Popular Science On March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg, 49, was crossing a road in Tempe, Arizona, when a Volvo SUV traveling at 39 miles per hour hit and killed her. ­Although she was one of thousands of U.S. pedestrians killed by vehicles every year, one distinctive—and highly modern—aspect set her death apart: Nobody was driving that Volvo. A computer was. A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about...

The Atlantic America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and ’70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play...

The Verge “Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages. Vainu is building a comprehensive database of...

The Guardian Nobody was supposed to see Yovana Mendoza eating the fish. The 28-year-old influencer, also known as Rawvana, has amassed more than 3 million followers across YouTube and Instagram by extolling the life-changing properties of a raw vegan diet. She has built a lucrative brand around veganism. But a couple of weeks ago, Mendoza was recorded eating seafood in a video posted by another vlogger. Realising she was being filmed, she tried to hide the fish, but the jig was up. “It was...

The New York Times “I was sure she was dead,” Lottie Mackinnon said quietly. Ms. Mackinnon was sitting huddled in the corner of a cafe with her two children, sipping hot chocolate as she described the day three years ago when she was walking with her Border collie, Bonnie, over the Overtoun Bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland. “Something overcame Bonnie as soon as we approached the bridge,” Ms. Mackinnon said. “At first she froze, but then she became possessed by a strange energy and ran and jumped...

The central idea behind the Brexit referendum was for Britain to “take back control”—over its laws, its money, its immigration system. For those who campaigned in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, Brexit would mark the beginning of a new, more global Britain. By leaving the EU, they argued, they would be returning power from Brussels back to lawmakers in Westminster and, by extension, to the British people themselves. But if the past two years have demonstrated anything,...

The New York Times When Facebook and its family of apps experienced a daylong malfunction last week, millions of people got a taste of what life would be like if the social network were out of their lives for good. I can tell you more about that: I permanently deleted my Facebook account five months ago. So what has happened in the aftermath? The social network’s long-stated mission has been to connect people so that we can live in a more open world. But after being off Facebook since...

When Chris Rackliffe, a motivational speaker in New York, met a potential friend at a bar last weekend, it never occurred to him to exchange phone numbers. Instead, the two swapped Instagram handles, and have been liking each others’ posts. Rackliffe said they'll probably meet up in person again soon. "It's so much more casual to give someone your Instagram handle and keep in touch through stories and DMs,” Rackliffe said. “Swapping numbers feels so serious and stiff nowadays." As Instagram...

It’s been just four days since the president learned that Robert Mueller found no evidence of collusion, but Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, is no longer in the mood to celebrate. He’s thrilled about the outcome, of course, as is his client. Trump told the former New York mayor that “he’s happier than he thought he would be.” But Giuliani, sipping a Diet Coke on Wednesday morning at the Trump Hotel, said it’s time to focus on the next mission: Find out who started all this—and...

The New York Times The dream of a “Blue Texas” has captured the imagination of Democrats for nearly a decade, and Beto O’Rourke has come closer than anyone to making a statewide victory a reality. His strengths as a candidate in his narrow loss in a 2018 Senate race against Ted Cruz — by 2.6 percentage points — led his supporters to push him to run for president, and he obliged them Thursday morning. But his performance may have demonstrated something else: Texas is on the doorstep of...

Slate Unless you spend your day glued to a Bloomberg terminal or mainlining CNBC, you might have missed the news late last week that the yield curve for U.S. Treasury bonds “inverted” for the first time since 2007. This dry-sounding development has led to a great deal of speculation on Wall Street and in the financial press about whether an economic downturn might finally be on the way. As the Wall Street Journal’s James Mackintosh put it, “The market’s most reliable recession indicator is...

Wired TWO YEARS AGO, a 6-year-old boy playing on his family’s farm in Oregon cut himself. His parents cleaned the wound and stitched it, and everything seemed fine—until, six days later, he began having muscle spasms, arching his back, and clenching his jaw. The boy had tetanus, the first case in a child to occur in Oregon in more than 30 years. Tetanus is rare because a routine childhood vaccine prevents it. The boy’s parents had elected not to vaccinate him. A case report written by a...

Vice Somehow, whenever I find myself scrolling aimlessly on my personal Instagram feed, I always end up near the end, fixated on the first photos I posted, in June 2016. I don’t know if it was the music—Rihanna, Chance, Drake, and Kanye all released life-changing albums around then—or the freedom that came with traipsing all over Europe those three months, but that summer is the last one that’s really clear in my memories. I’ve posted scores of better-edited, higher-quality photos in the...

CNN The CBD gold rush has begun. CBD, the chemical found in hemp and marijuana plants, is showing up in shampoos, lattes, body oils, gummy bears and dog treats. It's being sold in coffee shops and farmer's markets, mom-and-pops and high-end department stores and most recently, drugstore chain CVS. "Literally overnight, you're seeing CBD all around you and in everything," said Troy Dayton, CEO of The Arcview Group, an Oakland, California-based cannabis investment and research firm. "This is a...

Washington Post Before 10 a.m. on another cold Thursday, Monica Diaz stirred in her tent, filled with dread. It had been two weeks since the last cleanup, and city workers would again be here soon, with their dumpster truck and police cars, to clear out the encampment. Every morning was awful, but these were the worst of all, when Monica, who’d otherwise be resting before work, was forced to confront publicly what she did her best to hide: that she’s homeless. That she lives in a tent. That...

Bloomberg The Trump Administration’s trade war with China has turned out to be a windfall for another country the president frequently berates: Mexico. Consider Fuling Global Inc., a Chinese maker of plastic utensils that developed a lucrative business making paper cups and straws for U.S. restaurants. But President Trump upended all that with tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, including paper products. So the company found an alternative, opening a $4 million factory in...

Washington Post President Trump reportedly chose Stephen Moore for one of the vacancies at the Federal Reserve Board after reading a Wall Street Journal op-ed Moore wrote attacking the Fed. The piece, co-authored with Louis Woodhill, made two central claims: (1) we’re experiencing deflation, and (2) the way to address it is to follow a rule adopted by Paul Volcker in the 1980s. Slight problem though: Both of those claims are flat-out false. There is no deflation, and Volcker never created the...

The New York Times A drone from the University of Zurich is an engineering and technical marvel. It also moves slower than someone taking a Sunday morning jog. At the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Madrid last October, the autonomous drone, which navigates using artificial intelligence, raced through a complicated series of turns and gates, buzzing and moving like a determined and oversized bumblebee. It bobbed to duck under a bar that swooshed like a clock...

Venture Beat Over the course of my company’s 15 year trajectory, we’ve never stopped rebuilding it. Rebuilding isn’t an option; it’s the only way forward. It’s how we adapt to market conditions, client requirements, and employee needs. A rebuilding mentality drives forward-thinking practices and ultimately ensures that we stay not just relevant but ahead of the curve. After years of focusing on a rebuilding strategy, I’ve distilled the approach into the following five rules: Don’t give in to...

Scientific American In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them,” which “can be described in a baggage-independent way”—i.e., without matter. He attributes existence solely to...

The Atlantic When Max Vest shook hands with the host of his Miami Airbnb back in January, the man introduced himself as Ralph—even though “Ray” was the name he’d used in all their prior communication. This was the first and only indication that something was wrong. But his host had a great rating on the home-sharing site, and many of the comments mentioned how friendly and accommodating he was. So Vest, a children’s-camp director from Gainesville, Florida, didn’t think much of the discrepancy...

Modern Farmer The evidence against cow tipping is immense, and backed up by both farmers and the laws of physics (more on that later), but the simplest bit of proof we can point to: YouTube. While in the history of the world there have surely been a few unlucky cows shoved to their side by boozed-up morons, we feel confident in saying this happens at a rate roughly equivalent to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. The evidence against cow tipping is immense, and backed up by both...

AMES, Iowa—Cory Booker drew the second-biggest crowd of the weekend in Iowa at the Prairie Moon Winery here earlier this month. Then he attracted the biggest crowd, more than 300 people, similarly diverse, a few hours later in Davenport. Few reporters went to either. Booker and his campaign say that’s all part of the plan. Check back with them in seven or eight months. The other 2020 Democrats will have their media moments, Booker and his campaign people believe, and the voters will cycle...

The United States and China are again seeking to resolve their long-running dispute on trade this week as a high-level delegation from Washington arrives in Beijing for another round of negotiations. In recent days, however, peaceful engagement with the Middle Kingdom hasn’t been on Washington’s mind. The U.S. dispatched warships through the strait between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, earning the inevitable rebuke from Beijing, which still claims the island as part of China. U.S....

The New York Times Can a city cancel out its greenhouse gas emissions? Copenhagen intends to, and fast. By 2025, this once-grimy industrial city aims to be net carbon neutral, meaning it plans to generate more renewable energy than the dirty energy it consumes. Here’s why it matters to the rest of the world: Half of humanity now lives in cities, and the vast share of planet-warming gases come from cities. The big fixes for climate change need to come from cities too. They are both a problem...