For Reuters, Mariano Zafra, Anurag Rao, and Jon McClure describe how bird flu can pass between mammals, but, while not impossible, transmission to humans is still unlikely. Because of the heavy viral load in milk and mammary glands, scientists suspect the virus can spread between cattle during the milking process, either through contact with infected...

We get 24 hours in a day. How do we spend this time? How does our time use change as we get older and priorities shift? Here is the percentage breakdown in our teens, 20s, and 30s, through to our 80s. Read More

Maybe one day AI tools will be advanced enough to process a random dataset and produce valuable insights that incorporate the context of the real world. But that day is not today. Today, we can play with the tools available to us and see what happens. I’m Nathan Yau. I am a real person for now. This is The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members...

Stephen Wolfram gets into modeling biological evolution: Why does biological evolution work? And, for that matter, why does machine learning work? Both are examples of adaptive processes that surprise us with what they manage to achieve. So what’s the essence of what’s going on? I’m going to concentrate here on biological evolution, though much of...

You might’ve heard a little something about AI these past few months. If the ideas seem kind of fuzzy, Nicky Case and Hack Club are collaborating on a guide for how these things work and the issues that we should address as AI-based things grow more common. It has comics. While the current tools are fun to play with, there are and will be real safety...

It’s been over 200 years since the cicadas of Brood XIII and Brood XIX came up at the same time. For the New York Times, Jonathan Corum revisits old cicada maps by Charles L. Marlatt from 1922. The spatial distributions look similar to current patterns and show how predictable these things are, even though they’re in the ground for so long. Tags: Cicada,...