Society

Karen Tautges Malinak watches her herd of 20 goats from the kitchen window as she waits for her family to arrive. It’s a clear summer day in Independence, Minnesota—population 3,644, half an hour outside Minneapolis. She holds a pink coffee mug in her hands. “Moms make everything better,” it reads. Karen’s life revolves around her…

The United States’ recent regulatory action against the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok prompted mass migration to another Chinese app, the social platform “Rednote.” Now, a generative artificial intelligence platform from the Chinese developer DeepSeek is exploding in popularity, posing a potential threat to US AI dominance and offering the latest evidence that moratoriums like…

An AI assistant created by Chinese startup DeepSeek became the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store over the weekend, sending shock waves through Silicon Valley and causing the price of major tech stocks to plummet. Nvidia saw more than $460 billion erased from its market capitalization on Monday, a drop Bloomberg characterized…

For at least 100 years, automakers have stuck to a tried and trusted playbook: They’ll kick, scream, and obfuscate before they’re forced by law to fit profit-draining, life-saving technology. From their successful rejection of speed governor proposals in the 1920s, to their shaming by lawyer Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed published in 1965, which…

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Far from being solo operators, most single-celled microbes are in complex relationships. In the ocean, the soil, and your gut, they might battle and eat each other, exchange DNA, compete for nutrients, or feed on one another’s by-products. Sometimes they get even more intimate: One…

In Recent years, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings, but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in…

While Netflix is busy pumping out more series than any one person could watch (probably), some of the best shows are on Amazon Prime Video. Trouble is, navigating the service’s labyrinthine menus can make finding the right series a pain. We’re here to help. Below are our favorite Amazon series—all included with your Prime subscription.…

This week started off with a bang and just kept going. In the wee hours of Saturday night, TikTok cut off access to users in the United States ahead of Sunday’s deadline that forced Apple and Google to remove the video-sharing app from their app stores. While TikTok was dark, US users raced to get…

When Taylor Swift started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs in September 2023, sports betting fans were less than enthused. Robert Cooper, BetOnline.ag sportsbook director, remembers the reaction from pitching early Swift-themed prop bets, novelty wagers that don’t affect a game’s outcome or take place outside the game entirely, to football media. “Don’t…

On January 20, DeepSeek, a relatively unknown AI research lab from China, released an open source model that’s quickly become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley. According to a paper authored by the company, DeepSeek-R1 beats the industry’s leading models like OpenAI o1 on several math and reasoning benchmarks. In fact, on many…