Hysterical narratives promoting fear among some Americans may be more effective at sparking violence than hate speech is. Social media companies are expected to guard against both.
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A fresh look at museum artifacts fills in a gap in the Asian archaeological record and refutes the idea that an advanced technique was imported from the West by early modern humans.
Scholars and skeptics warned about Facebook long before its founder was even born. Technology companies keep asking for more and more data and proving they can’t be trusted.
By the time a building is abandoned and falls into disrepair, its community is already suffering. Michigan scholars suggest it’s time to plan for structures’ end of life before they even go up.
A new statistical test lets researchers search for similarities between groups. Could this help keep new important findings out of the file drawer?
Phones’ functions go far beyond making calls these days. Here’s the basics on why you can use some features and not others – and why planes may someday soon be filled with passengers yakking on phones.
Some can’t wait to hit the ground running while others would rather endure a root canal. Certain characteristics help explain who is in which group.
Don’t despair if, once you’ve gathered your shopping items, you’re met by a single line that looks a mile long. Queuing theory suggests this is likely the fastest way to get you rung up and moving on.
Before augmented reality products and apps take over the world, they’ll have to get out of their own way.
Ninety percent of psychology studies come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world’s population. Researchers are realizing that universalizing those findings might not make sense.
Without their devices, regular GPS users take longer to negotiate a route, travel more slowly and make larger navigational errors.
Researchers have tried unsuccessfully for decades to develop a malaria vaccine. Now a new approach, showing promise in mice, suggests it is possible to block mosquitoes from spreading the disease.
As fictional inventors make terrible choices on the big screen, real-world tech innovators can learn from their example how not to make the same kinds of ethical mistakes.
It has taken hundreds, if not thousands, of years to create the juicy, shiny produce that you take for granted at the supermarket. But now there is a faster way to domesticate wild fruits and veggies.
Since plants can’t pick up and move to greener pastures if conditions are tough, some have evolved interesting and sneaky strategies to make a living.
Cleaning up plastic pollution in the ocean is good – and long overdue. But where will the waste go? Recycling isn’t always an option. Bacteria and enzymes could process it, raising new questions.
Countries developing technology that removes or blasts away space junk may appear to be doing a public service. But those same technologies can destroy military and communications satellites.
A resonance theory of consciousness suggests that the way all matter vibrates, and the tendency for those vibrations to sync up, might be a way to answer the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
Chinese customers spend billions on Nov. 11. Why, and what does it mean for the global retail marketplace?
One-third of roads in the U.S. are unpaved; plenty more have faded or obscured road markings. Today’s self-driving vehicles can’t go on them, and will need new algorithms to handle those conditions.
The discovery and development of optical tweezers won the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics. Now physicists are using this tool to crack some of the fundamental questions behind how the universe works.
Protecting democracy requires more than just technical solutions. It includes education, critical thinking and members of society working together to agree on problems and find solutions.
Amazon, Facebook and Google have lofty goals for their effects on global society. But people around the world are still waiting for the positive results. Here’s what the tech giants could do.
NASA’s InSight Mars lander touches down Nov. 26, part of a careful robotic approach to exploring the red planet. But human exploration of Mars will inevitably introduce Earth life. Are you OK with that?
Measuring Twitter bots’ effects on the opinions of real people can yield surprising results about what makes them influential.