In September, scientists at the University of Hong Kong published the most complete census of ants ever assembled. The numbers are so big as to seem made up. The study estimated that there are at least 20 quadrillion — that is, 20,000,000,000,000,000 — ants on Earth. That’s about 2.5 million ants…

If you bought a new phone, computer, game console or some other such device in the past few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve been charging it using a cable with at least one end that looks something like a squashed Tic Tac — a rectangular plug with rounded corners, about a tenth of an inch…

The internet is the most comprehensive compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, but is its size a feature or a bug? Does its very immensity undermine its utility as a source of information? How often is it burying valuable data under lots of junk? Say you search for some famous or semifamous…

When the president, the treasury secretary and other Biden administration officials insisted this week that the American economy is not currently in a recession, they were mocked for weaseling out of bad news on a technicality. The Commerce Department announced on Thursday that the broadest measure…

Early in 2009, I offered the world some tech advice that I have regretted pretty much ever since: I told everyone to join Facebook. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. I didn’t just tell people. I harangued. I mocked. Writing in Slate, I all but reached through the screen, grabbed Facebook…

Previously on “Elon,” our man rushed into a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter just before the bottom fell out of tech stocks, including his own. Not the best timing, but fret not, for Elon’s always got an out. This time it’s bots. Eradicating the scammy, automated accounts that plague Twitter had…

There are days, now, when you can almost forget about the virus. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are still being infected with Covid-19 daily — an average of about 361 Americans died from it every day in the last week — but after more than two years and millions of lost lives, the…

Elon Musk is hard to love. Elon Musk is hard to like. On his way to becoming the world’s wealthiest person, Musk has emitted so many metric tons of self-indulgent puerility he might have violated the Paris Accords. But one need not find Musk personally or politically appealing to appreciate that…

The stock market has lately soured on the technology industry. Stock prices of many of the largest companies are down this year, some slightly — shares of Apple and Google have fallen more than 6 percent — and some stupendously: Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Netflix have lost about a third…