Science and Technology

This time of year, everyone asks what you like least about your life, but they phrase it as, “What’s your New Year’s resolution?”My biggest regret of 2023 was my relationship to my smartphone, or my “tech appendage” as I’ve named it in my iPhone settings. My Apple Screen Time reports regularly clocked in at more than five hours a day.That’s only an hour more than the average American, but I still found it staggering to think that I spent the equivalent of January, February and half of March looking at that tiny screen (April too, if we only count waking…

What is the happiest dog you can imagine? Is it beaming with joy on a celestial plane or frolicking in a field of psychedelic flora?If those images are hard to conjure, have no fear, or perhaps a healthy dose of it: Artificial intelligence can vivify even the most absurd scenarios in vibrant color, and on social media, some are seeing how far it can be pushed.Though A.I.-generated images can often unsettle with their uncanny realism — think the pope in a Balenciaga puffer jacket — many are finding joy in a new form of low-stakes image tinkering. This fall, ChatGPT…

In the last few months, Beth Fletcher, a 39-year-old photographer in Derbyshire, England, built a small following on TikTok by recapping and analyzing the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” When the latest season ended in early December, Ms. Fletcher was at a loss for content because, she said, “we don’t have another good reality TV show on until summer.”Then the TikTok algorithm delivered: a video of Brooklyn Schwetje, a graduate student and influencer, sharing a day in her life on the Ultimate World Cruise, a nine-month-long, round-the-world voyage with Royal Caribbean. Ms. Fletcher…

When Thomas Wong set foot in the United States Embassy in Beijing this summer for a new diplomatic posting, it was vindication after years of battling the State Department over a perceived intelligence threat — himself.Diplomatic Security officers had informed him when he joined the foreign service more than a decade ago that they were banning him from working in China. In a letter, he said, they wrongly cited the vague potential for undue “foreign preference” and suggested he could be vulnerable to “foreign influence.”Mr. Wong had become a U.S. diplomat thinking that China was where he could have the…

Jerry Yu reúne las características de lo que los chinos llaman un rico de segunda generación. Estudió en una escuela preparatoria de Connecticut. Vive en un condominio de Manhattan que le vendió Jeffrey R. Immelt, exdirector ejecutivo de General Electric, en 8 millones de dólares. Y es el dueño mayoritario de una mina de bitcóin en Texas, que fue adquirida por más de 6 millones de dólares el año pasado.Yu, un estudiante de 23 años de la Universidad de Nueva York, también se ha convertido —sin querer— en un caso de estudio sobre cómo los ciudadanos chinos pueden mover dinero…

For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line.Sometime in the coming year, a spacecraft from AstroForge, an American asteroid-mining firm, may be launched on a mission to a rocky object near Earth’s orbit. If successful, it will be the first wholly commercial deep-space mission beyond the moon. AstroForge, however, is keeping its target asteroid…