News

“What do you mean my actions have consequences? I’m literally just a girl.” This year, your feed has likely been blessed by the avatars of machinic girlhood: angels, bimbos, and the collective entity of “girls,” divine creatures who have transcended earthly bodies, curiously evacuated of anger, pain, attachment, who have …

The United States Environmental Protection Agency blocked its employees from accessing ChatGPT while the US State Department staff in Guinea used it to draft speeches and social media posts. Maine banned its executive branch employees from using generative artificial intelligence for the rest of the year out of concern for …

It’s scariant season—again. A new offshoot of Omicron, BA.2.86—nicknamed Pirola—has popped up in Israel, the US, South Africa, and the UK after it was first recorded in Denmark in late July. Pirola initially set off alarm bells because it was spotted in four countries at the same time—and because, having …

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison …

Standing on the marina, Rob Skelly peers into the darkness of the river where bright speckles of algae drift in the water. A neon green invader. “It’s starting to build,” he says. “Tomorrow, you’ll find that there’s clumps like that all over the river—and then the day after that there’ll …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles—those moving much faster than the rest—traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists …

Apple and Google have made it incredibly easy for us to back up our precious photos and videos from our phones. It all happens automatically in the background, with no wires or extra software involved, and all that these companies ask in return is a few dollars a month and …

A family member’s hurried Google search for a last-second visa to visit New Zealand recently caused a headache—and provided a timely reminder of why Google faces a landmark US antitrust trial next week. Tapping on the first link took us off to a website that after a few swipes charged …