The Diabetes Patients Who Hacked A Pancreas
While diabetics anxiously awaited the release of commercial systems, tech-savvy diabetics and their loved ones worked on do-it-yourself systems. How could a bunch of hackers, working in their free time, create something medical manufacturing companies had yet to put on the market?
How To Fight Lies, Tricks And Chaos Online
It took me years to really understand where all the information I saw online was coming from. So this isn’t just a guide to spotting when something is fake. It’s a system for slowing down and thinking about information — whether that information is true, false, or something in between.
The Confessions Of Marcus Hutchins, The Hacker Who Saved The Internet
At 22, he saved the internet from what was the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. It was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry’s global threat immediately. Then he was arrested by the FBI.
Yoga With Adriene: How The YouTube Star Won Lockdown
Adriene Mishler was already huge before the pandemic – her channel, which has more than 7 million subscribers, is the first to pop up when you search for “yoga” on YouTube – but the lockdown has catapulted her to a new level of fame.
The Criminalization Of The American Midwife
New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.
A Forest Submerged 60,000 Years Ago Could Save Your Life One Day
Before this underwater forest in the Gulf of Mexico disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that could serve as incubators of unexpected medicines, churning out new lifesaving formulas and compounds that may not be found anywhere else on the planet.
Scientists Found Ancient, Never-Before-Seen Viruses In A Glacier
Researchers have recovered evidence of ancient viruses in the glacier ice, including 28 viral groups that are new to science. As our planet undergoes climate change, these frozen records can inform predictions about which microorganisms will survive, and what the resulting environment will look like.
The Lost Art Of Concentration: Being Distracted In A Digital World
We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause button. Experts are telling us that these interruptions and distractions have eroded our ability to concentrate.
How To Tell If You’re Talking To A Bot
It’s important not to be swayed by fake accounts or waste your time arguing with them, and identifying bots in a Twitter thread has become a strange version of the Turing test. Advances in machine learning hint at how bots could become more humanlike.
The Danger Of Fast Carbs
The average American eats more than 1,000 calories of rapidly digestible starches and sugars every day, and gets 500 more from the fats and oils added to many of these products. Starch serves as the carrier for much of the fat, sugar, and salt that we ingest, and like sugar, it is converted into rapidly absorbable glucose.
Under The Weather
As psychiatrists and philosophers begin to define a pervasive mental health crisis triggered by climate change, they ask who is really sick: the individual or society?
Is Poverty Necessary?
Progress is dynamic, self-generating, unpredictable. Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests.
How To Digitize Handwritten Notes
A number of smart devices offer to digitize your scribblings, either as you write or shortly afterward. In addition to storing images of your notebook pages in electronic form, some of these hardware and software packages actually convert your writings into searchable text.
Iron Is The New Cholesterol
Oxygen and iron are essential for the production of energy, but may also conspire to destroy the delicate order of our cells. Elevated iron is at the center of a web of disease stretching from cancer to diabetes.
We Asked An AI To Write A Column For Us. The Results Were Wild
We’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real article, and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be.
A New Start-Up Wants To Use AI To Replace “Expensive, Architect-Designed” Homes
Tech start-up Higharc aims to “reinvent home design for the digital age.” The company uses iterative design to create “custom” 3D models and plans. Algorithmic design isn’t new to architecture, but it looks like Higharc seeks to do away with “expensive, architect-designed plans that take forever to produce.”
The Great Vape Debate: Are E-cigarettes Saving Smokers Or Creating New Addicts?
Behind the outright ban on sales of e-cigarettes in San Francisco is a panic about teenagers vaping. More than one in four American teens have tried vaping. In the UK, meanwhile, the medical establishment is endorsing vaping as an aid to giving up smoking. Where does the truth lie?
The Tech Giants Are Coming For Our Homes
The likes of Amazon, Google, Samsung, Apple and others are all competing for smart home dominance – but what drove so many of us to invite these multinational corporations into the highly personal spaces where we live?
Why Government Websites Fail
While the rest of the world has evolved to a place where we can track anything at all times and order anything from anywhere, government has been hopelessly stranded on an island in 1993.
The Apps On My Phone Are Stalking Me
Your location, your purchases, video and audio from within your home and office, your online searches and every digital wandering, biometric tracking of your face and other body parts, your heart rate and other vital signs, your every communication, recording, and perhaps your deepest thoughts or idlest dreams.
How All Our Tech Heroes Turned Into Tech Villains
Tech giants and their leaders have come to dominate public discourse in a way that few other industries have. They’ve unleashed products that are basically indispensable in modern life. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elizabeth Holmes all promised game-changing improvements on American life. What happened?