Category: Technology

whiteMocca/Shutterstock Until recently, AI’s role in research felt like having a useful assistant. It could summarise a paper, clean up a dataset or draft an abstract. Researchers were still in charge of the thinking. That changed in late 2025 when cutting-edge “frontier” AI models became capable of reasoning and planning reliably by themselves. A key […]

GoodStudio/Shutterstock The question sounds simple. The answer, once you examine the actual measurement science behind it, is more interesting than either “yes” or “no”. The houseplant-as-air-purifier idea can be traced to a 1989 US study, conducted for Nasa as part of research into closed-loop life support systems for space stations. In sealed, controlled chambers, certain […]

Belgian AI company Kantify was doing business as usual until a cancer diagnosis forced the team to rethink their direction. “We built algorithms for sectors like marketing or transport,” said Ségolène Martin, Kantify’s co-founder and CEO. “Those were complex projects that had nothing to do with health, but they enabled us to build a deep expertise in […]

Last week, we released apkeep version 1.0.0, the latest edition of our command-line Android package downloading software. Rather than indicating major changes for the project, this milestone instead signifies arriving at a relatively stable and mature place after gradual iteration on the project over the course of over four years. What’s New in 1.0.0 We […]

We’d all like the internet to be a better place—for kids and adults alike. But in the name of online safety, governments around the world are racing to impose a dangerous new system of control. Are age gates the silver bullet to the internet’s problems they’re being promoted as? Or are we being sold a bill […]

The federal SECURE Data Act is not a serious consumer privacy bill, and its provisions—if enacted—would be a retreat from already insufficient state protections. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of the bill late last month without bipartisan support. The bill is weaker than congressional proposals in prior years, as well […]

The robot pauses at the edge of the room as an engineer checks its sensors. Then, with a soft mechanical hum, this humanoid machine begins to move. It lifts a mannequin from a bed, slowly and carefully. The engineers hold their breath. I am in a robotics lab in Tokyo, Japan, as part of my […]

For decades, coral reefs throughout the Caribbean have been suffering from disease, pollution, overfishing and rising sea temperatures, yet most have continued to grow – until now. In 2023 and 2024, surface temperatures climbed to record highs in the world’s oceans, and a marine heatwave of unprecedented length and intensity spread across the tropics. Satellites […]

Nigma Photography/Shutterstock For generations, the mild and temperate climate of north-western Europe has been credited to one legendary force: the Gulf Stream. This idea is so deeply entrenched in our cultural identity that in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the protagonist Stephen Dedalus refuses to take a bath, arguing that “all Ireland is washed by the Gulf […]

EFF joins 18 organizations in writing a letter to UK policymakers urging them to address the root causes of online harm—rather than undermining the open web through blunt restrictions. The coalition, which includes Mozilla, Tor Project, and Open Rights Group, warns that proposed measures following the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill risk […]