As facial recognition technologies have evolved from fledgling projects into powerful software platforms, researchers and civil liberties advocates have been issuing warnings about the potential for privacy erosions. Those mounting fears came to a head Wednesday in Congress. Alarms over facial recognition had already gained urgency in recent years, as studies have shown that the […]
Read MoreThe opening to Chris Hughes’ much-publicized New York Times essay yesterday—attacking the company that made him vastly wealthy—was almost Shakespearean in its drama. After describing his last personal meeting with the Zuckerbergs—in their house, sharing a hug in parting with Mark’s wife, Priscilla—he lays out in 6,000-word detail how the empire Mark Zuckerberg built should […]
Read MoreAuthor’s note: On my show, Marketplace Tech, we’ve launched a series on the technology behind climate change adaptation. It’s called How We Survive. You can find the first week’s worth of special coverage here, and stories will be ongoing as this conversation and technology evolve. Here’s an unpopular opinion in some circles: We are going […]
Read MorePhotoshop played an outsize role in the odious college admissions scandal that broke earlier this year. Rick Singer, the concierge to the stars who pleaded guilty in March to money laundering and racketeering in a scheme to get rich children into luxury-brand colleges, used the software to graft the heads of teens onto the muscled […]
Read MoreTo keep our personal and mortal concerns about aging in perspective, it helps to know we’re not alone. Turns out that the moon also shrinks and wrinkles as it gets older, just like the rest of us. A new paper published this week reveals that there’s more going on with the moon, seismically speaking, than […]
Read MoreThe Simpson Desert stretches 68,000 miles across central Australia, but it looks as surreal as anything on Mars. There are more than 1,100 parallel sand dunes, each a wind-sculpted ridge of quartz grains coated in iron oxide, which rusts over time, producing awesome red vistas that aerial surveyor Cecil Thomas Madigan noted, in 1946, "responded […]
Read MoreIn the early morning of April 21, 10 students from the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab piled into the back of a pickup truck with a 13-foot rocket wedged between them and drove down a dusty dirt road to a launchpad near Spaceport America, in southern New Mexico. When they arrived, their teammates […]
Read MoreYou can almost hear the gleam in Fred Kennedy’s eyes when he talks about the Space Development Agency, a new US Department of Defense organization. The agency's new director, Kennedy uses words like agile and innovative. He makes statements such as, "We’re going to break a little glass and be a little provocative." Not the […]
Read MoreSteven Ramirez says you can save the Black Mirror references. He’s already heard his work compared to nearly every dystopian movie about memory—from the campy Total Recall and the shadowy neo-noir of Minority Report to the tragicomic heart-string-pulling of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But when you visit Ramirez’s lab on the southern shore […]
Read MoreEveryone knows the time-travel rules: Don't go back and meet your previous self; don't crush on your mom; and, as tempting as it is, don't try to kill an evil tyrant. Despite their obviousness, these tropes are still trotted out in most time-travel movies—including, most recently, Avengers: Endgame. See You Yesterday considers that history and […]
Read More