Science of the Future
Viewpoint: Selective pronatalism: The radical “ethical” case challenging parents’ right to end a pregnancy when a fetus has a severe genetic disorder
Even if polygenic embryo screening worked exactly as advertised, it could still do real social damage. That’s the argument from ...
Challenging health misinformation? People are more likely to believe AI when it responds with empathy
At a time of rampant medical misinformation online, artificial intelligence can do a good job of correcting falsehoods, but the ...
Viewpoint: RFK Jr. touts AI to guide health care…but searches using the technology he champions expose him as scientifically illiterate
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has become an unlikely cheerleader for artificial intelligence in medicine — ...
Viewpoint: ‘Bureaucratic and economic obstacles’ to agricultural biotechnology: Europe creeps into the 21st century, but blocks remain
Genetically modified crops won’t single-handedly rescue harvests from worsening droughts, but Europe’s rulebook is making sure they barely get the ...
Tearful onions? CRISPR has a solution for that
Chopping onions may one day be a dry-eyed affair. Researchers at Japan’s Chiba University and food company House Foods have ...
Trump wants an AI Force like Space Force, but that could make AI’s risks harder to manage
Artificial intelligence dominated the opening of the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 22, 2026. Ahead of the ...
Utah becomes first state to empower AI to bypass doctors and prescribe certain drugs
Utah is letting artificial intelligence slide a little further into the doctor's chair. The state's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy ...
Rural revival or corporate windfall? Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tax law opens the door to big breaks for data centers—but tech giants aren’t cashing in
Starting January 1, data centers built on rural land could qualify for a generous set of federal tax breaks, courtesy ...
The kooky logic behind the raft of spurious cancer claims from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health
It would shock you to know that Costco, according to a new Harvard School of Public Health methodology, caused 120,687 ...
Jay Clayton controversy: The divisive history of Trump’s newly-appointed AI czar
Jay Clayton, the former SEC chairman whose agency helped write the playbook for policing crypto through lawsuits, is reportedly on ...
Here are all the ways CRISPR gene editing is transforming Africa’s staple crops—and there’s a lot more innovation to come
CRISPR gene editing is already reshaping Africa’s most important food crops, from disease-resistant bananas to less toxic cassava, and a ...
Energy-sucking data centers are unpopular across the political spectrum. Could moving them into space change the equation?
Google plans to launch a satellite on Oct. 1 that can run its artificial intelligence technologies in orbit, an early ...
The exploding controversy over AI’s built-in survival drive
In controlled safety tests described earlier this year, researchers asked AI models to solve a series of simple math problems ...
Now AI almost started a war with China
This spring, at the height of the war with Iran, US forces came within moments of boarding a Chinese ship ...
Viewpoint: 4 very real AI doomsday scenarios
An engineered pandemic, a nuclear war, a planet paved over with paper clip factories: AI researchers have floated plenty of ...
22-year frozen embryo: In one of the longest delayed births ever, middle-aged Greek couple gives birth to a daughter
A 54-year-old Greek woman has given birth to a healthy baby girl conceived from an embryo that spent 22 years ...
Slowdown AI development? China acknowledges serious risks but sees warnings as U.S. ploy to control the technology
For years, Silicon Valley's most powerful voices insisted the US was locked in an unwinnable AI arms race with China ...
What’s Trump’s ‘AI Force’? Administration rushes to announce ill-defined watchdog agency and czar amid criticism of its resistance to curb AI acceleration
Donald Trump says he's creating an "AI Force" and will soon name an AI "czar," though as the Guardian reports, ...
Viewpoint: Dubious environmental fears: Why the AI buildout is critical to America’s ecological future
Opposition to artificial intelligence has intensified over the past year. A majority of Americans worry that AI will kill jobs, ...
AI is helping develop new vaccines
In the early 2000s, immunologist Bali Pulendran started his lab at Emory University to explore the mechanisms underlying vaccine-mediated immunity ...
Viewpoint: What’s the likely impact when the EPA loosens rules limiting methane pollution from oil and gas wells?
This story was originally published by ProPublica. The Trump administration is poised to loosen environmental restrictions on oil and gas wells ...
Doomsday cult? Why we should be suspicious of end-of-the-world claims
Marc Andreessen is done listening to AI's doomsayers, and he wants everyone else to stop too. The venture capitalist behind ...
A meaty problem: How to make cell-grown protein taste like steak, chicken, and seafood
Lab-grown, or cultivated, meat options are already a reality in select restaurants worldwide. For example, the omakase restaurant Robin in ...
Newly approved GMO chestnut trees planted across from the White House are stirring debate
Two genetically engineered American chestnut trees planted near the White House this spring have reignited a decades-old fight over how ...
Autonomous decisions: AI’s Holy Grail. What is it?
AI companies aren't pouring billions into the world's biggest data centers just so people can ask chatbots for recipes — ...
CRISPR fine-tuning unlocks vitamin C-rich potatoes without yield loss
Potato is a central pillar of global food security, yet its highly heterozygous, tetraploid genome has long frustrated conventional breeding ...
How the reckless AI race among Anthropic, OpenAI and China spawned today’s safety crisis
The AI industry's safety talk is colliding with its own commercial stakes, as The Wall Street Journal reports in a look at ...
