I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
The US Department of Defense’s research agency, DARPA, announced that its AI algorithms can now control an actual F-16 in flight. The fighter aircraft that was first introduced in 1978 has now seemingly evolved into an autonomous plane. “In early December 2022, ACE algorithm developers uploaded their AI
In 1950, Johnny Cash was 18 years old. Looking for independence and a sense of purpose, Cash enlisted in the Air Force and was quickly shipped off to San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed at the Lackland Air Force base. On March 5th, 1953, Staff Sgt Cash was manning
Researchers found that they could reconstruct high-resolution and highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular Stable Diffusion image generation model, as outlined in a paper published in December. The authors wrote that unlike previous studies, they didn’t need to train or fine-tune the AI
For two decades, Joseph DeRuvo Jr., 59, has lived an almost entirely barefooted life. He initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonizing bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort. After years spent as a photographer and a photography teacher, he is still self-employed,
David Vincent Kimel, a historian completing his PhD at Yale, found a rare copy of the script for Gone With The Wind that contains a number of deleted scenes, including one in which Rhett Butler considers suicide: "Selznick harbored a shocking secret never revealed until today: a civil war
Yesterday, I included a link to a blog post from economist Tyler Cowen's blog, Marginal Revolution, about Sir Francis Bacon and his dislike of the printing press. Among other things, the post quoted Bacon as saying "But these three [inventions], perhaps, have fallen out by a certain
Sometime in the period from the 6th to the 8th century, a woman willingly underwent surgery to scrape a hole into the top of her skull. The procedure must have gone well, at least well enough for her to survive and to try it several more times. A multinational group
Ian Fishback once seemed to be the embodiment of martial ideals. Intellectually driven, impressively fit, a West Point graduate and Arabist with one combat tour to Afghanistan and three to Iraq, he was heralded as morally inquisitive and ethically rigorous, qualities that earned him international praise after he went public
Late one February evening in 2005, Kerri Rawson went online and listened to a recording of the BTK killer from 1977. It was a 911 call, a chilling dispatch in which the caller casually reported a homicide he had just committed to the police. “I knew right away it was
He was 23 years old, the privileged son of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, seven months into the adventure of a lifetime that had transformed him from clean-cut student to bearded photographer and art collector. One moment his boat was being tossed by the waves, just as ours was,
For decades, wild pigs have been antagonizing flora and fauna in the US: gobbling up crops, spreading disease and even killing deer and elk. Now, as fears over the potential of the pig impact in the US grow, North America is also facing a new swine-related threat, as a
Harry Forestell, host of CBC News in New Brunswick, writes about undergoing surgery to help ameliorate his Parkinson's disease: "The surgeons and I kept up an amiable conversation as I asked questions about what was happening. In the background, a steady staccato, like the noise of a