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Over the weekend, a group of programmers claimed they built a program that passed the famous Turing Test, in which a computer tries to trick judges into believing that it is a human. According to new reports, this is a historic accomplishment. But is it really? And what does it mean for artificial intelligence?

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Z97 ushers in new and exciting ways to attach and use storage devices. With support for M.2 PCIe and SATA Express, two sides of the same SSD coin, Z97 improves on Z87. But not everywhere. AsRock add to Z97 with some new tricks, and so we take a look.

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Two years ago a single bitcoin was worth around $5. Today it is worth around $600. Now one economist has worked out exactly what forces are behind this dramatic increase.

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Headphones that make sounds seem to come from specific points in space could be the perfect counterpoint to virtual reality goggles.

Just as a new generation of virtual reality goggles for video games are about to hit the market, researchers at Microsoft have come up with what could be the perfect accompaniment—a way for ordinary headphones to create a realistic illusion of sound coming from specific locations in space.

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The influence of fathers on their teenage children has long been overlooked. Now researchers are finding surprising ways in which dads make a difference

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The past 12 months have been the warmest in Australia’s recorded history, where average temperature has warmed by 1.6-degrees F since 1910

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Illustrations by Jason Schneider

“There’s a lot of hype around this issue,” says Upmanu Lall, professor of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University and director of its Water Center. But, he says, we’re in little danger of running out of water overall. One could conceive of a scenario in which we’ve used up all the freshwater locked in ice or aquifers. Indeed, the water table has already dropped at an alarming rate in specific regions. (We’re on pace to deplete the Ogallala Aquifer, which underlies much of the Great Plains, in the coming decades, for example.) But even if that happened, we’d still have access to other forms of water. “The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable,” Lall explains. “It’s nature’s way of treating water through a distilling mechanism.”

‘The most common resource is rainfall, and that’s renewable.’

In places where water has grown scarce, farmers may be forced to change their approach to watering crops. Some may switch from using groundwater to collecting rain, or another more efficient option. In the Great Plains, exploitation of the Ogallala has made further pumping much more expensive than it was. It may soon make more sense to invest in better means of irrigation. Some are even talking about piping in water from the Great Lakes. With water, it’s easy to fret over a grim future. What’s harder is innovating our way toward a brighter one. 

This article originally appeared in the June 2014 issue of Popular Science.

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