IT infomation

Last week, European Union leaders approved the most aggressive climate-change plan in history. The eye-catching part was the $600 billion dedicated to green measures, spread across a massive economic recovery package and the seven-year EU budget approved in concert. All of it will be directed toward achieving the previously announced European Green Deal goal of […]

In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan to study at home together this fall as the pandemic creeps into a new academic year.  Homeschooling, this is not. As local and federal governments

The US Space Command has announced it’s found evidence that Russia recently conducted a test of anti-satellite weapons, albeit one that did not destroy or harm any objects. SpaceCom claims that on July 15, Russian satellite Kosmos 2543 deployed a new object into its own orbit, similar to a previous anti-satellite demonstration in 2017.  What does

When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed.  Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown just

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common systems involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluations to help determine which candidates to interview.  While activists and scholars warn that these screening tools can perpetuate discrimination, the makers themselves

The news: China’s Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully lifted off shortly before 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, July 23, Chinese media reported. The mission, which includes a lander, rover, and orbiter, is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in February 2021. China is the first nation to try to transport all three components

Earlier this week as a pandemic raged across the United States, residents were cut off from the only publicly available source of aggregated data on the nation’s intensive care and hospital bed capacity. When the Trump administration stripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of control over coronavirus data, it also took that

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It

Morgan Eckroth became famous on TikTok as morgandrinkscoffee. A 21-year-old barista and social-media manager for Tried & True Coffee in Corvallis, Oregon, she shares latte art, dramatic reenactments of customer interactions, and drink tutorials with her 4 million followers. Before the pandemic her content was pretty wholesome—she likes her job! But then in May, someone

The news: Russian hackers targeted UK, US, and Canadian researchers developing coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from the United Kingdom, American, and Canadian intelligence services. The hackers: The Russian intelligence hacking group known as Cozy Bear or APT29 has been blamed. You might know Cozy from its many previous high-profile cyber-espionage ventures, most notably

When France launched its app for digital contact tracing, it looked like a possible breakthrough for the virus-ravaged country. After going live in June, StopCovid was downloaded by 2 million people in a short time, and digital affairs minister Cédric O said that “from the first downloads, the app helps avoid contamination, illness, and so

The context: One of the greatest unsolved flaws of deep learning is its vulnerability to so-called adversarial attacks. When added to the input of an AI system, these perturbations, seemingly random or undetectable to the human eye, can make things go completely awry. Stickers strategically placed on a stop sign, for example, can trick a

This was the week airborne transmission became a big deal in the public discussion about covid-19. Over 200 scientists from around the world cosigned a letter to the World Health Organization urging it to take seriously the growing evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted through the air. WHO stopped short of redefining SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes covid-19)

This virtual panel session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next conference takes an in-depth look at Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review’s recently released research, Opportunity Marketplaces, which sits at the center of this paradigm shift in business strategy, and asks: are you ready to fast forward and accelerate the future of work? This content was

There’s a certain routine to logging on to the now-ubiquitous videoconference: join a screen of Brady Bunch–like squares, ping-ponging your gaze between speakers but mostly staring self-consciously at your own face. What started as a novelty of working at home is now an exhausting ordeal that can leave us feeling mentally wiped out.  Microsoft thinks

Are you hiding from covid-19? I am. The reason is simple: the high chance of death from the virus.  I was reminded of the risk last week by this report from the New York City health department and Columbia University which estimated that on average, between March and May, the chance of dying if you get infected

In 1996 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the