mRNA vaccines did not appear out of nowhere in 2020. They looked sudden because the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to watch vaccine development in real time. But the science behind them had been moving slowly for decades, through failed experiments, technical obstacles, limited funding, and a basic biological problem:…
For a long time, gene therapy sounded like one of those ideas that belonged more to the future than to medicine. The promise was simple to say and hard to deliver: if a disease is caused by a broken gene, perhaps doctors could give cells a working copy and treat…
Meta’s latest round of planned layoffs is not being presented as a simple case of artificial intelligence replacing human workers. That would be the cleaner story. It is also probably too simple. The more revealing story is about capital allocation. According to Reuters, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees in…
Major airlines are starting to behave as if the aviation industry has entered a new cost reality. United, Delta, Lufthansa Group, and other carriers have cut growth plans, reduced capacity, raised fees, or warned investors that fuel costs are now reshaping their 2026 outlook. The immediate trigger is the surge…
Snap’s latest round of layoffs is not just another tech cost-cutting story. It is one of the clearer examples of how artificial intelligence is moving from an experimental tool into the operating model of a large technology company. On April 15, 2026, Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, announced…
AI coding tools are often discussed as if the main question is speed. Can they generate code faster? Can they autocomplete more accurately? Can they turn a prompt into a working feature with fewer corrections? Those questions matter. But they are not the whole story. IBM’s new agentic development platform,…
Spirit Airlines has stopped flying. On May 2, 2026, the airline announced that it had started an orderly wind-down of operations, effective immediately. All flights were cancelled, passengers were told not to go to the airport, and customer service was no longer available in the usual sense. For a carrier…
Artificial intelligence is often discussed as if it has one inevitable social effect. It will either replace workers, make everyone more productive, destroy the middle class, create new jobs, or finally make expertise available to anyone with an internet connection. The more difficult truth is that AI may do several…
Richard Dawkins recently raised a question that sounds simple only until you sit with it: if an artificial intelligence can write poetry, make jokes, discuss a novel with subtlety, and reason about its own possible inner life, what exactly is left for consciousness to explain? That question matters because it…
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has a simple answer to the fear that AI will make engineers obsolete: engineering is not the same thing as typing code. That distinction matters. AI can already generate code, test fragments of software, summarize documentation, and automate many narrow technical tasks. But Huang’s broader point…