How Tech Can Help Curb Emissions by Planting 500 Billion New Trees. Trees are a low-tech, high-efficiency way to offset much of humankind's negative impact on the climate. What's even better, we have plenty of room for a lot more of them. A new study conducted by rese...

The Poker-Playing AI That Beat the World's Best Players. Poker is a powerful combination of strategy and intuition, something that's made it the most iconic of card games and devilishly difficult for machines to master. Now an AI built by Facebook and Carneg...

This Chatbot has Over 660 Million Users--and It Wants to Be Their Best Friend. Your New Best Friend? Making a new friend is a complex business. You might begin with small talk: introductions, explorations. Perhaps you bond over something you have in common: shared tastes or inter...

The Pentagon's New Laser-Based Tool Uses Your Heartbeat to Track You. The government's hefty arsenal of surveillance tools just welcomed a powerful new member. Rather than monitoring an external device--a bug or a smartphone--or even the exterior features of your face, the...

Cancer-Killing Living Drug Is Made Safer With a Simple Off Switch. When it comes to battling cancer, our most powerful weapon is also our most dangerous. You've heard of CAR-T: the cellular immunotherapy extracts a patient's own immune cells, amps up their tumor-hunti...

Alphabet Releases Its Master Plan for Toronto's New Smart City. Ever dreamed of living in a giant experiment? If so, Toronto may be the city for you. Sidewalk Labs has released blueprints for its proposed waterfront smart city and, depending who you ask, it's eithe...

Virtual Influencers Are on the Rise. How Far Will Their Influence Go? In early April 2019, something was suddenly very different about Kentucky Fried Chicken's Instagram account. In lieu of retro-style pictures of chicken, a decidedly 21st century Colonel Sanders with "S...

How the US Will Get to a 50 Percent Renewable Electric Economy by 2030 . By 2030, more than 50 percent of the US economy will run on electricity derived from renewables. What are the implications as we shift the US and global energy economies away from fossil fuels?

For the...

How the US Will Get to a 50 Percent Renewable Electric Economy by 2030. By 2030, more than 50 percent of the US economy will run on electricity derived from renewables. What are the implications as we shift the US and global energy economies away from fossil fuels? For the...

Could Lab-Grown Brains Develop Consciousness? There's a very un-sexy view of consciousness: our rich, meaningful inner experience of self and other is nothing but electrical and chemical chattering inside our brains. If you, like many scientists, ...