AMID THE CONSTANT onslaught of troubling headlines that is daily life under the Trump administration, it’s hard to know what’s more dangerous: The confirmation of John Ratcliffe to be the director of national intelligence—or what comes after it? Perhaps the clearest sign that three-term Texas congressman Ratcliffe is manifestly unqualified to serve as the nation’s director of national intelligence isn’t the fact that he embellished his resume, nor that a only minority of the US Senate ...

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said Wednesday. Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets discussing the virus since January and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.

Around the globe, over 800,000 people die from suicide each year. While health professionals and others cannot prevent all suicides, evidence suggests suicide can be prevented, and effective prevention strategies already exist. Efforts to prevent suicide and research on suicide prevention have focused on the reduction of access to methods of suicide1 and risk factors...

One Wednesday in early March, Abra Morawiec realized something seismic was happening at her farm stand. The month had been pretty quiet at the Feisty Acres table in the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan. But that day, at the very start of social distancing, she had sold out of everything by 2 p.m. “I had to go home three hours early,” Ms. Morawiec said. After wondering whether her small farm on the North Fork of Long Island would survive the pandemic, this was good news.

Android is synonymous with smartphones. It’s the most popular mobile operating system in the world, powering more than 2.5 billion active devices. However, a lot of people don’t know that the OS wasn’t originally designed for phones.

Google finally started shipping the second-generation Pixel Buds, and with them came a slew of new features for Android's Bluetooth stack. The 2nd-gen Pixel Buds are Google's first truly wireless headphones, and they are finally on sale for $179 in the US. They were announced a whopping six months ago at Google's annual hardware event, alongside the Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, and Nest Wi-Fi. They have an always-on Google Assistant, a charging case, and no active noise cancellation.

Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that allowed them to live comfortably – but without any real contro...

A landlord in rural Minnesota apparently wasn’t letting widespread eviction moratoriums stop him from kicking out his tenants during the coronavirus pandemic. So, when renters refused to leave after their lease was up this month — they wanted to obey the governor’s orders to “shelter-in-place” to protect their immunocompromised child, and couldn’t find another place to go — he allegedly shut off their electricity.

Safari operator Pankaj Shah would normally be showing tourists around the beauty spots of his native Kenya. Instead, he is spearheading a volunteer effort to feed thousands of families left penniless when the new coronavirus devastated the economy.

A four-year-old boy has beaten coronavirus while also fighting cancer with gruelling chemotherapy sessions. Archie Wilks was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer, in January 2019 and had been undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy before he was tested for coronavirus when he began showing symtoms.

A spokesperson called it a "precautionary step."

2020 has a new motto: "Cancelled due to the coronavirus." Businesses, schools, sports, travel, film, and TV production, conferences, meetings, and basically any and all business as usual has been suspended in the US as individuals and institutions try to slow the spread of COVID-19. We have, at least, had outdoor space to go to—staying at least six feet away from others as we do—when we need a break from the four walls of our homes.

The Trump administration has hired Anna Seidman, formerly a longtime lawyer at the trophy hunting advocacy group Safari Club International, to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s international affairs program.

YouTube removed at least 20 channels posting false or divisive content to generate ad dollars. The channels used voice-over actors to read scripts. At least one of them was hired on Fiverr, the freelance marketplace.

A Canadian team of scientists has successfully isolated a strain of the coronavirus and grown samples in a lab to help study the pathogen responsible for the deadly global pandemic. Researchers from Sunnybrook Research Institute, McMaster University and the University of Toronto, all in Canada, isolated the virus from two specimens and then cultivated it in a secure containment facility.

IBM announced Wednesday that it’s halting all domestic travel for internal meetings and cutting down on international travel because of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. The company is also banning employee participation in external events with more than 1,000 attendees. IBM says those restrictions apply through the end of March.

Whew. Don't scare us like that, Voyager 2.