At a major AI research conference, one researcher laid out how existing AI techniques might be used to analyze causal relationships in data. | Continue reading
For years we’ve tolerated buggy, bloated, badly organized computer programs. But soon, we’ll innovate, litigate and regulate them into reliability. | Continue reading
Getting computers to beat humans at games is impressive. But now the real work begins. | Continue reading
Designer Zac Posen used additive manufacturing to create wearable sculptures for partygoers. | Continue reading
A new proof with important implications for game theory shows that no algorithm can possibly determine the winner. | Continue reading
The chip on show at Amazon’s MARS event—alongside karate-chopping robots and Martian bases—is many times more efficient than conventional silicon chips. | Continue reading
The work could lead to a new approach to the study of what is possible, and how it follows from what already exists. | Continue reading
The bad news is that our slow-motion ecological catastrophe demands new ways of thinking. The good news? We’ve faced the end of the world before. | Continue reading
ClimaCell claims its service, which taps into millions of wireless devices, is 60% more accurate than traditional forecasting methods. | Continue reading
Maybe we don’t need to look inside the black box after all. We just need to watch how machines behave, instead | Continue reading
Powerful gene-editing tools have the potential to heal—or to harm. Now there’s a race to develop the antidote to the next bioweapon. | Continue reading
The chip on show at Amazon’s MARS event—alongside karate-chopping robots and Martian bases—is many times more efficient than conventional silicon chips. | Continue reading
Would you like to spend a night in a future 3D-printed Mars habitat? You might get the chance. | Continue reading
More than 60 researchers from 30 institutions will get access to Facebook user data to study its impact on elections and democracy, and how it’s used by advertisers and publishers.A vast trove: Facebook will let academics see which websites its users linked to from January 2017 t … | Continue reading
A powerful AI algorithm can dream up music that echoes Bach or the Beatles, but it isn’t real creativity. | Continue reading
Insurance companies, banks, and health-care organizations can dramatically improve their risk models by analyzing images of policy holders’ houses, say researchers | Continue reading
One of the birthplaces of artificial intelligence, MIT, has announced a bold plan to reshape its academic program around the technology. | Continue reading
The gene-editing tool has been used in a trial to enhance the blood cells of two patients with cancer, according to NPR.The trial: The experimental research, under way at the University of Pennsylvania, involves genetically altering a person’s T cells so that they attack and dest … | Continue reading
Time to start talking less about the technology for preventing global warming and more about the technology we’ll need to live with it. | Continue reading
The social cost of carbon could guide us toward intelligent policies—if only we knew what it was. | Continue reading
The experimental store in Levittown, New York, will be used to test how new technologies could be applied to the shopping experience.The technology: Walmart’s “Intelligent Retail Lab” store includes cameras that monitor the shelves and aisles, and interactive displays. | Continue reading
A world where people are monitored and supervised by machines isn’t confined to the realms of sci-fi. | Continue reading
Holly Jean Buck is a fellow at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. This is an adapted excerpt from her upcoming book After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (September 2019, Verso Books). | Continue reading
Sargassum is infesting Mexico’s coastline. Researchers are scrambling to stop an ecological crisis, and maybe even make something good of it. | Continue reading
One of the leading figures in the movement to disband Google’s AI ethics board says she and other employee activists are now being punished for their activism.In an e-mail circulated internally within Google and obtained by Wired, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google’s Open Resea … | Continue reading
Droughts and floods have pushed the nation’s leaky, polluted, and half-done water systems to the brink. | Continue reading
Machines need an exact digital replica of our world if we’re going to get true, location-specific AR—or accurate robot food deliveries. | Continue reading
With 5G networks rolling out around the world, engineers are turning their attention to the next incarnation. | Continue reading
AI-powered video technology is becoming ubiquitous, tracking our faces and bodies through stores, offices, and public spaces. | Continue reading
The Mars InSight lander has sensed a quake within the planet.The news: On its 128th day on the red planet, the lander picked up the first definitive sign of shaking from within Mars. | Continue reading
South Korea’s nuclear energy program looked like our best hope for combating climate change. Today, the entire industry is being dismantled. What went wrong? | Continue reading
A new report says current initiatives to fix the field’s diversity crisis are too narrow and shallow to be effective. | Continue reading
This week’s most thought-provoking papers from the Physics arXiv. | Continue reading
China blocked millions of would-be travelers from purchasing plane or train tickets last year as part of its “social credit” system, according to the Associated Press. | Continue reading
By searching NASA’s Near Earth Object Database, researchers found a meteor that burned up in Earth’s atmosphere five years ago in the sky over the South Pacific. | Continue reading
Only a few legislators really know what they’re talking about, but it’s a start. | Continue reading
It took humanity centuries to decide that Earth orbits the sun. Now a neural network has come to the same conclusion, using the same data, in just a few hours. | Continue reading
David Silver says the computer program that taught itself to be a chess grandmaster exhibits “the essence of creativity.” | Continue reading
Everyone’s mood improves when the weather is good, right? Actually, the large-scale evidence to prove this has never been gathered—until now. | Continue reading
Misted windshields could become a thing of the past thanks to a clever material engineered on a microscopic scale. | Continue reading
This week’s most thought-provoking papers from the Physics arXiv. | Continue reading
A brain-computer interface records “yes” and “no” answers in patients who lack any voluntary muscle movement. | Continue reading
In a startling demonstration, the machine drew on experimentation, data, and observation of humans to learn how simple implements could help it achieve a task. | Continue reading
More than 300 million people use online dating sites. We’re now beginning to get a look at how these complex networks work. | Continue reading
Health workers are using smartphones and AI tools to spot low-birth-weight babies in India. | Continue reading
Thanks to twin astronauts, we now have our first solid evidence of how the human body responds to long-term spaceflight—and it’s thrown up some mysteries. | Continue reading
New figures show we’re using more energy and still pumping out more emissions—so why aren’t we moving the dial? | Continue reading
Terahertz waves provide a unique view of the world but have always been hard to detect. That looks set to change. | Continue reading