Author: Michael

Aswin Singaram Natarajan rolls a stem of wheat in his hands. It looks perfectly healthy, but the senior experimental scientist at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, knows his eyes can deceive him. A plant could look green and vital and still be losing—losing too much energy or losing too much water or filling its grain to ripeness too slowly. And while these weaknesses are invisible to the human eye, they’re plain as day to the right instrument.

Read More

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub. It’s also where the backlash now sweeping the country arguably first began taking shape. Driving through it is surreal. Concrete monolithic buildings loom along every major road, with names like Skybox and CloudHQ. It’s accepted wisdom in Big Tech that the war against data centers must be about…

Read More

By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has never had a secret he couldn’t resist blurting out on television. His latest slip-up — if we can really call it that — happened during an interview with CBS’ new and improved 60 Minutes program on Sunday evening. During the interview, Trump took a bizarre left-turn in the conversation to share news that the White House almost moved to arrest a top tech executive over some vague problems with AI safety. It was a “situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI,” Trump explained, using the…

Read More

Subtle differences in brain activity may reveal who is most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease and who could remain mentally sharp well into old age. Distinct patterns of brain activity may predict Alzheimer’s disease years before memory problems or hallmark brain changes appear. Stanford Medicine researchers have developed a scoring system that identifies people at greater […]

Read More

The US military has published a Request for Information on a federal procurement website signaling interest in deploying a “proliferated cislunar constellation” consisting of an unspecified number of satellites performing an undisclosed mission in the vicinity of the Moon. The announcement follows statements in recent months from the Space Force’s acquisitions chief for advanced programs, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, that the military was getting serious about extending its reach to the Moon. The Space Force’s most distant satellites today are in geostationary orbit, some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator, collecting routine surveillance and missile warning data. Most recently,…

Read More