Features and Investigations

Auto Added by WPeMatico

AI is already making online swindles easier. It could get much worse.

Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that. It was a file uploaded to VirusTotal, a site cybersecurity researchers like him use to analyze submissions for potential viruses and other types of malicious software, often known as malware. On the surface it seemed […]

AI is already making online swindles easier. It could get much worse. Read More »

How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint

Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutrons, which bump into other atoms, continuing the chain reaction.  That reaction gives off heat, which can be used directly or help turn water

How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint Read More »

Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens

How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there’s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it—every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see—covered in sheets of paper. Now

Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens Read More »

Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war

Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers of the 4th Light Brigade, also known as the Black Rats, descended upon the damp forests of Estonia’s eastern territories. They had rushed in from Yorkshire by air, sea, rail, and road. Once there, the Rats joined 14,000 other troops at the front line, dug in, and waited for the

Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war Read More »

This Nobel Prize–winning chemist dreams of making water from thin air

Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family’s most vital chores: fetching water. Like most homes in his Palestinian neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, the Yaghis’ had no electricity or running water. At least once

This Nobel Prize–winning chemist dreams of making water from thin air Read More »

AI materials discovery now needs to move into the real world

The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t look all that different from others that I’ve seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, the machine zaps a palette of different elements to create vaporized particles, which then fly through the chamber and land to create a thin film, using a technique

AI materials discovery now needs to move into the real world Read More »