Americans agree on key issues despite partisan narratives

The United States presents a paradox: Though the media and public opinion suggest it is a nation deeply divided along partisan lines, surveys reveal that Americans share significant common ground on many core values and political issues. As a political…

Ants vs. humans: Solving the piano-mover puzzle

Who is better at maneuvering a large load through a maze, ants or humans? The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It’s one of several variations on classic computational…

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term

Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform. The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes…

We have a new teaser for The Last of Us S2

The second season of The Last of Us will hit HBO and Max in April. HBO released a new one-minute teaser for the second season of its post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us during CES last night, along with a release…

Nvidia unveils $3,000 desktop AI computer for home researchers

On Monday, Nvidia announced Project DIGITS, a small desktop computer aimed at researchers, data scientists, and students who want to experiment with AI models—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators—at home. The $3,000 device, which contains Nvidia’s new GB10…

Google Pixel 4a gets an unexpected update: Lower battery life

The Pixel 4a, a well-regarded release in Google’s line of budget-minded phones with nice cameras and decent stock software, was not supposed to get any more updates. This week, it will receive a rather uncommon one—one that intends to lower…

Handwriting trumps visual learning for teaching English to children

A new study published in Acta Psychologica has found that handwriting provides significant advantages over visual learning when it comes to helping elementary school students acquire new English words, particularly their shapes, sounds, and meanings. Scientists have long argued that…

Tesla’s remote parking under federal scrutiny after multiple crashes

Tesla is the target of yet another federal safety probe, the fourth currently open by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation. Today’s trouble concerns the automaker’s “Smart Summon” and “Actually Smart Summon” features, which allow Tesla…

Our brains underestimate our wrist’s true flexibility, study finds

Researchers have found that people systematically underestimate how far their wrists can move. This finding suggests that the brain’s internal representation of the body’s movement range is not as accurate as one might assume. The study, published in Communications Psychology,…

Widely used DNA sequencer still doesn’t enforce Secure Boot

In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect Windows devices against the threat of malware that could infect the BIOS and, later, its predecessor the UEFI, the firmware that loaded the operating system…

Let’s learn about the International Space Station

The International Space Station, or ISS, is one of humanity’s most remote outposts. Space agencies around the world teamed up in the 1980s and 1990s to construct this distant laboratory. Pieces of the station were built in different countries and…