How the pandemic readied Alibaba’s AI for the world’s biggest shopping day

The news: While the US has been hooked on its election, China has been shopping. From November 1 to 11, the country’s top e-comm…

AI is wrestling with a replication crisis

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the …

It might not feel like it, but the election is working

The election process is working.  A  long-building “chaos” narrative  being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the e…

Why counting votes in Pennsylvania is taking so long

So Election Day is over, but the election continues. The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting i…

Election robocalls: what we know and what we don’t

Millions of voters across the US received robocalls and texts encouraging them to stay at home on Election Day, in what experts b…

AI godfather Geoff Hinton: “Deep learning is going to be able to do everything”

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition…

How Amazon’s offsets could exaggerate its progress toward “net zero” emissions

In April, Amazon announced it would contribute $10 million to a pair of projects designed to pay forest owners across the Appala…

How claims of voter fraud were supercharged by bad science

During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political strategy. Instead of targeting Repu…

Not finding life on Venus would be disappointing. But it’s good science at work.

Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds  came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial li…

The five biggest effects Trump has had on the US space program

The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space sh…