The world is seeing extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence. There are new applications in finance, defense, health care, criminal justice, and education, among other areas.[1] Algorithms are improving spell-checkers, voice recognition systems, ad targeting, and fraud detection.

The three college-aged defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet—an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks—will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI. Josiah White, Paras Jha, and Dalton Norman, who were all between 18 and 20 years old when they built and launched Mirai, pleaded guilty last December to creating the malware that hijacked hundreds of...

During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.

On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome. Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.

oxyContin is a dying business in America. With the nation in the grip of an opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, the U.S. medical establishment is turning away from painkillers. Top health officials are discouraging primary care doctors from prescribing them for chronic pain, saying there is no proof they work long-term and substantial evidence they put patients at risk.

At more than 60 years into the Space Age, fictional spaceships appear on our screens at a far greater frequency than the real things launch in real life. But that doesn't mean they'll actually fly. When it comes to imagining interstellar travel, the history of spaceflight up until now hasn't given science-fiction designers a whole lot to work with. All we've seen are basic rockets (useful for escaping Earth's gravity well), plane-like space shuttles (useful for re-entering it), Moon modules (the lunar lander), and modular orbital tubes (the International Space Station).

Falling teacher pay. Decrepit school buildings. Textbooks older than we are. It’s no wonder this country is grappling with record teacher shortages – and our colleagues in five states have staged walkouts. But the real victims of this chronic underfunding of education are America’s children.

Set aside what religious tradition says, and discover who wrote the Bible according to the scholars who have examined the actual evidence.

Plato’stheory of justice quite different from and contrary to the justice as we understand it in constitutional-legal terms, can be precisely summed in following two quotes from the Republic: “Justice is having and doing what is one’s own”and “A just man is a man just in the right place doing his best and giving full equivalent of what he receives”.

On Sunday 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant was awoken by his alarm at 6am. He said goodbye to his girlfriend as she left the house, ate some breakfast, and set the burglar alarm before leaving his Hobart residence, as usual. He stopped briefly to purchase a coffee in the small town of Forcett, where he asked the cashier to “boil the kettle less time.” He then drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur, originally a colonial-era convict settlement populated only by a few hundred people.

The long read: Forgeries have got so good – and so costly – that Sotheby’s has brought in its own in-house fraud-busting expert

The drive to the little white dome on the northern slope of Mauna Loa is a bumpy one. Mauna Loa, the “Long Mountain,” is a colossal volcano that covers half of the island of Hawaii. The rocky terrain, rusty brown and deep red, crunches beneath car tires and jostles passengers. Up there, more than 8,000 feet above sea level and many miles away from the sounds of civilization, it doesn’t feel like Earth. It feels like another planet. Like Mars.

We’re eating alone more often than in any previous generation. But why should a meal on our own be uninspired?

The epic effort to rescue Floyd Collins was a battle between heroism and folly, selflessness and selfishness, and life and death.

Jeongja Han dumps a drawer of pens and lighters into a plastic garbage bag while her client, a recently widowed woman in her mid-50s who asked not to be named, sits on a stool, watching. The woman’s husband died in a car accident a few weeks ago, leaving her to clean out the spacious two-bedroom apartment they occupied for 30 years in Tokyo’s trendy Ebisu neighborhood. They had no children to lay claim to heirlooms or nostalgia, so her directions to Han were simple: “Get rid of everything.”

The broad-smiling, blond-bearded, would-be killer - Oleksiy Tsymbaliuk - is sitting next to me in my car. Tsymbaliuk, a former Orthodox priest, is the unlikely starting point for the extraordinary tale of how the Ukrainian security service says it faked a murder in order to stop a murder. In doing so, it tried to expose what it says is Russia's involvement in the killing of political opponents. "I am Arkady Babchenko's assassin," says Tsymbaliuk (pictured below) with a laugh as we shake hands.

The death toll in Flint, Michigan, from contaminated water may be much higher than state health officials have acknowledged, an ongoing FRONTLINE investigation has found. The likely killer: Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia caused by the legionella bacteria.

Americans tend to view the impact of the internet and other digital technologies on their own lives in largely positive ways, Pew Research Center surveys have shown over the years. A survey of U.S. adults conducted in January 2018 finds continuing evidence of this trend, with the vast majority of internet users (88%) saying the internet has, on balance, been a mostly good thing for them personally.

The long read: Gene A Bunin has spent the past 18 months talking to Uighur restaurant workers all over China. These conversations reveal how this Muslim minority feel the daily threat of arrest, detention and ‘re-education’.

Two women had the most audacious task. Killing the brother of the North Korean leader. Right out in the open, using deadly chemical weapons in an international airport. And the craziest thing? They had no idea what they'd gotten into.

For the entirety of recorded history, humans have worshipped nuclear fusion. It's gone by different names over the millennia, of course: the Egyptians called it Ra, the Greeks called it Helios, and the Aztecs knew it as Tonatiuh. Today, most of us know it as the Sun, but leading physicists around the world regard it with the same sense of awe as our ancient ancestors. This is not because these physicists believe the Sun rides across the sky in a giant reed boat...

When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic. Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”

The long read: When two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin invited their classmate for a game of hide-and-seek in the forest, they planned to murder her. They later claimed they were forced to act by the mythical Slender Man

Four siblings wrote hundreds of letters to each other during World War II. The story they tell of service, sacrifice and trauma was hidden away in an abandoned storage unit — until now.

Victims have grown skeptical they will ever see justice.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in business, tech, and science writing.

Kabul residents who can afford it, like the families of Samim Sediqi (at left) and his friend Iqbal, are moving to new apartment blocks in the neighborhood of Qasaba. Life there is easier—and safer—than downtown, where Taliban attacks are a threat.

As Donald Trump surrenders America’s global commitments, Xi Jinping is learning to pick up the pieces. When the Chinese action movie “Wolf Warrior II” arrived in theatres, in July, it looked like a standard shoot-’em-up, with a lonesome hero and frequent explosions. Within two weeks, however, “Wolf Warrior II” had become the highest-grossing Chinese movie of all time. Some crowds gave it standing ovations; others sang the national anthem.

The history of logic should be of interest to anyone with aspirations to thinking that is correct, or at least reasonable. This story illustrates different approaches to intellectual enquiry and human cognition more generally. Reflecting on the history of logic forces us to reflect on what it means to be a reasonable cognitive agent, to think properly. Is it to engage in discussions with others? Is it to think for ourselves? Is it to perform calculations?

Clarence Jones, the galvanizing lawyer who was Martin Luther King Jr.’s trusted lieutenant between 1960 and 1968, has come out from the shadows of civil-rights history. In 2006, he shared his untold tale with Douglas Brinkley: the secret missions, the F.B.I. wiretaps, and the “real” Martin of those perilous, passionate years.

The most pervasive feeling about the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality repeal is one of hopelessness. If we all need to use the internet, big telecom companies control our access to the internet, and there’s no choice about what company to use, how are we supposed to stop these companies from messing with our connections?

The arc of American history is undergirded by a continuous, pointed degradation of the black family. The crux of this is the pervasive mythology surrounding the “missing black father.” At his feet has been laid the blame for poverty, mass incarceration, police brutality, and any number of ills, rather than the real culprit — the systemic, institutionalized racism that defines so much of American life. Despite statistics and studies that contradict this mythology, this archetype continues to cast a shadow on the black community.

When rescuers found Nathan Carman after seven days at sea, his mother had vanished without a trace. But his past was about to resurface.

It's early in the morning on October 4, 2016, and in a few seconds, Rick Osterloh will present Google’s latest gadget portfolio to the world. He’s not even six months into his new job, creating and running the company’s ambitious new hardware division. In April, CEO Sundar Pichai had tasked Osterloh with turning the software giant into a gadget maker that can compete with Apple. Osterloh has barely had enough time to sample all the snacks in the mini-kitchen, much less conceive of and ship a bunch of products.

The long read: Every baffled new parent goes searching for answers in baby manuals. But what they really offer is the reassuring fantasy that life’s most difficult questions have one right answer