Stories by Deni Ellis Béchard

Cat bathroom data from an AI-powered litter box could offer useful pet health insights

A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offer insights to transform urban planning and pest control

Forensic scientist Michael Haag explains how laser scanners could be used to lock down the crime scenes where Charlie Kirk was fatally shot, letting investigators revisit angles, trajectories and vantage points long after the fact.

We surveyed people in the U.S. about artificial-intelligence-generated art. Their answers told us a lot about how we value human creativity

Artificial-intelligence agents—touted as AI’s next wave—could be vulnerable to malicious code hidden in innocent-looking images on your computer screen

OpenAI researchers reveal how their experimental model, devoid of any external aids, powered through hours-long proofs to earn a gold-medal score at the International Math Olympiad—and they discuss the project’s origins and describe how such work could help lead to artificial general intelligence

An artificial intelligence breakthrough uses reinforcement learning to tackle the Andrews-Curtis conjecture, solving long-standing counterexamples and hinting at tools for forecasting stock crashes, diseases and climate disasters

A conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot raises questions about how AI talks about awareness.

Hulk Hogan, a larger-than-life wrestler known for his showmanship, succumbed to cardiac arrest after a career marked by digital hoaxes and a landmark battle against online exploitation

As large language models like Claude 4 express uncertainty about whether they are conscious, researchers race to decode their inner workings, raising profound questions about machine awareness, ethics and the risks of uncontrolled AI evolution

Discover why some puzzles stump supersmart AIs but are easy for humans, what this reveals about the quest for true artificial general intelligence—and why video games are the next frontier

This AI system can analyze up to one million DNA letters at once, predicting how tiny changes in noncoding regions trigger everything from cancer to rare genetic disorders—and potentially revolutionizing personalized medicine

Elon Musk has launched xAI’s Grok 4—calling it the “world’s smartest AI” and claiming it can ace Ph.D.-level exams and outpace rivals such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s o3 on tough benchmarks

Japan’s new earthquake-detection network lengthens warning times, and researchers in Wales have harnessed nuclear blast detectors to gauge tsunami risks. But the U.S. lags in monitoring the massive Cascadia megathrust fault

For more than a century, cars have meant freedom, escape and self-reinvention to Americans. Now Tesla’s forthcoming Cybercab makes us ask whether we can have the romance of the open road without actually driving it

American military engineers designed the GBU-57/B bomb to devastate deeply buried bunkers without radioactive fallout. It’s the only nonnuclear weapon that can reach Iran’s hardest target

AI is shedding new light on the 12,000-year conversation between cats and their humans, suggesting that house cats wield a far richer vocabulary than once thought

Iranian Shahed drones, Ukrainian quadcopters and the U.S.’s Golden Horde program reveal three paths to massed autonomy, and each rewrites the rules of air defense

When Israeli aircraft recently struck a uranium-enrichment complex in the nation, Iran could have been days away from achieving “breakout,” the ability to quickly turn “yellowcake” uranium into bomb-grade fuel, with its new high-speed centrifuges

During recent protests in Los Angeles, fires triggered “thermal runaway” in several Waymo robotaxis’ lithium-ion battery packs. The phenomenon sent temperatures past 1,000 degrees Celsius, vaporized much of the cars and spewed lung-searing hydrogen fluoride

YouTube star Derek Muller built an 18-million-subscriber YouTube empire by challenging misconceptions about science. Now his own blood test and a sudden EPA reversal give his work urgent relevance.

Apple is paying $95 million over claims that Siri secretly recorded private chats and fed targeted ads

A new AI platform called Xanthorox markets itself as a tool for cybercrime, but its real danger may lie in how easily such systems can be built—and sold—by anyone

New rules that trim crash reporting requirements and widen testing access for U.S. robotaxis are hailed as an innovation edge and criticized for eroding safety oversight