Congrats to the winners of SWARM’s first-ever writing awards: @sarahscoles.bsky.social @aecarlson.bsky.social @evelynjlamb.bsky.social @sipappas.bsky.social & Josh Rhoten! Links to their winning work are at www.sciwrirockies.com/writing-awards
Based on Behzadan's research, an optimally trustworthy AI tool has a few essential qualities:
1. It knows its users.
2. It’s reliable, ethical and transparent.
3. It takes context into account.
4. It’s easy to use and asks users how it’s doing.
And 5. when trust is lost, it adapts to rebuild it.
People vary in how inherently trusting they are, but AI also has to earn our trust by doing its job reliably and safely. AI technology also becomes better and more reliable when more people use it.
Evening, #Boulder. Here's a story for our times...I spoke to
@colorado.edu prof Amir Behzadan about his research on making AI more trustworthy. AI is everywhere in our modern lives, but whether we choose to use AI tech often comes down to how much we trust it.
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/1...
There are ways to reduce the risk (e.g. diversifying and using multiple cloud service providers instead of a single one). But ultimately, these types of system outages are always a risk.
There's no guaranteed way to prevent an outage like this from happening again, especially with the number of companies and services relying on AWS and other centralized cloud platforms.
While it's not clear exactly what caused the outage, Perigo said it was probably caused by a minor misconfiguration or script error that was deployed across many systems.
During the outage, many services and websites hosted by AWS -- from Zoom and Venmo to Snapchat and Reddit -- couldn't "find" each other, so websites and apps appeared broken or offline.
Perigo told me the outage likely cost businesses hundreds of billions of dollars. The problem started with a failure in the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates website URLS into IP addresses that computers can use to communicate.
Heya #Boulder. After this week's AWS network outage, I spoke with Levi Perigo from @colorado.edu's network engineering program to learn more about the outage: what happened, who it affected, what caused it and why it could happen again.
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/1...
Hi Brandon. I checked with the researcher on this. He said the alumina coating is purer than what you'd find in gemstone sapphire (which can have traces of other elements), but the coating is still considered sapphire.
Yep! I was told the alumina in the vaccines is purer than what's found in gemstone sapphire (gemstones can have traces of other elements, too), but yes, it is sapphire.
Normal rabies vaccines need 3-5 doses, but Randolph's shots combine multiple doses into a single shot, and each dose is coated in a timed-release sapphire layer. These shots can be stored in a dry powder form and delivered to parts of the world that lack cold-storage capacity.
Then, the candied particles are coated with a nanoscopic layer of sapphire. Sapphire dissolves slowly once injected into a patient, so it protects the vaccine particles for days to weeks, depending on the thickness of the sapphire layer.
In Randolph's method for making the vaccines, the vaccine particles are sprayed with a hard candy-like substance, which entraps and preserves the proteins so they don't degrade at higher temperatures.
That means it's all but impossible to deliver rabies shots in parts of the world that don’t have specialized cold storage equipment (or the electricity to run it).
About 60,000 people per year still die of rabies. In industrialized countries, many people and pets have access to vaccines. But current vaccines on the market need to be stored cold because heat causes the proteins in them to break down.
Happy (rainy) Tuesday, #Boulder. I've got a new story for you all about a new temperature-stable, single-injection rabies vaccine developed by @colorado.edu researcher Ted Randolph.
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...
I had a blast talking with all the researchers for this story and visiting their hives near Boulder Creek. Made me very nostalgic for my backyard beekeeping days! 🐝
Their building strategies could spark ideas for new bio-inspired structures or even new ways to approach 3D printing.
In a new study, researchers 3D printed a variety of surfaces and added them to beehives for the bees to build honeycomb on. The bees used strategies like merging cells together, tilting the cells at an angle or layering them on top of one another to build usable honeycomb.
Normally, the bees like to make nearly perfect hexagonal cells, but when they build on odd surfaces, the cells get more irregular and harder for the bees to use.
We know the basics of how bees build their hives—they use wax to build the honeycomb where they store food and raise their young—but we don't know as much about how they strategize and work with one another to build honeycomb.
Hey #Boulder. What goes on inside the hive mind of honeybees? How do they collaborate to solve problems? In my latest story for @colorado.edu, I spoke with Profs. Orit Peleg and Francisco López Jiménez about how bees build hives on tricky building sites.
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...
The new algorithms Lahijanian designs can help robots assess a situation and choose safer actions that still try to complete their task, but are less likely to be harmful.
The problem is that people are unpredictable, and robots don't always know how to handle the unexpected situations that arise. This can be incredibly dangerous.
Robots and humans can complete many types of tasks together in manufacturing, health care and other settings. The robots are specialized to do certain tasks very well, but there are some areas (e.g. anything that's more complex or needs more dexterity) where humans still have the upper hand.
Happy Thursday, #Boulder. For my latest story I got to speak with Morteza Lahijanian in @colorado.edu's Aerospace Engineering department about how robots can make safer decisions when they're working with humans.
www.colorado.edu/today/2025/0...
In fact, on the day I went to her lab, I saw small polyps—baby jellyfish the size of a pinhead whose tentacles are just beginning to form—lining the inside of Xu’s jellyfish tanks.
Thankfully, this work also doesn't seem to harm the jellies. Stressed moon jellies may secrete extra mucus, and they often stop reproducing. But Xu says her jellies have not shown these signs.
