In the ordinary digital world that most people inhabit, forgetting a password is a minor inconvenience, since almost every service offers a way to reset it, typically by sending a link to an email address or a code to a phone, restoring access within minutes. This convenience rests on a foundation of central authorities, the…
Read MoreThe idea that data and algorithms could help prevent crime before it happens has long held a powerful appeal, promising to make policing more efficient, more objective, and more effective by directing limited resources to where they are most needed. Beginning in the early years of the last decade, police departments across the United States…
Read MoreAlmost everyone holds a scattered collection of loyalty rewards they will likely never fully use, points accumulated in airline programs, stars in coffee apps, store credits, and miles in credit card schemes that all sit locked inside the closed systems of the various companies that issued them. These rewards all share a common and deeply…
Read MoreFor a small business, the single most dangerous moment of all is not when it happens to be unprofitable but when it actually runs out of cash. A business can be perfectly profitable on paper, with more sales than expenses over the course of a year, and still fail outright because at some particular moment…
Read MoreDecentralized finance protocols face a problem that would be instantly familiar to almost any consumer business but that takes a particularly acute and unforgiving form in their world, the persistent challenge of keeping users around once they have first arrived. In traditional finance, customers tend to be quite sticky, since switching banks or brokerages is…
Read MoreIn the world of blockchains that secure themselves through staking, a powerful and deeply controversial idea has taken firm hold, the seductive idea that the very same staked assets used to secure one network could simultaneously be put to work securing many others at the same time. This concept, known as restaking, promises to make…
Read MoreThe popular vision of self-driving vehicles has long focused almost entirely on the remarkable engineering challenge of teaching a single car to perceive its surroundings and to navigate safely through the world without any human driver at the wheel. Yet as autonomous vehicles begin to move from research projects toward genuine real-world deployment, a different…
Read MoreSleep occupies roughly a third of every human life, and the quality of that sleep shapes nearly everything about the other two-thirds, from daily mood and memory to immune function, metabolism, emotional regulation, and the trajectory of long-term physical and mental health. Yet for all its profound importance, sleep has long remained deeply mysterious to…
Read MoreScientific progress depends heavily on money, and the way that money is distributed profoundly shapes what gets studied, who gets to study it, and how quickly important discoveries are actually made. For most of modern history, the funding of research has flowed through a relatively small number of large and established channels, government agencies, private…
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