deadly

Drones have changed war. Small, cheap, and deadly robots buzz in the skies high above the world’s battlefields, taking pictures and dropping explosives. They’re hard to counter. ZeroMark, a defense startup based in the United States, thinks…

When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build…

The book currently topping the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is The Anxious Generation, a jeremiad against social media and its impact on young people. Its thesis is that apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have unleashed…

The White House has issued new rules aimed at companies that manufacture synthetic DNA after years of warnings that a pathogen made with mail-order genetic material could accidentally or intentionally spark the next pandemic.The rules,…

Philosopher Nick Bostrom is surprisingly cheerful for someone who has spent so much time worrying about ways that humanity might destroy itself. In photographs he often looks deadly serious, perhaps appropriately haunted by the existential…

While the finer points of running a social media business can be debated, one basic truth is that they all run on attention. Tech leaders are incentivized to grow their user bases so there are more people looking at more ads for more time.…

After Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, he promised it would be a new kind of defense contractor, inspired by hacker ingenuity and Silicon Valley speed.The company’s latest product, a jet-powered, AI-controlled combat drone called…

“There’s been a lot of speculation recently about the possibility of AI consciousness or self-awareness. But I wonder: Does AI have a subconscious?” —PsychobabbleDear Psychobabble, Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across an…

This post is part of our Home Remedy Handbook, a tour of the landscape of home remedies from the iffy to the doctor-approved. Read more here.Read more...

We’re back to spring: the time of renewal, rebirth, and cleaning your damn house. And I mean really cleaning—not just picking up, but moving the couch, wiping off the blades of the ceiling fan, and getting behind the fridge. Spring…