Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Even Charles Darwin was puzzled by the evolution of the vertebrate eye. New research suggests that it traces back to a cyclopean invertebrate with a single eye atop the head. By Carl Zimmer Look at ...

A new study published today in Nature has found that X’s algorithm – the hidden system or “recipe” that governs which posts appear in your feed and in which order – shifts users’ political opinions in ...

It’s hard to ignore the seismic shifts brought about by algorithm-driven content. Every time you scroll through your social media feed or check your favorite news app, algorithms are diligently at ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

When tools like ChatGPT first launched, they weren’t even connected to the internet. No real-time knowledge, no live queries, just pretrained data with a cutoff point. Two years later, Perplexity, a ...

A major evolutionary theory says most genetic changes don’t really matter, but new evidence suggests that’s not true. Researchers found that helpful mutations happen surprisingly often. The twist is ...

While the creation of this new entity marks a big step toward avoiding a U.S. ban, as well as easing trade and tech-related tensions between Washington and Beijing, there is still uncertainty ...

Instagram is introducing a new tool that lets you see and control your algorithm, starting with Reels, the company announced on Wednesday. The new tool, called “Your Algorithm,” lets you view the ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

For years, Google’s predictable, and at times too easily gamed, ecosystem created an illusion that SEO success came from creating any and all content and checking boxes rather than understanding users ...

As the world races to build artificial superintelligence, one maverick bioengineer is testing how much unprogrammed intelligence may already be lurking in our simplest algorithms to determine whether ...