Features and Investigations

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These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat 

In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs.  Kids love

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Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind

Have you ever thought about what makes you you? Science assures us it has everything to do with the three-pound organ between our ears, with its billions of neurons and trillions of delicate connections. But it’s a lot trickier to explain why we have a sense of self-awareness or to pin down precisely where that

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a machine on a workbench with tubes and jars

The US military’s race to make fake blood

Its call sign was Morphine 1-2.   In February 2007, the hulking dual-­rotor casualty evacuation helicopter had just flown three wounded soldiers to a field hospital in Balad, north of Baghdad, when another call came: an emergency mission to fly through an insurgent-controlled area in broad daylight. Typically, helicopters would be in a spot like

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Mars may be a hellhole, but the moon is not far behind

Welcome to the second space race. You can be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. Last time, it was the Soviet Union and the United States vying to be the first to plant some flags. Now it’s a sprint to the lunar surface between America and China—alongside a host of varyingly friendly and rival nations—plus a

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We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no

Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary.  But recently, the idea that AI shouldn’t

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View from the grid location where a body was found towards Border Patrol Surveillance Tower 022, along the southern U.S. border in Sunland Park, New Mexico.

The US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can’t it catch people before they die?

When José Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses.  As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed

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God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything.

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. Now he likens the experience to having “a thought that is not my thought.” Divine words echo in his mind like a

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AI models flub these intelligence tests. Can you fare any better?

Puzzles and games have been central to AI development since the very beginning. Just as we humans like to test our smarts with crosswords or logic puzzles, developers can test how far models have advanced with a gaming gauntlet. The term “machine learning” was popularized in a 1959 article by the IBM computer scientist Arthur

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Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried

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