Close Menu
Technology Mag

    Subscribe to Updates

    Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

    What's Hot

    Nintendo will let you limit who your kid can GameChat with on the Switch 2

    May 30, 2025

    How to Win Followers and Scamfluence People

    May 30, 2025

    We’ve Tested Dozens of OLEDs to Find The Best

    May 30, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
    Subscribe
    Technology Mag
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram YouTube
    • Home
    • News
    • Business
    • Games
    • Gear
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Security
    • Trending
    • Press Release
    Technology Mag
    Home » The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack
    Business

    The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack

    News RoomBy News RoomMarch 26, 20253 Mins Read
    Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Email

    The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste some commands from GitHub, watch characters cascade down the screen. Just like in the movies. I was scanning the passing code for recognizable words—neuron, synapse—when a friend came to pick me up for dinner. “One sec,” I yelled from my office. “I’m just running a worm on my computer.”

    At the Korean restaurant, the energy was manic; the wind was bending palm trees at the waist and sending shopping carts skating across the parking lot. The atmosphere felt heightened and unreal, like a podcast at double speed. You’re doing, what, a cybercrime? my friend asked. Over the din, I tried to explain: No, not a worm like Stuxnet. A worm like Richard Scarry.

    By the time I got home it was dark, and the first sparks had already landed in Altadena. On my laptop, waiting for me in a volumetric pixel box, was the worm. Pointed at each end, it floated in a mist of particles, eerily stick-straight and motionless. It was, of course, not alive. Still, it looked deader than dead to me. “Bravo,” said Stephen Larson, when I reached him later that night. “You have achieved the ‘hello world’ state of the simulation.”

    Larson is a cofounder of OpenWorm, an open source software effort that has been trying, since 2011, to build a computer simulation of a microscopic nematode called Caenorhabditis elegans. His goal is nothing less than a digital twin of the real worm, accurate down to the molecule. If OpenWorm can manage this, it would be the first virtual animal—and an embodiment of all our knowledge not only about C. elegans, which is one of the most-studied animals in science, but about how brains interact with the world to produce behavior: the “holy grail,” as OpenWorm puts it, of systems biology.

    Unfortunately, they haven’t managed it. The simulation on my laptop takes data culled from experiments done with living worms and translates it into a computational framework called c302, which then drives the simulated musculature of a C. elegans worm in a fluid dynamic environment—all in all, a simulation of how a worm squiggles forward in a flat plate of goo. It takes about 10 hours of compute time to generate five seconds of this behavior.

    So much can happen in 10 hours. An ember can travel on the wind, down from the foothills and into the sleeping city. That night, on Larson’s advice, I tweaked the time parameters of the simulation, pushing beyond “hello world” and deeper into the worm’s uncanny valley. The next morning, I woke to an eerie orange haze, and when I pulled open my laptop, bleary-eyed, two things made my heart skip: Los Angeles was on fire. And my worm had moved.

    At this point, you may be asking yourself a very reasonable question. Back at the Korean place, between bites of banchan, my friend had asked it too. The question is this: Uhh … why? Why, in the face of everything our precarious green world endures, of all the problems out there to solve, would anyone spend 13 years trying to code a microscopic worm into existence?

    Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit Email
    Previous ArticleThe base iPad is finally being left behind
    Next Article Roborock’s S8 MaxV Ultra, our favorite robovac, is cheaper than ever

    Related Posts

    Donald Trump’s Media Conglomerate Is Becoming a Bitcoin Reserve

    May 29, 2025

    Businesses Got Squeezed by Trump’s Tariffs. Now Some of Them Want Their Money Back

    May 28, 2025

    There’s a Very Simple Pattern to Elon Musk’s Broken Promises

    May 28, 2025

    Freedom of the Press Foundation Threatens Legal Action if Paramount Settles With Trump Over ’60 Minutes’ Interview

    May 27, 2025

    A Helicopter, Halibut, and ‘Y.M.C.A’: Inside Donald Trump’s Memecoin Dinner

    May 27, 2025

    Inside Anthropic’s First Developer Day, Where AI Agents Took Center Stage

    May 27, 2025
    Our Picks

    How to Win Followers and Scamfluence People

    May 30, 2025

    We’ve Tested Dozens of OLEDs to Find The Best

    May 30, 2025

    The Best Vegan Meal Delivery Services and Kits

    May 30, 2025

    SEC drops Binance lawsuit in yet another gift to crypto

    May 30, 2025
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Pinterest
    • Instagram
    • YouTube
    • Vimeo
    Don't Miss
    Gear

    Google AI Overviews Says It’s Still 2024

    By News RoomMay 30, 2025

    I’ve covered Google’s AI Overviews since its messy rollout last year, when screenshots of absurdly…

    RFK Jr.‘s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ report seems riddled with AI slop

    May 30, 2025

    Gmail’s AI summaries now appear automatically

    May 30, 2025

    The ‘beige Amazon influencer’ lawsuit is headed for dismissal

    May 29, 2025
    Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of use
    • Advertise
    • Contact
    © 2025 Technology Mag. All Rights Reserved.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.