It’s not easy to transplant a whole human eye. The surgery is difficult. And the eyes themselves start to degenerate as soon as they’ve left the body. When surgeons attempted it a few years ago, the newly-transplanted eye wasn’t able to see. But researchers believe they might have a solution: a device that maintains and…
As the parent of two little girls, I often think about how their childhood is different from mine. The seven-year-old is learning about AI at school. The five-year-old is given internet-based homework every week. And they are both absolutely repulsed by the idea of smoking. That was not the prevailing sentiment when I was young.…
Something stinks in California’s climate policies. Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air. It’s become wildly popular because…
Let’s start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. Now type “Another” and you’ll get 3 or 4. Type “Another” again and you’ll get 8 or 9. That won’t work every time—but if it…
At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research in the same way that Claude Code supports software engineering. Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one that your company nonetheless calls Alex, an…
Paperman is a desktop utility for Mac and Windows that adds paper-like textures over your screen to soften contrast and reduce the glossy look of modern displays.
It’s been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. Yesterday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 °C (about 97 °F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it felt like 39 °C. It’s frightening that we are seeing such temperatures in…
IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company’s previous state-of-the-art technology announced in 2021. The design could pave the way for faster and more energy efficient computers for years to come. For more than half…
It’s been hard to look away from headlines about the European heat wave this week. Temperatures are breaking records across the continent, and the weather is threatening lives, shutting down schools, and in one particularly ironic case, forcing the cancellation of a London Climate Action Week event about extreme heat. As the summer ramps up…