Recommended from Around the Web (Week Ending July 4, 2015)
The Higher Life
Is a phone app really the path to spiritual enlightenment?
—Linda Lowenthal, copy chief
Why I Walked Out of Facial Recognition Negotiations
A privacy advocate contends that industry lobbyists are blocking rules restraining companies’ use of facial recognition to track customers, even if the companies themselves might be willing to comply.
—Linda Lowenthal
How a Conservative Billionaire Is Moving Heaven and Earth to Become the Biggest Alternative Energy Giant in the Country
Will there be a market for all the power Phil Anschutz plans to produce on the world’s largest wind farm?
—Nanette Byrnes, Senior Editor, Business Reports
The End of Advertising as We Know It
The impact of DVRs and the Internet is causing brand advertising of the Mad Men variety to become so much less effective that it may eventually disappear, says the author of a new book on the media business.
—Tom Simonite, San Francisco bureau chief
You’re Making This Island Disappear
An immersive and informative multimedia feature about the cost of climate change for the Marshall Islands – and what it may portend for the rest of us.
—Kyanna Sutton, senior Web producer
Addiction Is Not a Disease: A Neuroscientist Argues That It’s Time to Change Our Minds on the Roots of Substance Abuse
Why this psychologist and former addict says we’re looking at addiction through the wrong lens.
—Kyanna Sutton
Wildlife Forensics Lab Uses Tech to Sniff, Identify Illegal Wood
A lab in southern Oregon figured out that it could use a mass spectrometer to spot illegally harvested wood.
—Anna Nowogrodzki, editorial intern
The Underfunded, Disorganized Plan to Save Earth from the Next Giant Asteroid
Lasers? A nuclear bomb? What will we do if an asteroid is headed toward Earth?
—Anna Nowogrodzki
Inside the Hack of the Century
How Sony Pictures fell victim to the most spectacular cyber-attack in corporate history.
—Will Knight, senior editor, AI
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora
The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.
Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.
Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.
How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies
The Inflation Reduction Act is starting to transform the US economy. To understand how, we tallied up the potential tax credits available as the nickel from a single mine flows through the supply chain.
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