Download: How AI is changing internet search, and the future of privacy in the US
Every day, we are tracked by hundreds or even thousands in the digital world. All of this is collected, packaged together with other details, and used to create highly personal profiles that are then shared or sold, often without our explicit knowledge or consent. to send them would require Congress to pass a comprehensive federal privacy law. So...
Panasonic Z95A OLED TV Review: Searing Brightness and Color
Photo: Ryan Waniata Thanks to the excellent image processing, details pop, from 4K Blu-ray crystal to 1080p and even upscaling 720p. Only the fuzziest SD image fails to impress, sometimes it comes across a little blocky, but that's true of pretty much all 4K TVs. The only minor chinks in the armor I noticed over the course of a...
What’s next for AI in 2025
How do we calculate the end time? The four hot trends to watch out for in 2024 include so-called special chatbots - interactive assistant applications powered by multimodal big language models (check: we don't know yet, but we're talking about what are now called agents, the hottest thing in AI now); generative video (check: some technology has improved...
The Best Automatic Espresso, Latte, and Cappuccino Machines (2025)
Affetto is on the expensive side, and as an automatic machine can be finicky. Just make sure that it is topped up with water and beans, and that it cleans out the background container used regularly, and it works like a dream. Most Convenient, Easy CleanupWe love this machine. It's the best Keurig we've used (8/10, WIRED Recommendations) and...
Download: What’s next for AI, and stem cell therapy
Over the past few years, we've been trying to predict what's coming in AI. A silly game given how fast this industry moves. But we're on a roll, and we're doing it again. How do we calculate the end of the round? The four hot trends to watch out for in 2024 are pretty much nailed down by...
A New York legislator wants to take part of the California AI bill off
The bill only covers models that pass a certain threshold for the amount of computation required, usually measured in FLOPs (floating-point operations). In the bill, the guaranteed models are those that require more than 1026 FLOPs in training and cost more than $100 million. For reference, GPT-4 is estimated to require 1025 FLOPs. This approach can attract the...
2025 is a critical year for climate technology
One company, called Stegra, is close to launching the world's first commercial green steel plant, which will make the metal using hydrogen from renewable sources. (You may know this company by its former name, H2 Green Steel, as we were included in the list of 2023 Climate Technology Companies to Watch.) When I started following Stegra a few...
A New Superconductive Material Has Been Discovered
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 2024, superconductivity - the flow of electric current with zero resistance - was discovered in three different materials. Two instances of textbook understanding of the phenomenon. All three shreds are done. "This is an extraordinary form of superconductivity that many people would say is impossible," said Ashvin Vishwanath,...
Download: Greener steel, and what 2025 means for climate technology
By 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of steel will be produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan with a layer of more than 13 feet. Making this metal produces a lot of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of carbon emissions in the world-one of the largest industrial emitters and far more than sources such as...
How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic
I first covered the virus in an article published on January 7, 2020, titled "Doctors scramble to identify mysterious disease emerging in China." For that article, and many others to follow, I spoke with people who are experts in viruses, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. Often, the answer to my questions about the virus, how it spreads, and the...
