In early 2020, Christine Dibble had recently retired from the federal government and was eager to travel more, but the coronavirus outbreak put those plans on hold. Grounded at home in Washington Grove, Md., Dibble started to play around with…
The day after a missile struck a shopping mall in central Ukraine in June, killing at least 18 people, the Spanish-language arm of Russia’s global television network, RT en Español, took to Facebook to challenge the facts of the attack….
SAN FRANCISCO — Snapchat, the ephemeral messaging app, introduced its first parental controls on Tuesday, as social media platforms face increasing scrutiny for exposing young users to potentially harmful content. Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, said in a blog post that…
The Treasury Department on Monday prohibited Americans from using the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, saying the service has helped criminals launder more than $7 billion of virtual currencies. The crackdown was the U.S. government’s latest effort to rein in the…
Policymakers in Washington are promoting electric vehicles as a solution to climate change. But an uncomfortable truth remains: Battery-powered cars are much too expensive for a vast majority of Americans. Congress has begun trying to address that problem. The climate…
If it hadn’t been so excruciatingly sad, Alex Jones’s defamation trial might have been cathartic. Mr. Jones, the supplement-slinging conspiracy theorist, was ordered to pay more than $45 million in damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of…
If it hadn’t been so excruciatingly sad, Alex Jones’s defamation trial might have been cathartic. Mr. Jones, the supplement-slinging conspiracy theorist, was ordered to pay more than $45 million in damages to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of…
Hey, Alexa, tell Roomba to vacuum the bedroom. Amazon announced on Friday that it had reached an agreement to buy iRobot Corp., the maker of the Roomba robotic vacuum, for $1.7 billion, adding to its growing roster of smart home…
Why Everyone Else Believes In the mid-1960s, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Joseph Weizenbaum, built an automated psychotherapist he called Eliza. This chatbot was simple. Basically, when you typed a thought onto a computer screen, it asked…
In June, 100 fruit fly scientists gathered on the Greek island of Crete for their biennial meeting. Among them was Cassandra Extavour, a Canadian geneticist at Harvard University. Her lab works with fruit flies to study evolution and development —…
