Stories by Deni Ellis Béchard

A British start-up recently pulled off a key maneuver for electric vertical flight—but certification, infrastructure and demand will decide whether air taxis fill our skies

A premapped course, a crew of handlers and a world-beating time: here’s what this Beijing half marathon reveals about how far humanoid robots have come—and how far they haven’t

Ghost Murmur was described as a futuristic CIA tool that could detect a heartbeat from vast distances. Physicists say the public story clashes with the basic limits of magnetic sensing

As humanoid robots enter the real world, new studies suggest that people project human racial biases onto them—but the research is divided on whether those biases persist outside the lab and in real-world interactions

Code that reads your frustration is the least interesting part of the story of this accidental leak from Anthropic. The leak reveals how AI tools are also concealing their own role in the work they help produce

A Los Angeles jury found Instagram and YouTube negligent in how they were built, opening a new legal fight over how courts view social media

Cortical Labs says the stunt points toward a new kind of low-power computing—and perhaps a new way to study neurological drugs

Security feeds and traffic cameras have helped guide some of the most audacious targeted killings in modern history. Security researchers say the underlying vulnerabilities cover the planet and are easy to exploit

A cybercrime campaign called GlassWorm is hiding malware in invisible characters and spreading it through software that millions of developers rely on

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has trapped a third of the world’s commercial helium, threatening the irreplaceable coolant that makes MRI scanners and advanced microchips possible

Researchers at OpenAI and Ginkgo Bioworks showed that an AI model working with an autonomous lab can design and iterate real biology experiments at unprecedented speed

GPS spoofing is distorting vessel positions and deepening the risk in one of the world’s most important shipping lanes

Experimental composer Holly Herndon says this technology isn’t here to replace artists—and that the future of creativity belongs to collective intelligence

Roboticist Benjie Holson created the “Humanoid Olympic Games” thinking home robots were 15 years away. Then they started folding the laundry

A new wearable AI system watches your hands through smart glasses, guiding experiments and stopping mistakes before they happen

Sasha Stiles turned GPT-2 experiments into a self-writing poem at a Museum of Modern Art installation—and a new way to think about text-generating AI optimization

As Anthropic releases its most autonomous agents yet, a mounting clash with the military reveals the impossible choice between global scaling and a “safety first” ethos

Gabriel Gomes built an agent that turns plain English into physical experiments, enabling research that humans alone could never sustain

Joseph McMullen uses AI to sort through terabytes of evidence, freeing him to focus on what the machines can’t find: the human story

When a patient shared the story of her sister’s death, an AI captured the clinical details—freeing physician Christopher Sharp to just be present

Veteran teacher Jen Roberts explains why generative tools are more than just a platform for cheating—they’re a way to make classrooms fairer and more human

Transdisciplinary artist Stephanie Dinkins challenges us to rethink what we feed our machines—and asks what AI might become if it were trained on care

Sources say an Army antidrone laser near Fort Bliss prompted a brief FAA airspace closure—spotlighting the hazards of battlefield technology in civilian skies

Researchers mimicked the air-trapping tricks of diving bell spiders to create aluminum that stays afloat—even when punctured