In the north of Patagonia, the wind never stops. The Kokorkom, or “desert of the bones,” as the locals refer to it, is traversed by it as it scrapes across ridges of sandstone, lifting thin sheets of dust. It’s hard to believe that this area was once teeming with life when you’re standing there, with only scrub brush and low dunes extending to the horizon. Nevertheless, it did 95 million years ago. The delicate skeleton of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, a dinosaur so small that it would hardly touch an adult’s knee, was discovered there by paleontologists. It is currently one of…
Author: Eric Evani
Outside a Hyundai dealership, rows of crossovers sit nose-to-nose on a windy afternoon in Southern California, their hoods gleaming in the wan winter light. Families walk around them holding coffee cups, looking into cargo areas, folding second rows, and silently calculating the space needed for strollers. Nobody seems very enthusiastic. They simply appear certain. These days, people purchase crossovers. Which gives the complex relationship between Hyundai Motor Company and CUVs a strangely tense feeling. As the market has shifted steadily toward light trucks, Hyundai has been vacillating between leaning into the segment and hesitating at the edges for years. It…
Last week, in a well-lit demonstration room in Seoul, a Galaxy S26 was sitting attached to a security cable, its screen silently using a third-party app to arrange a ride while a Samsung engineer combed through emails. No grandiosity. No animation of fireworks. The phone just used Google’s Gemini AI to complete the task in a safe, enclosed window. It was strangely useful. That understated functionality might be the most obvious indication to date that Samsung Electronics has established a significant lead in the competition for AI smartphones, placing Apple Inc. in the unaccustomed position of having to catch up.…
Under chandeliers meant to evoke permanence and luxury, Samsung Electronics executives convened at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas for a panel discussion entitled “In Tech We Trust?” The question mark seemed purposeful. While CES was bustling with spectacle outside, with robots serving coffee and AI avatars promoting skincare products, the conversation within the ballroom was notably sober. This year, Samsung didn’t make a louder AI pitch. AI is more subdued. The company’s strategy, according to Simon Sung, is intelligence that “blends into the background.” No celebrity chatbot on its own. No grandiose demonstrations designed to surpass Google or OpenAI.…
Each glass vial in a sterile lab at the University of Houston, lit by fluorescent lights, contains something that some researchers secretly hope could alter the course of the overdose epidemic in the United States. At first glance, the concept of a fentanyl vaccine seems almost unbelievable. The brain—its receptors, cravings, and withdrawal—has been the main focus of addiction treatment for many years. That reasoning is reversed by this new method. Colin Haile created the fentanyl vaccine, which is licensed to ARMR Sciences. It doesn’t attempt to change the chemistry of the brain. It functions in the bloodstream instead, teaching…
Researchers gaze at glowing molecular models on large monitors in a lab at the Broad Institute in Cambridge. With its twisted RNA backbone looping like an ancient sculpture, the ribosome—biology’s tireless protein factory—rotates slowly on screen while being colored in reds and blues. It’s easy to forget that this machine may be older than cells themselves, humming inside each one. The ribosome has been regarded as established science for a considerable amount of time. It constructs proteins, assembles amino acids, and reads RNA. The story is over. But recently, that narrative has started to fall apart, exposing something much more…
An unremarkable office building with Beast logos on the glass doors is filled with workers on a muggy afternoon in Greenville, North Carolina. Inside, whiteboards are cluttered with ideas for chocolate flavors, thumbnail sketches, and budget projections that resemble spreadsheets from studio films rather than YouTube planning. The fact that this doesn’t feel like a “creator studio” is difficult to overlook. It has the vibe of a headquarters. Born Jimmy Donaldson, MrBeast began as a teenager who became fixated on view counts. According to reports, Beast Industries, his holding company, made $473 million in 2024. He ceased to be merely…
Energy officials were not discussing tanker routes or oil embargoes in Washington this summer. They were discussing gigawatts. In particular, the number of gigawatts that could be brought online quickly enough to power data centers that are educating the next generation of AI models. With no televised pipeline disputes or dramatic OPEC meetings, just warehouses full of servers running around the clock and using more electricity than some small nations, this may be the quietest energy revolution in decades. The International Energy Agency estimates that in 2024, data centers will use about 1.5% of the world’s electricity. That figure seems…
A Brooklyn commuter requests that his phone “summarize the email thread about Friday’s launch, draft a reply confirming 3 p.m., and add it to my calendar” while he is riding the crowded subway. No tapping is taking place. Don’t switch between apps. The device hums back with a composed message and a calendar entry awaiting confirmation after a brief pause. It seems tiny. Nearly normal. However, a fundamental change has occurred. Google Gemini has evolved beyond a simple chatbot that runs in a tab of the browser. Through the use of Gmail for email drafting, Docs for document summarization, Maps…
Researchers ask elderly patients to repeat phrases that are whispered through static on a gloomy afternoon in Nottingham while they sit in dimly lit clinics. It appears to be routine. headphones. A tiny booth. When a tone appears, press the button. However, there’s a feeling that something bigger—something that goes well beyond hearing—is taking place in these rooms. For many years, blood pressure, exercise, and crossword puzzles were the mainstays of dementia prevention. Then, in a surprising move, the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, Intervention, and Care ranked midlife hearing loss close to the top of the list of risk…