In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a famously controversial lecture at Cambridge University. He described a post-war schism between two groups — scientists and the literary world.

Snow identified this as a newly emergent divide, across which each party was more than happy to sneer at the other: Scientists proudly unable to quote a phrase of Shakespeare, and literary types untroubled by the second law of thermodynamics.

Those divisions within the university seem now more deeply entrenched than ever before. And those working within the arts and the sciences face a third antagonist in society: Populism, with its attendant and increasing distrust of intellectuals.

We are not only living in an age where women are being under-represented in many spheres of economic life, but technology could make this even worse. Women hold just 19% of board directorships in the US and Europe. This gender gap in the boardroom persists, despite the fact that, on average, women have obtained higher educational qualifications than their male counterparts for more than two decades in many OECD countries. And the main reason is social bias.

This is on the verge of being further reinforced by artificial intelligence, as current data being used to train machines to learn are often biased.

University of Arizona (UA) organized 13th annual College of Science lecture series recently on the theme "Humans, Data and Machines." The series were addressed by experts from computer science, Data Science, law etc.  The six-lecture series is designed to delve into various aspects of the revolutionary social change now underway with the convergence of the physical, digital and biological worlds.

Replacing a human joint is common, artificial and far from permanent. The procedure involves cutting into the body to remove living bone and replacing it with metal and plastic. As these parts typically last 15 to 20 years, a second — riskier — replacement surgery sometimes is necessary. However, for a millions of patients in agony with knee or hip arthritis, such implants are welcome. Because once cartilage, the tissue lining and lubricating joints, wears away, the patient is left with bone-on-bone pain, swelling, stiffness and disability.

Washington University ,School of Medicine researchers are working on a radically different way to help people with arthritis: creating living joint replacements from the patient’s own cells and then programming those cells to fight an arthritis recurrence

Imagine internet browsing without the ability to make sense of images. It’s a problem that visually impaired computer users face every day. While screen reading technology gives users audible access to written content, it needs written descriptions to interpret images, and often there isn’t any.

Some website developers include descriptions of images in the code (called “alt text”) because it improves their websites’ search engine rankings. However, there’s no mechanism for determining whether these descriptions are accurate or informative. As a result, developers often enter one-word descriptions such as “image” or “photo,” leaving the visually impaired with no useful information about the image.