Space tourist and billionaire programmer Charles Simonyi designed Microsoft Office. Now he wants to reprogram software. | Continue reading
Administrators say installing listening devices like Alexa in student bedrooms and hallways could help lower dropout rates. Not everyone agrees. | Continue reading
Kim Jong-un's regime has an army of cryptocurrency bank robbers | Continue reading
Fossils and objects are unlikely to survive more than a few million years. Searching for chemical traces of industrialization offers an intriguing alternative. | Continue reading
The news: Levels of a gas that is 12,400 more damaging than carbon dioxide in terms of its planet-heating properties are higher than ever. | Continue reading
The news: The European Commission is considering a ban of facial recognition in public places for up to five years, with exceptions for research and security projects, according to a white paper draft obtained by Politico. | Continue reading
Bird brains: Roboticists have been turning to birds for flight inspiration for years, but they haven’t yet successfully managed to get a drone to fly like one. | Continue reading
Engineers have been trying to crack this problem since the ’80s. | Continue reading
Sorry if it blocks your views. | Continue reading
By optimizing reinforcement-learning algorithms, DeepMind uncovered new details about how dopamine helps the brain learn. | Continue reading
The news: An MIT report into the university’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein has identified a number of senior figures who facilitated donations from the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, including three vice presidents, mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd, and f … | Continue reading
But some campaigners are pushing for the rules to change. | Continue reading
Climate change is driving climate change. | Continue reading
The myopic focus of tech leaders on AI-driven solutions to fake news is indicative of the arrogance that caused the problem in the first place. | Continue reading
The news: Video platform TikTok has published a set of new, more detailed guidelines governing which videos will be deleted from the app. | Continue reading
All future AI regulations will need to clear the checklist. | Continue reading
The news: The FBI has sent Apple a request for the data on two locked and encrypted iPhones belonging to Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, the gunman who killed three people at a naval base in Pensacola, Florida, last month. | Continue reading
The news: US startup Agility Robotics has just made its two-legged robot Digit available to buy for the first time. | Continue reading
A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. | Continue reading
Social media allows young people to explore how they express themselves, says Taylor Fang of Logan, Utah, the winner of our youth essay contest. | Continue reading
Not all oxygen is created equal. | Continue reading
Multiplayer poker is the latest game to fall to artificial intelligence—and the techniques used could be vital for trading, product pricing, and routing vehicles. | Continue reading
From the Olympics to elections, nations use hackers to win a bigger geopolitical game. | Continue reading
The best way to distribute quantum entanglement around the globe is via a massive constellation of orbiting satellites, physicists say. | Continue reading
Cash is gradually dying out. Will we ever have a digital alternative that offers the same mix of convenience and freedom? | Continue reading
Fanfic used to be a joke—now it’s teaching kids important skills like learning how to write. | Continue reading
Tens of thousands of Australians are fleeing their homes as hundreds of fires rage across the continent’s southeast coast. | Continue reading
The world’s costliest painting depicts a glass sphere with curious optical properties. Computer scientists figured out what the artist was getting at. | Continue reading
The Chinese scientists and two associates will be punished after a secret trial. | Continue reading
A fiction story about artificial romance | Continue reading
Awkward angles, bad poses, and raw emotions: it was the year of posts about our true selves—or so we thought. | Continue reading
The electric vehicle startup’s platform approach helped it raise nearly $3 billion this year. | Continue reading
Deep learning has a terrible carbon footprint. | Continue reading
Asymmetric conductors could revolutionize cooling systems for computers and other devices. | Continue reading
As past identities become stickier for those entering adulthood, it’s not just individuals who will suffer. Society will too. | Continue reading
Inspired by a difference between Chinese and English, it shows how AI research benefits from diversity. | Continue reading
Here’s what they had to say. | Continue reading
We’d better pick up the pace in the 2020s. | Continue reading
Educators love digital devices, but there’s little evidence they help children—especially those who most need help. | Continue reading
The idea is something of a technicality, but nevertheless an interesting one. | Continue reading
NOAA will get at least $4 million for a research program, which will include efforts to assess “climate interventions.” | Continue reading
It’s possible to limit the harm synthetic media tools might cause—but it won’t happen without effort. | Continue reading
But some experts say that D-ID’s “smart video anonymization” technique breaks the law. | Continue reading
Instead of never-ending progress, today’s kids face a world on the edge of collapse. What next? | Continue reading
Other neural nets haven’t progressed beyond simple addition and multiplication, but this one calculates integrals and solves differential equations. | Continue reading
Inside the quest to produce a bigger, better way to predict how the world’s deadliest blazes will behave. | Continue reading
There’s little scientific basis to emotion recognition technology, so it should be banned from use in decisions that affect people’s lives, says research institute AI Now in its annual report.A booming market: Despite the lack of evidence that machines can work out how we’re feel … | Continue reading