Daniel Rourke /stream

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When King George III of England began to show signs of acute mania toward the end of his reign, rumors about the royal madness multiplied quickly in the public mind. One…

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The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment…

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Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a…

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Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a…

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Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

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Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

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In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow…

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When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease.

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Although he worked on a farm as a teenager and has a romantic attachment to the soil, ­Lippman isn’t a farmer. He’s a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in…

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When businesses latch onto a buzzword, it quickly becomes the solution to everything. Not long ago, in the era of “big data,” companies scrambled to add chief data scientists to their…

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The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

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Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the…

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Horror movies don’t have the best track record when it comes to depicting queer characters. Often there are no LGBT characters at all, and when they do appear they’re likely to…

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The satellite company Planet is used to breaking records. In 2014, a rocket exploded with a payload of the company’s satellites inside—26, the biggest loss ever.

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H.P. Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, and references to his Cthulhu Mythos abound in contemporary culture. But Lovecraft was also…

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Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Lee Sedol is rather surprised that Google has fashioned an artificially intelligent system that so skillfully plays the ancient game of Go.

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To the computer scientist Leslie Valiant, “machine learning” is redundant. In his opinion, a toddler fumbling with a rubber ball and a deep-learning network classifying cat photos are both learning; calling…

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When King George III of England began to show signs of acute mania toward the end of his reign, rumors about the royal madness multiplied quickly in the public mind. One…

Bookmark

The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment…

Bookmark

Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a…

Bookmark

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

Bookmark

The mouse didn't look like much. It had the same red beady eyes and white fur as any other laboratory mouse. Sure, its DNA had been tweaked to make it ideal…

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Te Hiku Media gathered huge swathes of Māori language data. Corporates are now trying to get the rights to it

Bookmark

In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow…

Bookmark

When biologists synthesize DNA, they take pains not to create or spread a dangerous stretch of genetic code that could be used to create a toxin or, worse, an infectious disease.

Bookmark

Although he worked on a farm as a teenager and has a romantic attachment to the soil, ­Lippman isn’t a farmer. He’s a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in…

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Levandowski’s church will enter a tech universe that’s already riven by debate over the promise and perils of AI. Some thinkers, like Kevin Kelly in Backchannel earlier this year, argue that…

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The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics.

Bookmark

Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the…

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This story is part of our special coverage, The News in Crisis. When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat…

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The satellite company Planet is used to breaking records. In 2014, a rocket exploded with a payload of the company’s satellites inside—26, the biggest loss ever.

Bookmark

H.P. Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, and references to his Cthulhu Mythos abound in contemporary culture. But Lovecraft was also…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play…

Bookmark

To the computer scientist Leslie Valiant, “machine learning” is redundant. In his opinion, a toddler fumbling with a rubber ball and a deep-learning network classifying cat photos are both learning; calling…

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In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern…