Neil Savage

Lowell

Freelance Journalist at IEEE Spectrum

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

Freelance science writer for Nature, Chemical & Engineering News, IEEE Spectrum, Communications of the ACM, et. al. https://t.co/mkQLppe18N

Articles

AI listens for health conditions

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Neil Savage

As she listened to her patient speak, laryngologist Yael Bensoussan knew immediately what was wrong with him. Part of Nature Outlook: Medical diagnosticsThe man’s daughter had suggested he see Bensoussan because his voice sounded weak. In Bensoussan’s office at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, she could hear the problem. “I said to him, ‘You have water in your lungs.
Communications of the ACM

3 weeks ago | cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage

Ever since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, people have been using it to generate text, from emails to blog posts to bad poetry, much of which they post online. Since that release, the companies that build the large language models (LLMs) on which such chatbots are based—such as OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, the technology underlying ChatGPT—have also continued to put out newer versions of their models, training them with new text data, some of which they scraped off the Web.
Communications of the ACM

1 month ago | cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Sam Greengard |Mario Antoine Aoun |Gregory Goth

As an undergraduate at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, Richard Sutton pored through the school’s library, trying to read everything he could about learning and machine intelligence. What he found disappointed him, because he did not think it really got to the heart of the matter. “It was mostly pattern recognition. It was mostly learning from examples. And I knew from psychology that animals do very different things,” Sutton said.
New hydrogel offers light-controlled reversible stickiness

2 months ago | cen.acs.org | Neil Savage

An adhesive hydrogel whose stickiness can be turned off by shining infrared light on it could make for better bandages or allow robots to climb walls, according to the researchers who developed it ( Chem Bio Eng. 2025, DOI: 10.1021/cbe.4c00177). The hydrogel, made of N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAAm), naturally adheres to a variety of surfaces, including glass, aluminum, steel, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) films, and skin.
NASA’s Mars Plans Complicated by Eye Problems during Long Spaceflights

Mar 6, 2025 | scientificamerican.com | Neil Savage

This article is part of Nature Outlook: Vision, an editorially independent supplement produced with financial support from Astellas Pharma. About this content. In the next 15 years, NASA hopes to launch a mission to Mars. But the long journey poses a challenge — not least from a mysterious ailment that alters astronauts’ eyesight.
Eye problems cloud NASA’s vision of Mars

Mar 5, 2025 | nature.com | Neil Savage

In the next 15 years, NASA hopes to launch a mission to Mars. But the long journey poses a challenge — not least from a mysterious ailment that alters astronauts’ eyesight. Spending long periods in the microgravity of space can lead to changes in the eye, including swelling in the region where the optic nerve extends to the brain; flattening of the rear of the normally round organ; wrinkles that emerge at the back of the retina; and shifts in the refractive index that change how the eye focuses.
VCSEL's star still shining bright

Mar 1, 2025 | spie.org | Neil Savage

Kent Choquette thought the type of lasER he’d spent his career developing was doing pretty well in 2017. That device, the vertical cavity surface-emitting laser, or VCSEL, had seen remarkable success since it was first introduced commercially in 1996, and by 2017 an estimated one billion of the tiny devices had been sold, mostly for use in optical interconnects for data centers.
US scientist falsely accused of hiding ties to China sues university that fired him

Jan 21, 2025 | nature.com | Neil Savage

A chemical engineer arrested in 2019 under the controversial China Initiative, which aimed to protect US laboratories and businesses from espionage, is suing his former university. Feng ‘Franklin’ Tao was cleared of all charges and is demanding that the University of Kansas (KU) in Lawrence return him to his position as a tenured professor.
Brain Implants Give People Back What They Lost

Jan 15, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | Neil Savage |Orit Hazzan |Micah Beck

Ian Burkhart was a 19-year-old college student enjoying a day out with friends in 2010 when he dove into the water off North Carolina’s Outer Bank, hit bottom, and broke his neck. He wound up paralyzed below the elbows, unable to walk or to control his wrists or fingers. The accident did not end his story, though, because just four years later he became the first person to undergo a procedure aimed at restoring movement to his hands.
How the latest materials are taking biosensors to the next level

Dec 11, 2024 | nature.com | Neil Savage

When Shuai Xu set out to create a wearable biosensor to monitor the vital signs of premature infants and newborns, he faced a major challenge: the skin of these children is so delicate that the adhesive used to attach a sensor could damage it, potentially leading to infection. The stiff device pulling against the skin as the baby moved, and the wires that might pull it in a different direction, added to the problem.