One big question

Amidst the rocket models, jet engines and satellites at the 33rd Annual Space Symposium, we found a quiet corner to sit down with Scott Fouse, the vice president of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center. We asked him: What will space exploration look like in 2040?

While it seems everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon, we were wondering just how advanced the technology really is. So we put a question to Igal Raichelgauz, the founder of Cortica, an image-recognition company that relies on AI technology: Why is artificial intelligence still kind of dumb?

Architecture professor Alan C. Short has released a book in which he says that current building practices have gone astray by sealing us off from the natural world. We asked professor Short as part of our One Big Question (OBQ) series: How could we better today's buildings by looking to the past?​

To find out what life might be like on a TRAPPIST planet, we contacted Lisa Kaltenegger and Jack O'Malley-James at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University and asked them One Big Question: "What could life in the TRAPPIST-1 system be like?"​

Electric vehicles are often touted as more environmentally friendly than cars using gasoline. But electricity has to be produced somewhere, so it got us wondering if EVs really are better for our planet than traditional vehicles. We found out, as part of our regular One Big Question series (OBQ).

You might not think your crock pot would have a lot to do with your love life, but as we enter the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), connected devices can collect data about our behaviors that might actually help match us with our ideal partners. We explore this idea through One Big Question.

At the recent SUNZ Summit we met up with Dr Amy Fletcher and asked her whether we should consider bioengineering animals that could live in the world we're creating, rather than in the one we're destroying?

As more and more devices bathe our eyes in blue light at night, our sleep patterns will be disturbed and it's even possible that some cancer risks might increase​. So what to do? Do blue-light-blocking glasses, screens and filters do anything to help?​ We asked an expert to find out.

As part of our regular "One big question"​ feature, we asked Neil Jacobstein, the former president and current chair of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Track at Singularity University, how the potential downsides of artificial intelligence can be managed.

Training the body’s own immune system to fight cancer is steadily gaining traction as a successful way to combat the disease and may, one day, lead to a vaccine. To find out more, New Atlas asked a company working on one such vaccine just how close a cancer vaccine really is.

Wondering just what impact a US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement would have on climate change, as part of our "One Big Question" column, we turned to Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, to see what he thought. Here's what he had to say.

In our next installment of One Big Question, we asked Ben Kaplan, the CEO of public-relations firm PR Hacker, just how Donald Trump could be considered America's first "viral president." Here's what he had to say.