“The fundamental challenge that we face is that publishing has, for decades, functioned based on trust,” says Suzanne Farley, research integrity director at Springer Nature.

“The thing about making up new terminology—and this is a place that writers can fall down—is that, like anything else, it has to make sense not only within the universe that you’re building but also in the universe of the reader,” says John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and The Last Emperox, among other sci-fi works.

Dire wolves went extinct some 13,000 years ago, and for a long time researchers believed that Canis dirus (translation: “fearsome dog”) were a sister species to the gray wolf.What researchers found was that instead of just being some kind of beefed up gray wolf, dire wolves actually had very distinct DNA.

Even the industry’s fanciest nights, like the National Book Awards gala, took place as digital events, with participants glammed up and sitting at home.WIRED asked the writers behind five of our favorite 2020 tomes to tell us what it was like to release a book during quarantine.

On Thursday evening, Twitter's head of trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, posted a thread of tweets explaining a new policy on hacked materials, in response to the firestorm of criticism it received—largely from the political right and President Donald Trump—for its decision to block the sharing of a New York Post story based on alleged private data and communications of presidential candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.

The first, long championed by China, is net nationalism, which makes the State the predominant authority over all things internet, and at bottom sees the network as nothing more than an instrument of state power.

Based on the president’s comments and those of FDA head Stephen Hahn and HHS director Alex Azar, the data that tipped plasma into getting this Emergency Use Authorization came from a nationwide program to give people wider access to convalescent plasma, led by researchers at the Mayo Clinic.

Dyson’s 2013 calculation convinced many people that gravitational wave detectors were, at best, impractical probes for learning about quantum gravity.“There’s a kind of default consensus that it’s a waste of time to think about quantum effects and gravitational radiation,” said Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT who was a coauthor with Parikh on the new paper.

At the beginning of 2020, a business that offered you a real person in real time to help you with your needs would be considered a luxury and somewhat exempt from the forces of frictionlessness.

The resulting material is a geopolymer, which has similar properties to concrete and could potentially be used to build landing pads, habitats, and other structures on the moon.Lunar regolith has chemical similarities to fly ash, which makes geopolymers an attractive option for building stuff on the moon.

This past week, much of the world was treated to a Super Pink Moon and if you were one of many who missed out due to clouds or rain, don’t worry!Writers and poets love the moon, super or not, so this week we’ll offer a series of moon-related quotes and poems.

An arm of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, Let’s Encrypt is a so-called certificate authority that lets websites implement encrypted connections at no cost.Let's Encrypt uses software called Boulder to make sure that it's allowed to issue a certificate to a site.

The genre, which imagines stories and worlds shaped by climate change, is sometimes considered a cousin of science fiction.R. Burgmann, he calls pessimistic fatalism one of the major “paradigmatic responses to climate change in recent fiction.”.

At the beginning of this year, the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld published a short story called “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” by Isabel Fall.

Gove and his colleagues dissected hundreds of larval fish and found that 8.6 percent of specimens from slicks—which appear as smooth ribbons on the surface—contained microplastics, more than twice the rate as larvae in nearby non-slick surface waters.

We had canvassed thousands of the world's leading experts in technology and culture, and had begun the long task of interpreting the more than 700 responses to the final question in our survey:In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust.

If some property owners who live near the ocean or in a river floodplain can be convinced to sell their homes, and the land is returned to open space, the entire community will benefit.

The seas continue to take on the atmosphere’s heat, as marine heatwaves cripple ecosystems and less snow and ice threaten water supplies.Let’s begin with the most apparent consequence of climate change in the oceans: global mean sea level rise.

Under Trump’s plan, the Environmental Protection Agency will revoke the so-called waiver underpinning the state’s ability to set tailpipe greenhouse-gas emissions standards that are more stringent, as well as the state’s electric vehicle sales mandate.

The research team has an entire webpage devoted to its seismic recordings of the natural resonances (vibrations) that come out of the Utah arches.

“Millions of Americans entrusted personal information to Facebook with the understanding that Facebook would respect the laws governing consumer privacy, but Facebook’s many privacy missteps made clear that it lacked a culture of compliance in this area,” FTC commissioner Christine Wilson said at a press conference announcing the settlement Wednesday.

Emphatic caps feel like the quintessential example of internet tone of voice, and sure enough, they’ve been around since the very early days online: Linguist Ben Zimmer found people in old Usenet groups explaining that all caps meant yelling as far back as 1984.

By swiping to a special screen inside the app, Uber riders can travel to within 800 feet of 24 eligible bus stops and then transfer to a bus for free.“In our county, we really are trying to change the culture so that more people are using public transit rather than thinking about putting their car on the road,” says Janet Long, a Pinellas County commissioner and chair of the transit authority board.

New York's Vaccine Order Shows How Health Laws Are Failing Us. The threat of bigger measles outbreaks is turning the political tides, making public health officials more willing to take draconian steps.

In 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act to reform Section 215 and prohibit the nationwide bulk collection of communications metadata, like who we make calls to and receive them from, when, and the call duration.

“In short, Russia would need to do two things: Ensure that the content Russians seek to access is actually located somewhere in the country, and ensure that routing and exchanges could all occur domestically,” says Nicole Starosielski a professor at New York University and author of The Undersea Network .

If a troll runs two fake news pages but only one of them violates Facebook’s policies, the company can’t take down the other until it breaks the rules as well.

Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right? Alyssa Foote; Getty Images If you use social media, you've probably noticed a trend across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter of people posting their then-and-now profile pictures, mostly from 10 years ago and this year. Instead of joining in, I posted the following semi-sarcastic tweet:

The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) quickly became America’s main tool for protecting and restoring historic sites, like battlefields, and for providing matching grants to states for urban and suburban recreation facilities, like ballfields.

“Over the last 20 years of doing this, we’ve gotten better at thinking about the economic costs,” says John Furlow, a development and aid expert at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society and an author of NCA4.