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Sitting near a window at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, overlooking the duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in computing power a dollar could buy over the past 85 years.A neon green line rose steadily across the page, like fireworks in the night sky.That diagonal line, he said, shows why humanity is just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long-hyped moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and equip themselves with millions of times more computing power than their biological brains currently provide.“If you create something that is thousands of times — or millions of times — more powerful than the brain, we can’t predict what it will do,” he said, wearing multicolored suspenders and a Mickey Mouse wa...

American and Israeli officials expressed renewed optimism Thursday about a ceasefire deal in the Gaza Strip, after Hamas reversed its position and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later told President Biden he would send a new negotiating delegation to the stalled talks.White House officials said they believed the new progress in the talks amounted to what has repeatedly been called a “breakthrough” in the months-long negotiations, though they said it would take time to work out the many steps involved in implementing the truce. Israeli and other officials involved in the talks agreed that there had been progress, but described it in more cautious terms.The discussions are based on a three-phase framework agreement made public by President Biden in late May and endorsed by the Uni...

Spring Fertility, a clinic in Midtown Manhattan, looks like the place where the main characters on “Broad City” would have wound up if the millennial sitcom had done an episode about egg freezing. The waiting room has books by America’s youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman and its Instagram poet laureate Rupi Kaur. The kitchen is stocked with Spindrift. A conference room also serves as a venue for “shots nights,” less raucous than they sound, where patients inject themselves with fertility drugs communally, with encouragement from staff.Spring’s medical director in New York, Catha Fischer, dressed in a loose blouse and a low ponytail, beamed as she showed me the phlebotomy stations and operating room, where patients are anesthetized so that a doctor can puncture their ovaries with a needle an...

Voters flocked to a polling station in Portsmouth, a city on England’s south coast known for its naval base and historic dockyard, on Thursday morning, to a warm welcome from poll workers.Elderly couples walked hand in hand toward the local church, which had been temporarily set up with ballot boxes, along with parents with children in strollers and young adults rushing to work.One by one, they cast their weight on the nation’s future in a vote that polls say could end 14 years of Conservative rule.“I just want to see change,” said Sam Argha, 36, who was outside the polling station Thursday morning. “I just want to see us do something different.”It also serves as a microcosm of the broader national challenge facing the ruling party: a long-standing Conservative electorate held by a popular...

Early last year, a hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and stole details about the design of the company’s artificial intelligence technologies.The hacker stole details from discussions in an online forum where employees discussed OpenAI’s latest technologies, but was unable to break into the systems where the company hosts and develops its artificial intelligence, according to two people familiar with the incident.OpenAI executives disclosed the incident to employees at an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco offices in April 2023, the people said, during which they discussed sensitive company information on condition of anonymity.But executives decided not to share the news publicly because no customer or partner information...

In the working-class neighborhood of Tehran surrounding Imam Hussein Square, side streets and alleys are lined with second-hand shops and small repair shops that refurbish all manner of household appliances. But with little to do, most shopkeepers idle outside their stores.A 60-year-old man named Abbas and his son Asgar, 32, sat on two of the second-hand faux-brocade chairs they sell. When asked about their business, Abbas, who did not want his last name used for fear of attracting government attention, seemed incredulous."Just look down the street," he said. "Business is bad. There are no customers, people are economically weak now, they have no money."After years of debilitating U.S. sanctions that have generated chronic inflation, compounded by Iran’s economic mismanagement and corrupti...

A scientist whose research was at the center of a controversy over a potential Alzheimer's drug has been charged with fraud.A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York, on charges of falsifying data to obtain grants totaling about $16 million from the National Institutes of Health.Dr. Wang’s studies have supported research on a diagnostic test for Alzheimer’s disease and on simufilam, a drug in late-stage clinical trials. Simufilam’s maker, Cassava Sciences, a Texas-based pharmaceutical company, has claimed that the drug improves cognition in Alzheimer’s patients.Alzheimer's disease affects about six million Americans, a number that is expected to double by 2050, and promising treatments generate enormous excitement. Cassava&...

The leader of the The whole world gang — Marat’s brother, Vova — has also just returned from battle, having served in the brutal Soviet-Afghan war. He seems unfazed by what he saw there. None of his peers seem curious, either. Such is the aesthetic world of the series: empty to the point of being impenetrable. The director, Zhora Kryzhovnikov, rarely lets the camera wander beyond the rectilinear confines of the apartment blocks. The period details are eerily accurate, but I still have no idea what Kazan actually looks like. The plot is somehow frenetic and inert.The play is set at a critical moment. Everyone knows the Soviet Union is collapsing, but no one knows what will happen next. In one of his few moments of effective irony, Vova reflects on the future. “I listened to Gorbachev,” he s...

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the first legal challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements, which is scheduled to take effect in September.Judge Ada Brown granted an injunction sought by several plaintiffs, saying the ban cannot be enforced against them pending a final ruling.But while the ruling was preliminary, it said the FTC had no “substantive authority to issue regulations” regarding unfair competition practices and that the plaintiffs “would likely succeed on the merits” of their challenge.Judge Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas said he expects to issue a final decision by the end of August.The commission “supports our clear authority, supported by statute and precedent, to issue this rule,” said Douglas Farrar, a s...

The evacuation order issued this week by the Israeli military concerns about a third of the Gaza Strip, at a time when the local population is increasingly ill-equipped to manage repeated forced displacements, after nearly nine months of war that have left tens of thousands dead and wounded and put the territory at risk of famine.The order, which the United Nations estimates affects about 250,000 people, is the largest since October, when about a million residents of the northern Gaza Strip were ordered to leave their homes, the organization said Tuesday."It's an endless cycle of death and displacement," Louise Wateridge, a spokeswoman for the main U.N. agency that helps Palestinians, UNRWA, said in voice messages from central Gaza on Wednesday. "People here are expressing that they ar...