Freshman enrollment dropped more than 5 percent from last year at American colleges and universities, the largest decline since 2020 when Covid-19 and distance learning upended higher education, according to preliminary data released on Wednesday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit education group. The finding comes roughly …
Read More »No, a Voting Machine Did Not ‘Flip’ a Vote in Georgia
All it took was one mistake by a voter in Georgia to propel a conspiracy theory to nationwide attention and the upper echelons of Republican politics. Election officials in the state said that the voter, a woman whose name they did not disclose, visited a polling site in Whitfield County …
Read More »Bots Linked to China Target Republican House and Senate Candidates, Microsoft Says
Dozens of inauthentic accounts on X linked to China have been assailing Republican members of Congress running for re-election in Alabama, Tennessee and Texas, accusing them of corruption and promoting their opponents, according to a report released on Wednesday by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. Those targeted include Representatives Barry Moore …
Read More »Tesla Shares Jump 22% After Robust Profit Increases
Tesla’s shares jumped 22 percent on Thursday — one of its best days in years — after it reported a big increase in profit for the third quarter. The company said it expected sales of cars to grow as much as 30 percent next year when it plans to introduce …
Read More »A Feathered Murder Mystery at 10,000 Feet
In January 2023, scientists attached tracking devices to eight grey plovers on the coast of the Wadden Sea off the Netherlands. The hope was to learn more about the birds’ yearly migration to breeding grounds in the Arctic. And all was going well until late May, when one of the …
Read More »Ancient Cities Unearthed in Mountains of Central Asia
Michael Frachetti was on an archaeological dig high in the mountains of southeastern Uzbekistan in 2015 when a forestry official approached him. “You know, I’ve seen some of those kinds of ceramics in my backyard,” the official said, referring to the artifacts emerging from the dirt. “Come see.” The casual …
Read More »What Drugmakers Did Not Tell Volunteers in Alzheimer’s Trials
By 2021, nearly 2,000 volunteers had answered the call to test an experimental Alzheimer’s drug known as BAN2401. For the drugmaker Eisai, the trial was a shot at a windfall — potentially billions of dollars — for defanging a disease that had confounded researchers for more than a century. To …
Read More »United by Love, Divided by Politics
In the 2024 presidential election, Karl Lenker is voting for former President Donald J. Trump. His girlfriend of a decade, Jan Lewin, is voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. So Ms. Lewin, 67, did not appreciate the Biden-Harris “Dumb and Dumber” mug that her partner bought for his morning coffee. …
Read More »U.S. Study on Puberty Blockers Goes Unpublished Because of Politics, Doctor Says
An influential doctor and advocate of adolescent gender treatments said she had not published a long-awaited study of puberty-blocking drugs because of the charged American political environment. The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues …
Read More »How to Use Images From Your Phone to Search the Web
A picture is worth a thousand words, but you don’t need to type any of them to search the internet these days. Boosted by artificial intelligence, software on your phone can automatically analyze objects live in your camera view or in a photo (or video) to immediately round up a …
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