Scientific

Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier’s Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned “with heartfelt sadness and great regret,” according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of…

In 2025 we will see AI and machine learning leveraged to make real progress in understanding animal communication, answering a question that has puzzled humans as long as we have existed: “What are animals saying to each other?” The recent…

A former ByteDance intern who was allegedly dismissed for professional misconduct, including sabotaging colleagues’ work, was announced as a winner of one of the most prestigious annual awards for AI research this week. Keyu Tian, whose…

MLCommons, a nonprofit that helps companies measure the performance of their artificial intelligence systems, is launching a new benchmark to gauge AI’s bad side too.The new benchmark, called AILuminate, assesses the responses of large…

Kevin: When we went to do the IPO, it was very, very clear that the digital side was far more valuable than the magazine side. That was the beginning of the craziness. Here’s a magazine that has a lot of revenue, respectability, great…

Eric Lander is a Big Science heavyweight. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he led the International Human Genome Project and is founding director of the powerful Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. His countless…

Google added that part of the problem it faces in generating its AI Overviews is that, for some very specific queries, there’s an absence of high quality information on the web. And there’s little doubt that Lynn’s work is not of high…

The extent to which academics are likely to follow the media attention, money, and Nobel Prize committee plaudits is a question that vexes Julian Togelius, an associate professor of computer science at New York University’s Tandon School of…

In the past two years the French capital has been in the throes of AI fever and has launched some of Europe’s most talked-about startups, including Mistral, which is currently valued at $6.2 billion (£4.7 billion). That’s partly down to the…

Deep doubt impacts more than just current events and legal issues. In 2020, I wrote about a potential “cultural singularity,” a threshold where truth and fiction in media become indistinguishable. A key part of the threshold is the level of…