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Updated 2025-09-13 21:02
They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.
Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that people were saying it had come out of a food market. If that was so, why hadn’t anyone found any infected animals? She wondered why no…
Brazil’s most vulnerable are struggling to survive the stress of covid
When oxygen supplies ran out in several municipalities across the Brazilian state of Amazonas in January, 61 premature babies grabbed the headlines. The tiny infants didn’t have covid-19, but the Amazonas State Secretariat of Health (SES-AM) was worried that the strain the pandemic was putting on the health-care system had left them in danger. Things…
What it will take to achieve affordable carbon removal
A pair of companies have begun designing what could become Europe’s largest direct-air-capture plant, capable of capturing as much as a million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and burying it deep beneath the floor of the North Sea. The sequestered climate pollution will be sold as carbon credits, reflecting the rising demand for…
How YouTube’s rules are used to silence human rights activists
For over a week now, a corner of YouTube frequented by Kazakh dissidents and close observers of human rights in Xinjiang has been only intermittently available. On June 15, the YouTube channel Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights went dark, its feed of videos replaced by a vague statement that the channel had been “terminated for violating…
Using machine learning to build maps that give smarter driving advice
If you drive in the United States, chances are you can’t remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to Global Positioning System (GPS) and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved…
Retail’s evolution depends on edge computing
Radio waves from Earth have reached dozens of stars
For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found…
How astronauts deal with the boring parts of being in space
Mundane tasks suddenly become extremely complex in space. I spoke with former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, who flew two missions to space, to learn about how astronauts handle the day-to-day. Here are a few of the highlights. When it comes to everyday, mundane tasks you needed to relearn to do in space, what are some…
LinkedIn’s job-matching AI was biased. The company’s solution? More AI.
Years ago, LinkedIn discovered that the recommendation algorithms it uses to match job candidates with opportunities were producing biased results. The algorithms were ranking candidates partly on the basis of how likely they were to apply for a position or respond to a recruiter. The system wound up referring more men than women for open…
The next pandemic is already here. Covid can teach us how to fight it.
It was August 2017, and pleasant and breezy in the central mountains of Madagascar. The passengers loading their bags into the minibus leaving Ankazobe, a small town in the highlands, were grateful for the morning coolness. It would be warm and sticky on the trip they were taking to Antananarivo, the island’s million-person capital 100…
Podcast: Hired by an algorithm
If you’ve applied for a job lately, it’s all but guaranteed that your application was reviewed by software—in most cases, before a human ever laid eyes on it. In this episode, the first in a four-part investigation into automated hiring practices, we speak with the CEOs of ZipRecruiter and CareerBuilder, and one of the architects…
French spyware bosses indicted for their role in the torture of dissidents
Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such…
Why China’s kicking out the crypto miners
The news: China’s intensifying crackdown has sent cryptocurrency prices tumbling. China has been upping its regulatory squeeze on cryptocurrencies for some time, but it now looks likely that over 90% of Bitcoin mining capacity in the country will shut down, according to a report in the Global Times, which is published by the Chinese state.…
Scientists might have spotted tectonic activity inside Venus
Venus might be hell, but don’t call it a dead planet. Amid surface temperatures of up to 471 °C and surface pressures 100 times greater than those on Earth, new research suggests the planet might still be geologically active. That’s encouraging news to people who think it could once have hosted life (or that it might still…
Navigating a surprising pandemic side effect: AI whiplash
Amid the many business disruptions caused by covid-19, here’s one largely overlooked: artificial intelligence (AI) whiplash. As the pandemic began to upend the world last year, businesses reached for every tool at their disposal—including AI—to solve challenges and serve customers safely and effectively. In a 2021 KPMG survey of US business executives conducted between January…
Work in Asia’s data age
The steady advance of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies has been reshaping work and jobs for the past decade. Well before covid-19, robust debates were underway about the future of work and what potential scenarios for employment might emerge. While many Asian markets have met the challenge of containing the spread of covid-19 with…
It took a pandemic, but the US finally has (some) centralized medical data
Throughout the pandemic, there has been serious tension between what the public wants to know and what scientists have been able to say for certain. Scientists have been able to learn more about covid, faster, than about any other disease in history—but at the same time, the public has been shocked when doctors can’t answer…
NASA inches closer to printing artificial organs in space
In America, at least 17 people a day die waiting for an organ transplant. But instead of waiting for a donor to die, what if we could someday grow our own organs? Last week, six years after NASA announced its Vascular Tissue Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate research that could someday lead to artificial…
Bias isn’t the only problem with credit scores—and no, AI can’t help
We already knew that biased data and biased algorithms skew automated decision-making in a way that disadvantages low-income and minority groups. For example, software used by banks to predict whether or not someone will pay back credit-card debt typically favors wealthier white applicants. Many researchers and a slew of start-ups are trying to fix the…
The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system, ranked
If you want to believe, now is the time: the hope that we might one day stumble upon alien life is greater than it ever was. No, it’s not going to be little green men speeding through space in flying disks—more likely microbes or primitive bacteria. But a discovery like that would nevertheless be a…
Holistic decision-making in a digitized health-care environment
Smart data integration can help to increase the quality of data-based decision-making, especially in scenarios where clinical decision-makers face multiple barriers and challenges along the patient pathway. And this is critically important in today’s digitized health-care environment where the quality of decision-making depends on the quality and availability of the underlying data. In medicine, decision-making…
We investigated whether digital contact tracing actually worked in the US
In the spring of 2020, the first versions of covid-19 exposure notification systems were released to the public. These systems promised to slow the disease’s spread by providing automated warnings to people who came into contact with the virus. Now, over a year later, residents in over 50 countries—including half of US states—can opt into…
Uyghurs outside China are traumatized. Now they’re starting to talk about it
Mustafa Aksu had a bad track record with therapists. Growing up in China, he was bullied by his Han Chinese classmates for being Uyghur. This made him constantly anxious, and his stomach often hurt, so much that sometimes he threw up. A concerned teacher referred him to counseling, but Aksu was skeptical it could help.…
Every workplace can be a place of continual learning
While businesses in every sector have been working toward a digital transformation for the past several years, covid-19 accelerated this shift across industries. New technologies are advancing at a pace that requires employers to continuously retrain their workforce to stay current. Organizations must become places of learning if they are to prepare workers for jobs…
The Delta variant doubles the risk of hospitalization—but the vaccines still work
The risk of being hospitalized with the Delta covid-19 variant is roughly double that associated with the original Alpha strain, according to a study published in The Lancet. The study: The researchers analyzed data from 5.4 million people in Scotland, where the Delta variant is now dominant, from April 1 to June 6. After adjusting…
Taxing digital advertising could help break up big tech
For the past several years, economists, and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren said “big tech companies have too much power, too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy.” In the months since the election, politicians…
Inside the fight to reclaim AI from Big Tech’s control
Timnit Gebru never thought a scientific paper would cause her so much trouble. In 2020, as the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, Gebru had reached out to Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, and the two decided to collaborate on research about the troubling direction of artificial intelligence. Gebru wanted…
Anti-vaxxers are weaponizing Yelp to punish bars that require vaccine proof
On the first hot weekend of the summer, Richard Knapp put up a sign outside Mother’s Ruin, a bar tucked in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. It had two arrows: one pointing vaccinated people indoors, another pointing unvaccinated people outdoors. The Instagram post showing the sign (above) quickly went viral among European anti-vaxxers on Reddit. “We started…
These creepy fake humans herald a new age in AI
You can see the faint stubble coming in on his upper lip, the wrinkles on his forehead, the blemishes on his skin. He isn’t a real person, but he’s meant to mimic one—as are the hundreds of thousands of others made by Datagen, a company that sells fake, simulated humans. These humans are not gaming…
Transforming health care at the edge
Clinical trials are better, faster, cheaper with big data
Clinical trials have never been more in the public eye than in the past year, as the world watched the development of vaccines against covid-19, the disease at the center of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Discussions of study phases, efficacy, and side effects dominated the news. The most distinctive feature of the vaccine trials was…
What makes the Delta covid-19 variant more infectious?
Covid cases are on the rise in England, and a fast-spreading variant may be to blame. B.1.617.2, which now goes by the name Delta, first emerged in India, but has since spread to 62 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Delta is still rare in the US. At a press conference on Tuesday, the…
Building the engine that drives digital transformation
Digital transformation has long been a well-established strategic imperative for organizations globally. The effects of covid-19—which have transformed the world into a (perhaps permanently) dispersed collection of individual broadband-connected consumers, partners, and employees—have not disrupted or wholly redefined this trend, instead they have created additional emphasis on digital transformation strategies already well underway. This is…
The coming productivity boom
The last 15 years have been tough times for many Americans, but there are now encouraging signs of a turnaround. Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of the previous decade. But on June 3, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US…
TikTok changed the shape of some people’s faces without asking
“That’s not my face,” Tori Dawn thought after opening TikTok to make a video in late May. The jaw reflected back on the screen was wrong: slimmer and more feminine. And when they waved their hand in front of the camera, blocking most of their face from the lens, their jaw appeared to pop back…
The next Venus missions will tell us about habitable worlds elsewhere
When the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions to Venus were given the green light by NASA last week, the scientific community was stunned. Most had expected that NASA, which hadn’t launched a dedicated mission to Venus in 30 years, would be sending at least one mission to the second planet from the sun by the end of…
When AI becomes child’s play
Despite their popularity with kids, tablets and other connected devices are built on top of systems that weren’t designed for them to easily understand or navigate. But adapting algorithms to interact with a child isn’t without its complications—as no one child is exactly like another. Most recognition algorithms look for patterns and consistency to successfully…
How wearable AI could help you recover from covid
Angela Mitchell still remembers the night she nearly died. It was almost one year ago in July. Mitchell—who turns 60 this June—tested positive for covid-19 at her job as a pharmacy technician at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago. She was sneezing, coughing, and feeling dizzy. The hospital management offered her a choice. She…
This company delivers packages faster than Amazon, but workers pay the price
Early on the morning of October 12, 2020, 27-year-old Jang Deok-joon came home after working his overnight shift at South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang and jumped into the shower. He had worked at the company’s warehouse in the southern city of Daegu for a little over a year, hauling crates full of items ready to…
This is the first new close-up picture of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede in more than 20 years
NASA has just released the first pictures of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, taken during a flyby by the Juno probe. Juno passed Ganymede on June 7, making its closest approach at just around 1,000 kilometers from its surface while traveling at 66,800 kilometers per hour. It’s the closest any probe has come to the moon…
Which US vaccine plans actually helped hard-hit communities?
Long before the first covid-19 vaccines went into arms, certain groups in the US felt the impact of the pandemic more severely: those who whose jobs had to be done in person, who were suddenly labeled “essential”; those who were shut out from government assistance; and certain communities of color. Officials promised that the vaccine…
Five questions posed by Facebook’s two-year ban on Donald Trump
On Friday, Facebook announced that it would suspend former president Donald Trump from the social network for two years, until at least January 7, 2023, and said he would “only be reinstated if conditions permit.” The announcement comes in response to recommendations last month from Facebook’s recently created Oversight Board. Facebook had hoped that the…
China’s Tiananmen anniversary crackdowns reach far beyond the firewall
The 24-hour vigil started just after 8 a.m. US Eastern Time on June 3—more or less on schedule, and without any major disruptions. The event, hosted on Zoom and broadcast live on other platforms such as YouTube, was put together by Chinese activists to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Beijing’s bloody clampdown on a student-led…
AI still sucks at moderating hate speech
For all of the recent advances in language AI technology, it still struggles with one of the most basic applications. In a new study, scientists tested four of the best AI systems for detecting hate speech and found that all of them struggled in different ways to distinguish toxic and innocuous sentences. The results are…
Why the ransomware crisis suddenly feels so relentless
Just weeks after a major American oil pipeline was struck by hackers, a cyberattack hit the world’s largest meat supplier. What next? Will these criminals target hospitals and schools? Will they start going after US cities, governments—and even the military? In fact, all of these have been hit by ransomware already. While the onslaught we’ve…
The Brood X cicadas are here — and yes, there’s an app for that
A few weeks ago, Michelle Watson woke up to a deafening, steadily oscillating screech. “What the heck is that noise?” she wondered. She went outside to her yard and saw hundreds of beady-eyed insects enrobed in a thick shell of gold emerging out of the ground and crawling up the trees. What Watson was seeing…
NASA is ending its 30-year Venus drought with two new missions
The last time NASA launched a dedicated mission to Venus was in 1989. The Magellan orbiter spent four years studying Venus before it was allowed to crash into the planet’s surface. For almost 30 years, NASA has given Venus the cold shoulder. All of that is about to change with a double feature. NASA administrator…
As cybersecurity evolves, so should your board
But how many directors get lost in the technicalities of technology? The challenge for a chief information security officer (CISO) is talking to the board of directors in a way they can understand and support the company. It’s drilled into the heads of board directors and the C-suite by scary data-breach headlines, lawyers, lawsuits, and…
Seven EU countries just got a digital vaccine passport
The news: The European Union’s digital vaccine passport system went live in seven countries yesterday, ahead of a full launch for all 27 member states on July 1. The document, called a digital green certificate, shows whether someone has been fully vaccinated against covid-19, recovered from the virus, or tested negative within the last 72 hours. Travelers who…
Blue water thinking
The names of many of the new companies and technologies created to combat the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems can evoke thrilling acts of derring-do on the high seas. WaveKiller uses compressed air systems to create “walls” of bubbles up to 50 feet thick, to guard against erosion and contain waste and oil…
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