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
Human vision is an extraordinary facility. Although it evolved in specific environments over many millions of years, it is capable of tasks that early visual systems never experienced. Reading is a good example, as is identifying artificial objects such as cars, planes, road sign … | Continue reading
Airborne transmission would mean there are certain solutions we really need to focus on. | Continue reading
A notorious hacker who made an estimated $1.5 million by stealing information from more than 300 companies and governments in 44 countries has been identified as a 37-year-old man from Kazakhstan. Known as Fxmsp, the hacker became famous in 2019 when he advertised access and sou … | Continue reading
And that's why I'm not going outside, says Antonio Regalado. | Continue reading
In 1996 John Perry Barlow, co-founder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace”. It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home o … | Continue reading
Researchers have been refining methods to detect fake accounts on social media for many years. But methods created to sniff out individual bots can fail to detect more sophisticated forms of manipulation—such as state-sponsored disinformation or harassment campaigns spanning thou … | Continue reading
A growing body of evidence suggests most new covid-19 infections are caused by just a few "superspreaders" that can infect dozens at a time. | Continue reading
A 1988 hit by the Argentine rock band Soda Stereo gave Buenos Aires a nickname that still sticks today: “La Ciudad de la Furia,” or the City of Fury. The “fury” of Buenos Aires is evident in the uneven quality of everyday life here. It’s not uncommon for strikes and demonstration … | Continue reading
Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigra … | Continue reading
There's a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them. | Continue reading
Scientists are taking a harder look at using carbon-capturing rocks to counteract climate change, but lots of uncertainties remain. | Continue reading
It is a frigid February day when I visit Communitech, a bustling tech hub that occupies a renovated 19th–century tannery in the city of Kitchener, Ontario. Inside the brick-and-beam space, Harleen Kaur opens her phone and pulls up her latest creation—an attempt to tackle the prob … | Continue reading
Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” Parscale’s numbers … | Continue reading
Gordon Moore’s 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become … | Continue reading
There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them. Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the s … | Continue reading
I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. It’s the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; he’d already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to potential investors. “There was a girl in my life,” he started. “I call her my g … | Continue reading
The discovery that led Nir Shavit to start a company came about the way most discoveries do: by accident. The MIT professor was working on a project to reconstruct a map of a mouse’s brain and needed some help from deep learning. Not knowing how to program graphics cards, or GPUs … | Continue reading
A few years ago I used an algorithm to help me write a science fiction story. Adam Hammond, an English professor, and Julian Brooke, a computer scientist, had created a program called SciFiQ, and I provided them with 50 of my favorite pieces of science fiction to feed into their … | Continue reading
The news: Software called TextFooler can trick natural-language processing (NLP) systems into misunderstanding text just by replacing certain words in a sentence with synonyms. In tests, it was able to drop the accuracy of three state-of-the-art NLP systems dramatically. For exam … | Continue reading
A long time ago, in the bad old days of the 2000s, debates about the internet were dominated by two great tribes: the Optimists and the Pessimists. “The internet is inherently democratizing,” argued the Optimists. “It empowers individuals and self-organizing communities against … | Continue reading
In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mind. The upheaval has been accompanied by a reported spike in the use of surveill … | Continue reading
It was a striking story. “Machine Bias,” the headline read, and the teaser proclaimed: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.” ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit news organization, had analyzed risk asses … | Continue reading
In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely o … | Continue reading
The discovery of the exoplanet KOI-456.04 orbiting the star Kepler-160 suggests we should more aggressively look for habitable planets around sun-like stars. | Continue reading
In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mind. The upheaval has been accompanied by a reported spike in the use of surveill … | Continue reading
Hamid Khan has been a community organizer in Los Angeles for over 35 years, with a consistent focus on police violence and human rights. He talked to us on April 3, 2020, for a forthcoming podcast episode about artificial intelligence and policing. As the world turns its attentio … | Continue reading
Black Americans have seen technology used to target them again and again. Stopping it means looking at the problem differently. | Continue reading
In 2013, police in Grants Pass, Oregon, got a tip that a man named Curtis W. Croft had been illegally growing marijuana in his backyard. So they checked Google Earth. Indeed, the four-month-old satellite image showed neat rows of plants growing on Croft’s property. The cops raide … | Continue reading
Ask Zhu Kaiyu about his factory, and he can rattle off a series of statistics meant to impress: 15,000 square meters, 800 employees, 300 machines, 5 million articles of clothing sold per year. Zhu opened his factory for knitted apparel in Dongguan, Guangdong province, China in 20 … | Continue reading
The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion … | Continue reading
You’ve likely heard stories about the birth of the PC: of Xerox PARC as the Mecca of computing; of its creation of the Alto, Ethernet, and the laser printer; of the Homebrew Computer Club, the MITS Altair, Bill Gates and the theft of his Micro-soft Basic; of Steve Jobs and Stephe … | Continue reading
A new study argues that cognitive decline and loneliness do not adequately explain why older adults share more fake news on social media. | Continue reading
If AI is really going to make a difference to patients we need to know how it works when real humans get their hands on it, in real situations. | Continue reading
The moonshot program to come up with a vaccine against covid-19 is advancing faster than anyone could have hoped. At least four experimental vaccines have been shown to protect monkeys, and three of those are already being given to brave human volunteers. The aim is a vaccine by … | Continue reading
Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote "zombie content" that avoids content moderators and fact-checkers. | Continue reading
It may not look like much at first glance, but a map created by University of Wisconsin computer science professor Paul Barford and about a dozen colleagues took around four years to produce. He believes it could make the Internet more resilient to accidents, disasters, or intent … | Continue reading
In Portland, Oregon, earlier this spring, a programmer named Ian Hilgart-Martiszus pulled out a needle and inserted it into the arm of social worker Alicia Rowe as she squinted and looked away. He was testing for antibodies to the coronavirus. He’d gathered 40 friends and friends … | Continue reading
This weekend I’m going to break my isolation for the first time in two months. Aside from occasional socially distanced bike rides and walks in the park with a handful of trusted friends, I haven’t spent time with anyone, much less touched anyone beyond a hasty (and sleeved) elbo … | Continue reading
The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of. How it works: Give it a genre, an arti … | Continue reading
Dozens of US states are hiring and training contact tracers to combat the coronavirus pandemic. But high case counts, low testing capacity and other challenges could undermine their effectiveness. | Continue reading
The country has the highest penetration of any automated contact tracing app in the world, but one senior figure says it “wasn’t a game changer.” | Continue reading
In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too—and in bulk. The maj … | Continue reading
Deep reinforcement learning has trained AIs to beat humans at complex games like Go and StarCraft. Could it also do a better job at running the economy? | Continue reading
Millions of Indian citizens are being forced to download the country’s tracking app—a line no other democracy has yet crossed in the fight against the coronavirus. | Continue reading