After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Everything Changes

We’re in a strange period. Expectations for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker continues to build—it’s only a few months away!—but there’s a lot more going on in so many other areas of a galaxy far, far away that it’s easy to lose track. Read on for news on no less than four different streaming…

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See How LA Belches Emissions, Block by Block

In the Los Angeles megacity, 10 percent of the total road surface was responsible for 60 percent of road emissions. All told, the researchers calculated the city is spewing 176 million tons of CO2 per year total.Getty ImagesHovering above the iconic Hollywood sign is Southern California’s other icon: smog. After decades of gains fighting the…

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Trump’s Trade War Isn’t Just a US–China Problem

Philippe Wojazer/AFP/Getty ImagesThe US and China won’t be the only ones affected in the trade war raging between the two countries. As companies scramble to find ways around the ever-increasing tariffs that the world’s two largest economies impose on each other’s goods, other countries are being drawn into a conflict that might have no winners.The…

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Lambda School’s For-Profit Plan to Solve Student Debt

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Early this summer, the tech entrepreneur Austen Allred was on Reddit, as he often is, when he noticed something suspicious. The coding forums he frequents, where people usually talk about JavaScript bugs and command line functions, were being suffocated by…

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I Tried to Become a Musician Using Apps and a Light-Up Piano

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Alex Zhang is shredding on the piano. He sits at a shiny black Steinway grand and rocks back and forth as his fingers fly across the keys, a flurry of blurred digits that leap from one end of the keyboard…

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What Sci-Fi Can Teach Computer Science About Ethics

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.The protagonist of Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” is a bit of a sad sack. A guide for a VR tourism company in Sedona, Arizona, he leads “vision quests” in a digital guise taken straight…

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Ask the Know-It-Alls: How Do Machines Learn?

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer questions about your interactions with science and technology.Q: How do machines learn?By now you must have heard the good news about our savior, artificial intelligence. It makes you look better in selfies, prevents blindness, and can…

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