Futurism

Ever stumble across an online “news article” that just doesn’t feel quite right? You may be onto something. A joint investigation by The Florida Trib and the KCRW podcast Question Everything found that a so-called “independent, locally owned digital news publication” dubbed the South Florida Standard was in reality an AI-generated Potemkin village staffed entirely by fake writers. The writers had AI-generated profile pictures and made-up biographies to match t

A stunning new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows a nearby galaxy bursting with light at its center, revealing the distinct but optically invisible structure that underpins the sprawling realm. Known as Messier 77, or the Squid Galaxy, it’s located in the constellation Cetus some 45 million light-years from Earth. Like our own Milky Way, it takes the form of a barred spiral galaxy, but its center is far more luminous. That’s because it’s dominated by an a

The spoilsports at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission no longer want you profiting off of geopolitical turmoil and other grim happenings in the world on Polymarket — or profiting unfairly, at least. The agency’s chairman Michael Selig vowed to crack down on insider trading on the controversial prediction market, which the Trump administration has eagerly embraced. “We’re going to find them, and we’re going to bring actions,” Selig told Wired in an interv

When Bitcoin first launched in 2009, it promised its users a decentralized digital currency that would be free from the prying eyes of financial authorities. That was possible thanks to the blockchain, a digital stone slab where every transaction could be etched into the collective public record. Of course, Bitcoin and its look-alikes quickly descended into a haven for grifters, drug sales, and money-laundering, enabling anonymous criminals the world over. Then a few confusing things happened

Southwest Airlines appears to have become the first airline to enshrine a no-robots policy into their rulebook, after a Dallas business owner tried to take his 3.5-foot robot for a jaunt through the clouds. First reported by CBS News, Aaron Mehdizadeh, owner of robot-rental company the Robot Studio, was on his way home from a trip to Las Vegas with his robot pal “Stewie” in tow. Rather than shipping the humanoid-robot or checking it as cargo, Mehdizadeh bought the robot its own se

Nearly a year after Waymos touched down in Atlanta for the first time, residents of the community of Buckhead, Georgia have noted a massive influx of the company’s autonomous vehicles trying to forge a path through their neighborhood. The result is a massive increase in vehicle traffic — and occasional weird ritual-like scenes as the AVs circle cul-de-sacs for hours on end. “It’s almost every little cul-de-sac in our area, so I think it’s a problem,” one neighbor

Employees haven’t been shy about pushing back against AI in the workplace. In a clear disconnect, bosses are often gung-ho about the tech, while their underlings are more aware that it often spits out confident-sounding work that on closer inspection is filled with subtle errors that need to be manually corrected. That divide was on full display when the mayor of Vancouver admitted extensive AI usage to the public this week, per The Canadian Press. Earlier this week, Mayor Ken Sim pa

Woe is the c-suite. After heedlessly embracing AI tech at the expense of their workers, some bosses are now whining to The Wall Street Journal that their companies are being overrun by out-of-control AI agents. One company grappling with the influx is Magnum Ice Cream, the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s. We’re just as stupefied by the idea of an ice cream maker deploying AI bots en masse as you are, and we’re even more baffled that its chief information officer of the A

Unprecedented extreme weather is no longer once-in-a-lifetime. We live in an era when seasonal hurricanes have the potential to be nothing short of astronomical. Heat waves are not only the norm, but literally deadly. Lately, fears have grown that the upcoming El Niño — a cyclical climate phenomenon that can cause flooding, heat waves, and crop instability around the globe — could unleash devastation that’ll serve as a grim preview of things to come in our swiftly tilting global environ

In April, Polish fashion brand Enfin Levé dropped a bombshell straight from the late cretaceous period: a handbag they claim is made of “lab-grown T-rex leather.” The startling announcement made headlines throughout the luxury design world, which was quick to balk at the nearly $600,000 starting price at a coming auction in Paris. In the scientific community, however, experts are skeptical of the entire premise, with some wondering whether the material truly counts as coming from

For 133 years, Princeton University allowed students to take their exams without a proctor — a unusual situation resulting from student demands for an “honor code.” Now in 2026, that time-honored system is coming to an end, all thanks to a surge of cheating enabled by AI. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Ivy League university made the bombshell decision to scrap the honor system this week, after faculty voted to require in-person proctors starting over the summer.

The 19th century German economist Karl Marx identified a basic tension in human labor: squeeze workers too hard, and they’ll eventually start fighting back. It’s a contradiction capitalists have spent untold billions of dollars and decades trying to resolve, often through automation technology like AI — remove human workers from the payroll, the thinking goes, and you’ll never have to worry about pesky unions or strikes ever again. In an ironic twist, though, it turns out th

Gene therapy — attempting to help a patient by modifying a gene expression in their body, basically — has shown immense promise for treating a growing range of severe illnesses and disabilities, from Huntington’s Disease to congenital deafness. But using a gene-hacked virus to tinker with the genetic code of a living human, which has only started in earnest over the past decade or so, is certain to be risky. Now, the first instance of how the practice can backfire is coming to light.

In Taiwan, a 23-year-old college student is in hot water after hacking the country’s high speed rail system with a hodge-podge setup consisting of a laptop and a couple of radios. According to the Taipei Times, the incident disrupted four separate trains, causing nearly an hours-long delay across various rail lines. Identified only by his surname Lin, the student is alleged to have sent an alarm signal to the Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSRC) control center, which triggered a travel-stop a

On the surface, companies across nearly every industry seem to be gobbling up AI contracts. Yet under the hood, employees increasingly complain that AI results in more stress while saving no time whatsoever on productive tasks. Many employers, in turn, have begun mandating AI use on the job, some even going so far as to fire those who don’t hop on board in order to justify their big-time spending on tech industry contracts. While the forced adoption of AI has major implications for the

Is your dentist upselling you on something? Does your old filling really need to be replaced, and is that tooth decay really bad enough to warrant new work? Such suspicions have probably crossed your mind before as you laid there in tense anticipation of the noisy drill about to send stomach-churning vibrations through your teeth, and they’re not going to go away once you hear about how dentists across the country are embracing AI tools.  In her new book “I Am Not a Robot: My Year Us

Mysteries abound on our planetary neighbor Venus, not least of all because it’s permanently shrouded in a thick and nigh-impenetrable layer of clouds. But when the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Akatsuki space probe visited the steaming hot world in 2016, it managed to spot something anomalous in the atmospheric veil obscuring the planet’s inscrutable surface: an enormous wave tearing through the atmosphere for days at a time, creating a cloud that stretched up to 3

NASA satellites are tracking an intriguing patch of colored plumes in the waters off the US’s Mid-Atlantic coast. Swirling with vivid hues of green and turquoise, and tinged with a little brown, the stained waters were first detected by orbital observatories in early April. But they were most intense in the Mid-Atlantic Bight, an area where the waters from several bays, including the Chesapeake, merge with the open ocean, according to an update from the space agency. Discerning what&

If you’ve been to a medical appointment in the past two or three years, chances are high that your doctor was using an AI scribe: software that listens into the conversation, transcribing it and structuring it into the format of medical notes. In theory it’s a cool idea, but pain points abound. Earlier this week, Ontario’s auditor general — an accountability officer acting under the Legislative Assembly of Ontario — released a special report warning that AI medical scribes w

If you’ve been on TikTok lately, you might have come across a viral meme showing yet another dark side of AI: its impact on cishet relationship dynamics. Variations on the format typically depict a woman working hard at a laptop, with a caption explaining that she’s burning out so “her man” can run an AI startup that “loses $30K a month.” It feels like there’s a serious side to the jokes, since they come in the dark shadow of many grim stories about t