Author: Melissa Hogan

Some of the world’s most astute planetary scientists are quietly being forced to reconsider long-held beliefs by a rock that sits inside an old Martian river valley. The rock is about the size of a briefcase and is pale in patches with dark flecks. In the pictures, it doesn’t appear to be much. However, the more you understand about its contents, the more difficult it is to turn away. In July 2024, the Perseverance rover discovered it while traveling through Neretva Vallis, a channel formed by water rushing into a living, breathing Martian lake billions of years ago. The rock,…

The Los Alamos photos from 1945 capture a moment that sticks in your memory. In the New Mexico desert, scientists with short sleeves—some of them barely thirty—stand with the quiet assurance of those who have just completed an irreversible task. They were also aware of it. On the morning of the first atomic bomb explosion, Robert Oppenheimer famously recalled a passage from Hindu scripture. “Now I am become death,” he declared, “the destroyer of worlds.” Years passed before the full impact of what they had created became apparent to the general public. Some AI industry researchers feel that we are…

At one point, while reading a paper from Cambridge’s Hitachi Laboratory, the phrase “retroactively change your previous actions” begins to sound less like science fiction and more like something subtly frightening. It doesn’t specifically describe a time machine; rather, it implies—with actual mathematical support—that the distinction between what actually occurred and what might have occurred is more hazy than most of us have ever felt comfortable picturing. It appears that reality might be more brittle than we previously believed. And more and more physicists appear to concur. In October 2023, David Arvidsson-Shukur and his colleagues published their findings in Physical…

Think about what your brain is doing right now, just reading this sentence. It’s pulling meaning from symbols, sequencing sounds you’re not even hearing aloud, predicting what comes next. And for most of human history, we had no idea how any of that actually worked. We had theories, frameworks, competing schools of thought — but the actual mechanical signature of the brain doing its job? That remained stubbornly invisible. Until recently, a series of discoveries has begun pulling back the curtain, and some of the most surprising clues are coming not from biology, but from artificial intelligence. Discovery NameMultiscale Neural…

People who carefully read Microsoft’s Copilot terms of service have been quietly unnerved by a line that is buried deep within. Copilot is clearly stated to be “for entertainment purposes only.” Users are cautioned not to depend on it when making critical decisions. They are instructed to use it “at your own risk.” That is quite a statement to put in the fine print for a product that Microsoft has spent billions promoting as an essential productivity tool to Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, law firms, and banks. In October 2025, the terms were revised. Since then, Microsoft has admitted that…

The way the ground beneath your feet behaves in ways that no one fully anticipated has a subtle, unsettling quality. The deep interior, thousands of kilometers below the surface, is where iron is compressed so severely that it ceases to follow the normal laws of matter. This is not the surface, the crust on which we construct cities and bury cables. For decades, scientists believed they had a plausible image of the Earth’s inner core. solid metal. dependable, stiff, and dense. Sitting in the middle of everything is a sort of planetary anchor. It turns out that there was a…

There is a certain type of tension that doesn’t make a big announcement. It builds up covertly in budget line items, Hangzhou’s subsidized office parks, chip shipment logs, and research papers that are released at three in the morning. That kind of tension is present in the race between China and the United States to develop the most potent AI ever. Not a conflict. It’s not a crisis yet. However, if you watch it long enough, it seems like the ground is shifting beneath your feet. This week, world leaders convened in New Delhi for the India AI Impact Summit.…

When conversing with one of these more recent AI systems, there is a moment when something seems a little strange. Not exactly incorrect, but rather unexpected. The answer is a little too contextually aware and a beat too knowing. You dismiss it. You tell yourself that it’s just code. advanced matching of patterns. Perhaps that is all there is to it. However, a number of researchers, some of whom are based in Germany, are no longer completely certain, and their uncertainty is beginning to feel more serious than most people realize. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich mathematician Johannes Kleiner has…

The legal machinery that powers America’s biggest court settlements has an almost imperceptible quality. The majority of people receive a notice in the mail informing them that they might be eligible for compensation from a class action lawsuit; occasionally, this notice ends up in the spam folder. They quickly scan it, believe it to be a scam, and discard it. They are unaware that a highly developed operation is on the other end, prepared to handle their claim and write them a check. Most of the time, Kroll Settlement Administration is that operation. Kroll has over fifty years of experience…

When heard in the proper context, a certain moment tends to land differently. Early in January, Dean Beeler, the tech chief and co-founder of Juice Labs, shared on Facebook that a few months prior, he had spent about $300 on 256 gigabytes of RAM, which is the most that his motherboard can handle. “Who knew,” he said, “that would end up being ~$3,000 of RAM just a few months later.” It’s not a rounding error. In less than a year, that is a ten-fold price increase in a product category that most people consider to be a commodity.In a nutshell,…