You’ve probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species—the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals—and, well, one thing led to another, which is why some people now carry…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It’s a marathon, not a sprint, after…
If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can’t even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI’s annual report card, comes out today and cuts through some of that noise. …
Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion. Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his…
Grizzly bears have made such a comeback across eastern Montana that in 2017, the state hired its first-ever prairie-based grizzly manager: wildlife biologist Wesley Sarmento. For some seven years, Sarmento worked to keep both the bears, which are still listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the humans, who are sprawling into once-wild…
Is it the Department of Defense or the Department of War? The Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America? A vaccine—or an “individualized neoantigen treatment”? That’s the Trump-era vocabulary paradox facing Moderna, the covid-19 shot maker whose plans for next-generation mRNA vaccines against flus and emerging pathogens have been dashed by vaccine skeptics in…
I. We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship’s AI mind were left. Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which…
When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers. I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination,…
A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University’s newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it’s more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation.…