The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1939, upon arriving late to his statistics course at UC Berkeley, George Dantzig—a first-year graduate student—copied two problems off the blackboard, thinking they were a homework assignment. He found the homework “harder to do than usual,” he would later recount, and apologized to the…
Other Phones to Consider We test a ton of Android phones. We like the ones below, but you’ll be better off with one of the options above. If you haven’t yet done so, check out our Best Cheap Phones and Best Folding Phones guides for more. Samsung Galaxy S25 FE Photograph: Julian Chokkattu Samsung Galaxy…
I don’t know if you’re like me, but one of my favorite ways to treat myself is with products that I know will help me better my body or ease any pain. Therabody has a slew of truly great products to help with everything from sore muscles, to aches and pains, and even has a…
Employees at Salesforce are circulating an internal letter to chief executive Marc Benioff calling on him to denounce recent actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prohibit the use of Salesforce software by immigration agents, and back federal legislation that would significantly reform the agency. The letter specifically cites the “recent killings of Renee Good…
Do you need cellular? All Apple Watch Series and SE models can be purchased with Bluetooth connectivity alone. Adding cellular capacity raises the sticker price by about $100, plus the roughly $10-per-month fee for a wireless plan. The Ultra models can be purchased only with cellular capacity, but you don’t have to activate it. Most…
OpenAI has announced a number of projects this year with foreign governments to help build out what it has called their “sovereign AI” systems. The company says the deals, some of which are being coordinated with the US government, are part of a broader push to give national leaders more control over a technology that…
Compare Indoor Cameras Best MicroSD Cards Photograph: Amazon Many security cameras support local storage, enabling you to record videos on the camera or a linked hub. A few hubs have built-in storage, and some provide slots for hard drives, but most rely on microSD cards. Here are some details on what to look for (and…
“Developing a tire specifically for electric vehicles requires a number of considerations you do not encounter when working with internal combustion engines,” said Ian Coke, chief technical officer at Pirelli North America. “Electric vehicles are heavier, have more powerful and faster acceleration off the line, and require lower rolling resistance.” Rolling resistance refers to the…
“This is not a consumer device company that takes privacy very seriously,” Gamero-Garrido says. Since people use smartphones far more than Alexa or a Kindle, he says an Amazon smartphone today would “significantly increase the scale of the potential privacy harms.” Gamero-Garrido thinks Amazon could use Transformer as a data-gathering tool to glean how people…
I first encountered the ideas of ultralight backpacking in 1994, in an article in now-defunct (and much-missed) Backpacker magazine. It was titled “Less is More,” by Mark Jenkins. (I still have a PDF copy I scanned years ago.) Jenkins wrote about a long trip across Europe and Africa. By the end, he and his traveling…