sokolenok / ShutterstockEver asked what the Internet thought about something and immediately regretted it? The four researchers behind Fermat’s Library, a platform and online community…

Back in 2012, Google thought I was a man. Let me back up. In January of that year, the search giant released a new privacy policy that, for the first time, sought to aggregate your…

When Occupy Wall Street protesters began camping out in Zuccotti Park in 2011, Venkat Venkatasubramanian visited more than once. He didn’t participate in the protests against wealth…

It’s not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab (motto: “Every Bit as Good”), had a “God, what I have I done?”…

Ramsey’s theorem predicts a surprising (and useful) consistency in the organization of graphs. Here’s a simple visual proof of how it works.Image by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta…

I was slung in my favorite deck chair, drink in hand, having a gawk at the night sky. Andromeda, Pisces ... I trawled the constellations, mind abandoned, still aware in some curve…

Although A.I. robots can pick up on jokes, they have a lot to learn about telling them.Queen Mary University of London / YouTubeIn the 2004 film I, Robot, Detective Del Spooner asks…

One day not long ago, police forcibly brought a man to the hospital after he updated his profile picture on Facebook. He was in his late 20s and had a long history of suicide attempts,…

In the run-up to NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, a Dutch radio hacker named Huub (@fmcnl) tweeted to the United States military that one of their F-16 fighter jets was mistakenly…

From a computer’s standpoint, the difficulty in pattern recognition is one of surplus: with an endless variety of patterns, all technically valid, what makes one “right” and…