Information

As with most things, nature’s data storage system, DNA, far surpasses anything we’ve created. Now, researchers have doubled its already incredible storage capacity by adding extra letters to its “alphabet,” and developed a new way to read it back.

A new KFF survey has found 78 percent of Americans believe, or are uncertain about, at least one piece of COVID-19 misinformation. The survey also found more than one third of those polled believe the government is exaggerating the number of COVID-19 deaths.

Storing the world’s knowledge digitally online makes it vulnerable to being lost in a disaster. As a backup, GitHub has now archived 21 TB of public open source data and buried it in a vault in the Arctic in an effort to preserve it for 1,000 years.

Microsoft and Warner Bros. have crammed the 1978 movie Superman onto a silica glass slide the size of a drink coaster. This tough new medium is designed to last centuries, surviving punishment that would ruin film or magnetic drives.

​An intriguing new study suggests that the recent acceleration in fringe extremism and misinformation is due to the mass proliferation of information we all have at our fingertips playing up on our limits for effectively processing information.​

In a world labeled as “post-truth”, where facts and scientific evidence have become subjective, some researchers are investigating how false beliefs are not only formed, but seemingly strengthened, when presented with contradictory evidence.​

​Chinese scientists have smashed the quantum entanglement distance record. Transmitting information through entangled photons had previously only been possible to 100 km (62 mi), but using the Micius satellite launched in August, information has effectively been teleported 1,200 km (746 mi).

A new study suggests that encoding information using corkscrew-shaped laser beams could help us keep pace with our ever-increasing data demands.

Electronic Frontier Foundation and other information privacy advocates have created Canary Watch, a database of common online companies' acknowledgments that they have not been ordered by government entities to release private user information.

LaMetric is a customizable "smart ticker" designed to help navigate the daily information avalanche by delivering the specific information you need on one simple interface – from weather forecasts to stock prices to social media updates to account balances.

With the goal of developing a robot able to understand natural language commands, the Cornell University "Tell Me Dave" project is getting robots to learn complex tasks by seeing and doing, thereby continually learning without written software updates.

Researchers in Uruguay and in Louisiana have succeeded in forming a loop quantum gravity model of a quantum black hole. The result is that predictions of physics-ending singularities vanish, and are replaced by bridges to another universe.