Early Friday morning, a flawed software update from the security firm CrowdStrike took down Windows computers across the world. For the aviation industry, the outage created the kind of chaos usually reserved for sudden, catastrophic weather—except all over the world, all at the same time. The outage highlighted an assumed but sometimes-obscured fact of the…
Is sleeping on your side good for you? If you’ve ever tried to consciously change your sleeping position (maybe because of a medical procedure or odd bed) you probably know it’s tough to fight your natural inclinations. The good news for side sleepers is the broad consensus among experts is that it’s at least as…
ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s approach to building artificial intelligence came under fire this week from former employees who accuse the company of taking unnecessary risks with technology that could become harmful. Today OpenAI released a new research paper apparently aimed at showing it is serious about tackling AI risk by making its models more explainable. In…
One of the new ad formats Google announced today will allow brands to link short-form videos they made—or ones they hired creators to film—to their advertisements in Google’s search engine. AI-generated text summaries of the clips will be included below. “I’ve got three Gen Z-ers at home, and watching them shop, it’s very video-based,” said…
Catherine Roberts Catherine Roberts is a health and science journalist at Consumer Reports. She has been at CR since 2016, covering infectious diseases, bugs and bug sprays, consumer medical devices like hearing aids and blood pressure monitors, health privacy, and more. As a civilian, her passions include bike rides, horror films and fiction, and research…
While all car seats must pass minimum federal safety standards, some may provide additional margins of crash protection, and some are easier to install than others. That’s crucial, considering a poorly installed car seat leaves a child vulnerable in a crash. “Those reasons, along with continuous ease-of-use and safety improvements, make a strong case for…
Away from the race track, paddle shifters are far less common. In CR’s survey, 60 percent of drivers who said the vehicle they drive most often had an automatic transmission said that it did not have paddle shifters. Sixteen percent said they did not know whether their vehicle had them or not. “Paddle shifters come…
Everything changed last year for Windows laptops. For the first time, Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon processors brought all the efficiency Mac users love to Windows, resulting in some of the fastest and longest-lasting laptops we’ve ever seen, like the Surface Laptop 7. But if all that goodness is only reserved for expensive, high-end laptops, it’ll never…
The phenomenon is known as immune amnesia, and it can leave people vulnerable to other infections for several weeks to months. Research has shown that it can take two to three years after a measles infection for protective immunity to fully return. “The measles virus is strongly immunosuppressive, meaning that it will interfere with the…
Ninety cases of measles have been reported in Texas in less than a month, marking the worst outbreak of the disease in the border state in more than 30 years. At least 16 people have been admitted to the hospital. Nine cases of measles have also been reported in the neighboring state of New Mexico….