The key to a nation’s long-run prosperity is increased productivity. If workers can produce more in an hour, day, or week then they can collectively work less or enjoy more of the fruits of their labor: More pickleball courts and more time to play pickleball.
With all the astonishing improvements that we see on our computers and smartphones, it might seem that productivity is about to explode, that our concern will soon be how to distribute income and manage leisure when mach
Anyone who has suspected that there are more women than men where they live, or vice versa, will find fodder for their suspicions in new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Whether it refutes or confirms their suspicions likely depends on where they live.
Women outnumber men in the largest urban counties east of the Mississippi River, along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Deep South, while the West skews male, according to data released last week from the 2022 American Commu
Considering all the data we now store about our lives on our smartphones and in the cloud, it’s no wonder digital privacy is at the forefront of many consumers’ minds. The good news is that major technology companies—including some historically not very privacy-minded—have stepped up recently to improve user privacy.
Here are the companies that provided their customers with more privacy protections in 2023.
Apple
It’s no surpr
Prescription drugs and vaccines revolutionized healthcare, dramatically decreasing death from disease and improving quality of life across the globe. But how do researchers, universities and hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry decide which diseases to pursue developing drugs for?
In my work as director of the Health Outcomes, Policy, and Evidence Synthesis group at the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy, I assess the effectiveness and safety of d
The Transportation Department committed to taking a “very light touch approach” under the White House’s regulatory plan for novel space activities during a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Senators asked Kelvin Coleman, the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, how the agency planned to keep up with regulating crewed and transportation missions in orbit when launch licenses take such a long time. But Co
Look out Ivy League, Elon Musk is coming for you.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of several other companies (including, um, X), has plans to launch a new university in Austin, Texas.
As the Texas Tribune reported, tax filings for The Foundation, one of the charities owned by the world’s richest man, show plans to use a $100 million gift from Musk to fund the school. Initial plans call for a primary and secondary school, which will focus on a science, technolo
Teen usage of social media hasn’t dropped much, despite rising concerns about its effects on the mental health of adolescents, a survey from the Pew Research Center found.
But the data also found that roughly one in six teens describe their use of two platforms—YouTube and TikTok—as “almost constant.”
Seventy-one percent of teens said they visit YouTube at least daily; 16% described their usage as “almost constant”
Pope Francis on Thursday called for an international treaty to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and used ethically, arguing that the risks of technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality, and forgiveness are too great.
Francis added his voice to increasing calls for binding, global regulation of AI in his annual message for the World Day of Peace, which the Catholic Church celebrates each Jan. 1. The Vatican released the text of the message on Thursday.
In the year since ChatGPT was released to the public, researchers and experts have warned that the ease with which content can be created using generative AI tools could poison the well, creating a vicious circle where those tools produce content that is then used to train other AI models.
That so-called “model collapse”—which would hollow out any “knowledge” accrued by the chatbots—appears to have come true.
Last week, X user Jax
With only a few weeks to go in 2023, job losses from layoffs continue to mount, meaning the year is going to go out how it began. According to layoffs tracking site Layoffs.fyi, 1,157 tech companies have now laid off 257,778 workers over the course of the year. As for December, the most prominent companies that have laid off employees include:
Etsy
Etsy is the most recent tech company to announce layoffs. On December 13, CEO Josh Silverman informed employees that the com