Personalized algorithms may quietly sabotage how people learn, nudging them into narrow tunnels of information even when they start with zero prior knowledge. In the study, participants using ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

Social media algorithms shape what users see, influencing emotions, perceptions, and mental well-being in ways that often go unnoticed. This article examines how these automated systems can amplify ...

In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to the ...

Daniel Mendelsohn, a humanities professor at Bard College, gave a lecture Monday about his experience translating Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.” Mendelsohn’s translation of “The Odyssey” was ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

Will Starbucks’ AI be able to predict your order in the future? At the annual Dreamforce AI conference last week, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol hinted at blue sky innovations like predictive ordering and ...

Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists ...

Every time a new slang word gets coined on the Internet, linguist Adam Aleksic is thrilled. “It’s definitely good for me in that I stay in business,” says Aleksic, who studies the origins of words and ...

Do you remember the early days of social media? The promise of connection, of democratic empowerment, of barriers crumbling and gates opening? In those heady days, the co-founder of Twitter said that ...

How do the algorithms that populate our social media feeds actually work? In a piece for Time Magazine excerpted from his recent book Robin Hood Math, Noah Giansiracusa sheds light on the algorithms ...

Coal has been on the way out for a decade now. The industry’s future was considered mainly dead and buried — until the Trump administration decided to dig it out of the grave. Rowland-Shea is the ...