In 2011, Jad Abumrad, the creator and a host of the syndicated radio show and podcast “Radiolab,” won a MacArthur Fellowship, better known to the admiring and the envious as a genius grant. Appropriately enough, Mr. Abumrad used some of the $500,000 prize money to build and outfit a studio on the top floor of…
This month has seen a torrent of news about experimental vaccines to prevent Covid-19, with the latest development from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford. On Monday they announced that a preliminary analysis showed their vaccine was effective — especially when the first dose was mistakenly cut in half. The announcement came on the heels…
While your travel plans may be on hold, you can pretend you’re somewhere new for the night. Around the World at Home invites you to channel the spirit of a new place each week with recommendations on how to explore the culture, all from the comfort of your home. Beyond the palm trees and mai…
As an activity in the Covid-19 era, skiing has a lot going for it — it’s outdoors, people naturally distance by spreading out all over a mountain, and they’re used to covering their faces. What’s tricky is everything around skiing: renting gear, waiting in lift lines, sharing gondolas and chairs, crowding at mid-mountain restaurants, socializing…
Tanya Saracho landed her first television writing job on the Lifetime soap “Devious Maids” in 2012. She was a diversity hire. It’s an official term for a practice meant to encourage inclusion. In an effort to make writers’ rooms — long the bastion of white males — more diverse, studios pay the salary of a…
Nov. 24, 2020 Image Give someone the gift of healthy living this year with one of these gift ideas from the writers and editors of Well. What gift has made your life better? That’s the question I posed to the editors, writers and contributors to Well, and the result is our first-ever Well holiday gift…
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. I began 2020 eagerly anticipating my first trip to Japan, one I had spent a year planning. I hoped to explore the culture in my typical fashion, through long wandering walks. Yet, as the coronavirus…
One of the people I credit with extending my life is struggling for her own. Over the past eight years, Alesha Arnold has served as the research nurse caring for me in a cancer clinical trial. In the summer of 2019, this bright young woman — she is in her 40s — was shocked by…
GPT-3, the latest incarnation of artificially intelligent natural-language systems, knows how to write — and write and write and write. For a taste of what it can (and cannot) do, here are three examples of its verbosity. In each case, we gave the system a short prompt (in italics) and let it roll. First we…
November 24, 2020, New York — Owkin, a startup company that deploys artificial intelligence (AI) and Federated Learning (FL) technologies to augment medical research, accelerate drug development and enable scientific discoveries, announces a collaboration with the Institut Pasteur, a private, non-profit foundation whose mission is to help prevent and treat diseases, mainly those of infectious…