Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. Graves being prepared for the victims of an airstrike on a school in Minab in southern Iran, 2 March 2026. A photo of Iran's bombed schoolgirl graveyard went around the world. T he graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them.

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Feedback is feeling bold, so here is a prediction: the research we are about to describe is going to win an Ig Nobel award within the next decade. The entire project feels tailor-made for the Igs. It is an effort to objectively measure human flatulence using biosensors, or "Smart Underwear". We learned of this from a press release from the University of Maryland, flagged to us by physics reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan with the phrase: "Surely, Feedback can do something with this." The essential problem is that we do not know the normal range for flatulence, unlike other key biomarkers like blood glucose.

Search traffic to news sites has already plunged by a third in one year, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Search traffic to news sites has already plunged by a third in one year, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Publishers fear AI search summaries and chatbots mean'end of traffic era' Media companies expect web traffic to their sites from online searches to plummet over the next three years, as AI summaries and chatbots change the way consumers use the internet. An overwhelming majority are also planning to encourage their journalists to behave more like YouTube and TikTok content creators this year, as short-form video and audio content continues to boom. The findings are drawn from a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which included the views of 280 media leaders from 51 countries.

This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004) viewed mock search result pages varying in the presence (vs. absence), placement (top vs. middle), and stance (benefit-framed vs. harm-framed) of AI-generated summaries across four publicly debated topics. Compared to a no-summary control group, participants exposed to AI-generated summaries reported issue attitudes, behavioral intentions, and policy support that aligned more closely with the AI summary stance. The summaries placed at the top of the page produced stronger shifts in users' issue attitudes (but not behavioral intentions or policy support) than those placed at the middle of the page. We also observed moderating effects from issue familiarity and general trust toward AI. In addition, users perceived the AI summaries more useful when it emphasized health harms versus benefits. These findings suggest that AI-generated search summaries can significantly shape public perceptions, raising important implications for the design and regulation of AI-integrated information ecosystems.

Google's efforts to serve up AI-generated answers in search results hasn't exactly gone according to plan. When AI Overviews rolled out last summer, the feature surprised users by crafting embarrassing responses, telling them to glue cheese onto pizza, eat rocks and boogers, and set their birthday as a password. Though Google made fixes to address some of the most absurd answers, AI Overview still occasionally presents inaccurate information. But rather than retreat from AI search results, Google is doubling down. This week, the company announced it's testing a new "AI Mode" in search that replaces the typical web links that follow an Overview with a more comprehensive AI-generated summary.

Apple Intelligence is here, and I look forward to everyone sharing the bonkers/pointless #AI summaries it now puts on your lock screen. "Pugsley is little fester" is one of my faves. On @washingtonpost, I also have "Harris to endorse Harris."

From a high level, we need something akin to the medical Hippocratic oath, which governs doctors to do no harm. It's for others to decide whether that's regulation or something else, but we need a framing commitment. I often come at things from a narrative place, and I've always been struck by writer Isaac Asimov's Robot series, in which he weaves meditations around how societal principles and protections are included in the laws of robotics on an almost engineered basis. Similarly, we need someone to assert a foundational principle for all of us that AI shouldn't do harm. On balance, at the phase we're in right now, I see far more benefits than any actual realized negatives. I think what's going on in medicine alone should give people a lot of enthusiasm for the positive potential in AI.

Today Yahoo is debuting a revamped version of its news app. This new Yahoo News app, which is available as a free download now, is powered by the underlying code of the well received yet short-lived app Artifact. And, of course, the new app is infused with artificial intelligence capabilities to surface the news articles that might interest you most. Artifact was a news reader app that launched in 2023 and was helmed by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It made heavy use of AI, employing algorithms to process user behavior and serve readers highly personalized content based on which news stories they engaged with.

When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google's new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company's head of search Liz Reid admitted the flubs had highlighted areas that needed improvement, writing that "we wanted to explain what happened and the steps we've taken." One saw Google's algorithms endorse eating rocks because doing so "can be good for you," and the other suggested using nontoxic glue to thicken pizza sauce. Rock eating is not a topic many people were ever writing or asking questions about online, so there aren't many sources for a search engine to draw on. According to Reid, the AI tool found an article from The Onion, a satirical website, that had been reposted by a software company, and misinterpreted the information as factual. As for Google telling its users to put glue on pizza, Reid effectively attributed the error to a sense of humor failure.