Can AI Help Run an Economy? How artificial intelligence could help governments understand, simulate and improve economic policy - without turning algorithms into rulers AI may never become a digital finance minister, but it could become something more useful: a laboratory for testing economic decisions before they reach the real world. Imagine that a government is preparing a major tax reform. Economists can estimate how households might react, compare historical cases, build several models and argue over assumptions. What they cannot do is rewind the country and try the reform again with a different tax rate, then again with another subsidy, and again with a different interest-rate path. In economics, history usually gives us one run. Now imagine a different kind of policy laboratory. Before changing a single rule, the government creates a large simulated economy containing artificial households, firms, banks and supply chains. Some households save, some spend, some are heavil...

Nuclear Fusion Energy: Can We Build a Star That Powers the Grid? A simple, science-first guide to thermonuclear reactors, the race toward commercial fusion, and the hard engineering still standing between today's experiments and tomorrow's power plants. Fusion energy promises to bring star-like power to Earth, but turning experimental reactors into reliable power plants remains one of the hardest engineering challenges of our time. Nuclear Fusion Energy: Can We Build a Star That Powers the Grid? For more than half a century, nuclear fusion has occupied a strange place in our idea of the future. It is serious enough to command billion-dollar laboratories, yet distant enough to become a running joke: fusion power is always thirty years away. That joke is starting to age. Fusion is still not a finished energy technology, but the field has moved beyond simply asking whether controlled fusion is possible. Researchers have repeatedly achieved ignition at the National Igniti...

 We Are Learning to Engineer Life How CRISPR, engineered cells, organoids, synthetic biology and AI are turning living systems into technology Bioengineering is turning biology into an increasingly programmable technology — from gene editing and engineered cells to organoids, synthetic biology and AI-designed proteins. For most of human history, biology was something we learned to work around. We bred plants and animals, removed diseased tissue, transplanted organs and developed drugs that nudged cells in useful directions. What we could not do, at least with much precision, was open the machinery of life and deliberately rewrite it. That line is now moving. Today, bioengineers can alter a DNA letter inside a living patient, reprogram immune cells to hunt disease, grow simplified versions of human organs in a dish, teach bacteria to respond to inflammation, design proteins that never existed in nature and modify pigs so their organs are less likely to be rejected by the hum...

 String Theory Explained: The Simple Idea Behind One of Physics’ Biggest Dreams A plain-English guide to one of physics’ most ambitious ideas: why physicists replaced points with strings, where extra dimensions and branes come from, what M-theory is, what string theory has actually achieved, and why nature has not yet told us whether the idea is right. String theory proposes that the fundamental ingredients of nature may not be point-like particles, but extremely small vibrating strings whose different modes appear as different particles. Imagine that you could keep zooming in on ordinary matter. A hand becomes tissue, tissue becomes cells, cells become molecules, and molecules become atoms. Go deeper and you reach electrons and atomic nuclei. Inside the nuclei are protons and neutrons; inside those are quarks. Eventually, our best experiments stop revealing smaller pieces. At that frontier, modern particle physics treats electrons, quarks and other elementary particles a...

  Anthropic Is Building More Than Claude. It Is Testing a Theory of What an AI Company Should Be Claude is the visible part of Anthropic. The harder story sits behind the chat window. Anthropic was founded by researchers who believed the race toward more powerful AI was moving too quickly to be governed by ordinary technology-company incentives. Five years later, the company is itself one of the race’s fastest-moving participants — backed by enormous capital, locked into data-center commitments measured in gigawatts, and preparing for public markets. That contradiction is not a footnote to Anthropic’s story. It is the story. Anthropic still describes itself as an AI safety and research company, not simply a software vendor. It is a public benefit corporation. It created an independent trust meant to influence who controls its board. Its flagship safety framework is supposed to make stronger models trigger stronger safeguards. Yet by 2026 Anthropic had also become one of the...

How to Turn ChatGPT Into a Personal Tutor — and Actually Learn Something A practical guide to using AI for school subjects, university courses, exams, languages and even a new profession — without waiting for the “perfect course” to appear. ChatGPT can become more than an answer engine: with the right approach, it can act as a flexible personal tutor for school subjects, languages, exams and professional skills. The Most Interesting Use of ChatGPT May Be Learning, Not Answering A teenager is staring at a page of algebra. The homework is not the real problem. The real problem is that somewhere three lessons ago, the class moved from something that made sense to something that did not — and everything since then has felt like trying to build the second floor of a house with part of the first floor missing. A university student has the same problem in a more respectable form. The lecture notes say “p-value,” “confidence interval” and “null hypothesis.” The words are familiar. ...