Three days after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, Mark Zuckerberg was asked the question on many people’s minds: Did the explosion of fake news and caustic political rhetoric on Facebook help Trump win? Zuckerberg dismissed the idea. "The idea that fake news … influenced the election in any way is a…

As TV genres go, national politics in the Trump era is as on-the-nose as it gets—delicious instability, blatant backstabbing, legislative high-drama, and daily presidential temper tantrums. The political shade-serving is squarely, unmistakably, reality TV. It’s in our DNA. As Michael Thomsen wrote last year, “The logic of reality television—that the raw material for cinematic truth…

Today, you’re a horrible goose from Untitled Goose Game, and the internet is laughing with you. Five months from now, if anyone looks at your photos from tonight, all they’ll see is waterfowl. Near-instant obscurity is the fate of many Halloween costumes, but their descent from timely and hilarious to huh? now skids down an…

Laura Lewis and her team of researchers have been putting in late nights in their Boston University lab. Lewis ran tests until around 3:00 in the morning, then ended up sleeping in the next day. It was like she had jet lag, she says, without changing time zones. It’s not that Lewis doesn’t appreciate the…

In the summer of 1907, a German doctor named Clemens von Pirquet noticed something strange with one of his patients. The five-year-old boy had previously tested positive for tuberculosis. The test involved injecting a tiny bit of TB protein just under the skin. His antibodies recognized it, activating immune cells which formed a little bump…

We’re flying about 5,000 feet above rural New York in a Cirrus Vision Jet when the pilot has what appears to be a heart attack. He lets go of the controls and slumps forward in his seat, leaving me—not a pilot—to fly the airplane to safety. I reach behind me, press a big red button…

The Pentagon says artificial intelligence will help the US military become still more powerful. On Thursday, an advisory group including executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook proposed ethical guidelines to prevent military AI from going off the rails.The advice came from the Defense Innovation Board, created under the Obama administration to help the Pentagon tap…

Microsoft's Surface brand offers some of the best Windows hardware on the market. Best known for the innovative, tablet-like hardware designs, Microsoft has expanded over the years and now offers a full family of computers, from a standard laptop to a giant desktop.Microsoft was an early innovator in mobile-friendly hybrid PC hardware. It's hard to…

Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes…

I recently stayed in a cheap hotel in San Diego, using room 417 as an office while I was in town. After a few days, I happened to look into the trash can next to the desk and saw almost nothing in there but a couple handfuls' worth of spent Keurig pods that would soon…