When pundits and researchers tried to guess what sort of manipulation campaigns might threaten the 2018 and 2020 elections, misleading AI-generated videos often topped the list. Though the tech was still emerging, its potential for abuse was so alarming that tech companies and academic labs prioritized working on, and funding, methods of detection. Social platforms…
There are few animals more bizarre than the anglerfish, a species that has so much trouble finding a mate that when the male and female do connect underwater, males actually fuse their tissue with the females for life. After the merger, the two share a single respiratory and digestive system.Now scientists have discovered that the…
The federal government on Tuesday asked a federal judge to sentence Anthony Levandowski to 27 months in prison for theft of trade secrets. In March, Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing a single confidential document related to Google’s self-driving technology on his way out the door to his new startup. That startup was quickly acquired by…
It’s common knowledge that an Amazon Prime membership nets you free two-day shipping. But there are additional benefits that make the service more worthwhile, and considering the cost of a yearly membership, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you aren’t taking advantage of all of them. Below, we’ve listed some of the benefits you should…
The living world turns chaos into order by making large structures out of small units. The sublime coordination of a flock of birds or a school of fish—built iteratively from the twitches and bumps of single individuals—turns instinctive behaviors into something vast and graceful. It’s not just for show. A lone gazelle can’t evade a…
If you have an Amazon Prime membership (maybe it’s where you’ve been buying all your toilet paper during the pandemic) then you’re likely aware of the key benefits: free shipping, access to special deals, and the free streaming movies and TV shows. But there are a host of other, lesser-known benefits available to Prime customers,…
US representatives Will Hurd and Robin Kelly are from opposite sides of the ever-widening aisle, but they share a concern that the US may lose its grip on artificial intelligence, threatening the American economy and the balance of world power.Thursday, Hurd (R-Texas) and Kelly (D-Illinois) offered suggestions to prevent the US from falling behind China,…
Last weekend, a young girl held up her smartphone and hit the Go Live button on Twitch’s mobile app. Her stream appeared under Twitch’s Just Chatting section, where people livestream themselves talking to their viewers. She explains that she’s about to do her morning routine. Within minutes, 11 viewers filed in, including her best friend…
At the House Judiciary Committee hearing on July 29, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai each tried to defend their company against antitrust regulation by touting their values as an American corporation. Placed in opposition to this, for some, was an enemy more menacing than all of them:…
In 2018, Aneesh Chaganty released a little thriller called Searching. It was the writer-director’s debut feature, and it garnered him a bit of attention (and eventually $75 million at the box office). Centered on a young father trying to find his missing daughter by scouring social media, the movie relied on a novel narrative tool:…
