The first family to quit Pastor Clark Frailey’s church during the pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a second young couple said they were doubting his leadership a week later, Frailey … | Continue reading
The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on … | Continue reading
Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—t … | Continue reading
A new approach inspired by Einstein’s light cones lets computers make better guesses about what will happen next. Applications could include predicting the effects of medical treatment. | Continue reading
Hacking isn’t all 1s and 0s—more often than you’d think, it’s about people. A Tesla employee was offered a $1 million bribe in early August to install ransomware on the car company’s networks in Nevada, a scheme that could have netted a cybercrime gang many more millions in extor … | Continue reading
Simple, shareable, and private, these pages are Gen Z’s choice for not just learning about something, but doing something about it. | Continue reading
Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across California, forcing thousands to evacuate. | Continue reading
Mongolia shares the world’s longest land border with China, but its early and highly centralized pandemic response has been so effective that not a single person in the landlocked country has died from covid-19. A former army colonel turned public health official recounts how Mon … | Continue reading
The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for that. Now, machine-learning researchers and scholars are looking for ways to make A … | Continue reading
Any researcher who’s focused on applying machine learning to real-world problems has likely received a response like this one: “The authors present a solution for an original and highly motivating problem, but it is an application and the significance seems limited for the machin … | Continue reading
My bitterness peaked midway through day four of the “Fast-Mimicking Diet,” when a parent arrived at my daughter’s softball game with doughnuts. As little girls and fellow coaches crowded around the box, I stood apart, glumly sipping out of my special water bottle with its “propri … | Continue reading
Since OpenAI first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 in May, hundreds of media outlets (including MIT Technology Review) have written about the system and its capabilities. Twitter has been abuzz about its power and potential. The New York Times publish … | Continue reading
From the end of March until mid-June, while Moscow was under coronavirus lockdown, the Russian capital emptied out—mostly. On walks to the supermarket or pharmacy I was passed by streams of cyclists in the trademark yellow uniform of Yandex’s food delivery service. On the road, t … | Continue reading
Maâti Monjib speaks slowly, like a man who knows he’s being listened to. It’s the day of his 58th birthday when we speak, but there’s little celebration in his voice. “The surveillance is hellish,” Monjib tells me. “It is really difficult. It controls everything I do in my life. … | Continue reading
Late in the summer of 2016, Xu Yuyu received a call that promised to change her life. Her college entrance examination scores, she was told, had won her admission to the English department of the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Xu lived in the city of Linyi in … | Continue reading
Maâti Monjib speaks slowly, like a man who knows he’s being listened to. It’s the day of his 58th birthday when we speak, but there’s little celebration in his voice. “The surveillance is hellish,” Monjib tells me. “It is really difficult. It controls everything I do in my life. … | Continue reading
Shalev Hulio wants to explain himself. Normally, silence and secrecy are inherent in the spy business. For nine full years, Hulio never talked publicly about his billion-dollar hacking company—even when his hacking tools were linked to scandal or he was accused of being complicit … | Continue reading
Stuck at home, some are finding creative ways to make casual conversation with coworkers and strangers. | Continue reading
The black mouse on the screen sprawls on its belly, back hunched, blinking but otherwise motionless. Its organs are failing. It appears to be days away from death. It has progeria, a disease of accelerated aging, caused by a genetic mutation. It is only three months old. I am in … | Continue reading
The tech incubator will finally begin its full-fledged basic-income test in 2019. The news: Beginning in early to mid 2019,Y Combinator‘s Making Ends Meet program will provide unconditional cash transfers to 3,000 participants in two states. (The incubator is still deciding which … | Continue reading
“It was super easy actually,” he says, “which was the scary part.” | Continue reading
When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. “I figured that people probably wouldn’t know what that was,” she says. The linguistic ambiguity was useful: she could conceal her emb … | Continue reading
Researchers have demonstrated that they can fool a modern face recognition system into seeing someone who isn’t there. A team from the cybersecurity firm McAfee set up the attack against a facial recognition system similar to those currently used at airports for passport verifica … | Continue reading
The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For decades, the EU has codified protections on personal data and fought against what i … | Continue reading
The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states. Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that … | Continue reading
In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan to study at home together this fall as the pandemic creeps into a new academic … | Continue reading
When you first meet her, you won’t be able to tell that Ipek Kuzu suffers from a rare genetic disease. The three-year-old plays happily on her own for hours, driving her toy cars and “cooking” in her pretend kitchen. But she’s not well. She’s a little wobbly on her feet and doesn … | Continue reading
As nations do the hard math on how to meet their climate goals, clean hydrogen looks like an essential tool for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in aviation, shipping, fertilizer production and other sectors. | Continue reading
In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on which the university was built, had committed genocide against Africans and laid the … | Continue reading
At a typical annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the program is a parade of titles like “A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection.” The same technical flavor permeates the papers, the research talks, and many … | Continue reading
The European Union imposed its first-ever sanctions for cyberattacks on Thursday, targeting Russian, Chinese, and North Korean groups connected to several major hacking incidents. The action, which includes travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and organizations connected … | Continue reading
Experts and r/ChangeMyView subreddit moderators offer 10 tips to debunk conspiracy theories convincingly—and kindly. | Continue reading
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval. What he did have: ingredients fo … | Continue reading
When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed. Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unpreceden … | Continue reading
The news: In a new white paper about its plans for AI, translated by China scholars Jeffrey Ding and Caroline Meinhardt, Tencent, the owner of WeChat and one of China’s three largest tech giants, emphasizes that deepfake technology is “not just about ‘faking’ and ‘deceiving,’ but … | Continue reading
It’s impossible to contain covid-19 without knowing who’s infected: until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available, stopping transmission is the name of the game. While testing capacity has increased, it’s nowhere near what’s needed to screen patients without symptoms, wh … | Continue reading
The idea of “bias-free” hiring, already a highly misleading concept, is being used by AI recruitment firms to shirk greater scrutiny for their tools’ troubling labor issues beyond discrimination. | Continue reading
The facility lies midway between Munich’s city center and its international airport, roughly 23 miles to the north. From the outside, it still looks like the state-run farm it once was, but peer through the windows of the old farmhouse and you’ll see rooms stuffed with cutting-ed … | Continue reading
Facebook says it is setting up new internal teams to look for racial bias in the algorithms that drive its main social network and Instagram. | Continue reading
Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: the new space race. I am curious about the major players in space exploration today. Usually we see NASA and other US companies in the new … | Continue reading
The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It… | Continue reading
“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI. OpenAI first described GPT-3 in … | Continue reading
Trying to get an up close and personal look at the solar system's gas giants is a tricky and dangerous journey. | Continue reading
In February of last year, the San Francisco–based research lab OpenAI announced that its AI system could now write convincing passages of English. Feed the beginning of a sentence or paragraph into GPT-2, as it was called, and it could continue the thought for as long as an essay … | Continue reading
Service workers are finding support on TikTok and Facebook as anti-mask protestors in private groups swap tips for evading safety requirements in shops and restaurants | Continue reading
Experts and r/ChangeMyView subreddit moderators offer 10 tips to debunk conspiracy theories convincingly—and kindly. | Continue reading
The South Pole Wall is 1.4 billion light-years long, and was only found thanks to a special technique normally used to find dark matter. | Continue reading
For decades, US policymakers have bet that the world’s best and brightest will endure a dysfunctional immigration process for a chance at the opportunities the country offers. And for decades, they have been right. Talented people born outside of the US have continued flocking to … | Continue reading