. She and her students created and distributed “Treetop Barbie,” dressing a doll in fieldwork clothes and creating a doll-sized booklet about canopy plants. The Annual Meeting offers a chance to show that science is best when it is for everyone, regardless of background or perspective, whether they're a kid or just a kid at heart. Said Parikh, “The AAAS Annual Meeting is where the pages of Science literally come alive. It's a place where scientists, no matter what discipline or industry they decided to pursue, can pull back and just fall in love with the idea of science again—like we did when we were kids.”

Fires during summer 2019–2020 decimated entire vineyards in South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, but smoke, which was far more widespread and insidious, seeped into grapes and into fermenting barrels, yielding unpleasant, unsaleable product. Although the full extent of the damage caused has not yet been calculated, analysis from the Australian Wine Research Institute indicates that smoke taint alone costs the country's wine industry tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each time a high fire season occurs. Advances in a wide range of technologies could help growers and winemakers mitigate the negative impact of smoke taint and other unpredictable anomalies, such as frost, drought, pests and disease -- and not just in Australia, but around the world. The Vineyard of the Future, led by Associate Professor Sigfredo Fuentes, a plant physiologist at the University of Melbourne, is an international consortium of scientists conducting leading-edge research to amass high-resolution data from vine to glass and analyse it in meaningful ways. Drones, satellite imaging, video analysis, and plant and people sensors combined with artificial intelligence -- collectively called "digital agriculture" -- give producers and sellers of wine an advantage in an industry riddled with uncertainty.