As wind-driven wildfires spread through the Los Angeles area[1] in January 2025, fire-spotting technology and computer models were helping firefighters understand the rapidly changing environment they were facing.

That technology has evolved over the years, yet some techniques are very similar to those used over 100 years ago[2].

I have spent...

Authors: Staff

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a smartphone screen showing text and a small icon of a blue whale

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT[1], Google’s Gemini[2] and Anthropic’s Claude[3] have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts. Those companies have also captured headlines with the huge sums[4] they’ve invested to build ever more powerful...

Authors: Staff

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Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

It is exceedingly difficult[1] to get a handle on exactly how big the problem...

Authors: Staff

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Wearable devices[1] have become a big part of modern health care, helping track a patient’s heart rate, stress levels and brain activity. These devices rely on electrodes[2], sensors that touch the skin to pick up electrical signals from the body.

Creating these electrodes isn’t as easy as it might seem. Human skin is complex[3]. Its...

Authors: Staff

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