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AI could learn and adapt like humans with algorithms that work like genes.

It might be more accurate to think of many of the brain’s 10 billion neurons as being deep networks, with five to eight layers in each one.

To understand self-organization in nature, behold the sandpile.

There’s a rude charm to the title, “Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You.” It’s catchy, like the title of an antagonistic explainer: Here are the causes of your lackluster social life. It sounds more like a New York Times op-ed than an academic paper. But in fact, “Why Your Friends Have More Friends […]

Last year, hackers made headlines after they breached SolarWinds, a software company that specializes in network monitoring software. About 33,000 organizations, including the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department, and some intelligence agencies, use Orion, one of SolarWinds’ products. Orion was designed to monitor the users’ networks to make sure they were functioning properly and, ironically, […]

The language algorithm GPT-3 continues our descent into a post-truth world.

A past generation’s glory can be the next generation’s headache.

Why facial recognition has led to false arrests.

 In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne foretold a Malthusian future of famine and disease if humanity failed to control its growth. The Ehrlichs’ warning made sense. At the time, the global population sat at about 3.5 billion, and its rate of growth was 2.1 percent—close to the […]

Adam Kucharski explains how diseases like COVID-19 and misinformation spread.