Author: NY TIMES

Buying things in bulk at wholesale retailers can be an all-day affair. Sam’s Club, the store chain owned by Walmart, is trying to make that time shorter: by using artificial intelligence to scan shoppers’ carts so they no longer have to show a receipt at the exit upon checking out.“Eliminating even the few seconds it takes to scan a receipt at the exit door is well worth it,” Megan Crozier, an executive vice president at Walmart, announced onstage this week at the company’s presentation for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.It has long been common practice at stores where…

NASA has chosen the technology to help it land future spacecraft on unmapped planets. Meta uses the technology for artificial intelligence. Chinese engineers have turned to it to encrypt data.And it could represent the next front in the semiconductor trade war between the United States and China.The technology is RISC-V, pronounced “risk five.” It evolved from a university computer lab in California to a foundation for myriad chips that handle computing chores. RISC-V essentially provides a kind of common language for designing processors that are found in devices like smartphones, disk drives, Wi-Fi routers and tablets.RISC-V has ignited a new…

It was a different kind of practice: thoughtful, free and natural. Hutchings was living in Kingston, in southwest London, close to the expanses of Richmond Park. Like Sonny Rollins, who would play his sax on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, Hutchings took his instruments into the deserted public spaces and conducted his practice under trees, in fields and inside hollowed-out tree trunks, sharing snippets with audiences on Instagram.“Rollins’s sound became bigger, because he was blowing into the noise of New York City, whereas when you’re in nature, your sound becomes smaller, and your dynamic range in small dynamics becomes…

The International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, held two days of hearings this week in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.Here’s what to know about the court and the case:What is the court?The court, based in The Hague, Netherlands, was established by the founding charter of the United Nations in 1945 to settle disputes between its member states. Also known as the World Court, the I.C.J. is one of the U.N.’s six main bodies, which include the General Assembly and the Security Council.The court typically has a…

Israel’s political and military leaders marked 100 days of war against Hamas in Gaza over the weekend by vowing to continue until victory, even as they awaited a decision from the world’s top court on a possible injunction against the Israeli military’s devastating offensive.About 1,200 people were killed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 assault against Israel, a majority of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, a majority of them women and children, according to Gaza health officials.Warning of a long conflict, the Israeli statements exposed a…

Rosalind Wiseman regularly receives emails from women who think they are going to surprise her with the following divulgence: “You are never going to believe this: My work is like middle school.”Ms. Wiseman, however, is unfazed. “Of course I can believe it,” she said. Her response is a pep talk that goes something like this: “I remind them that they aren’t weak because they are affected by these dynamics. And that even if we have left our teen years behind us, we are driven to feel valued by the groups we are connected to, and most of us will do…

Sometime in the next few weeks, when she wins her 1,203rd game, Tara VanDerveer at Stanford will pass Mike Krzyzewski at Duke as the college basketball coach — man or woman — with the most wins of all time.It took Krzyzewski, who is known as Coach K, 47 seasons to reach that milestone. T Dawg, as VanDerveer is affectionately called on campus, will get there in 45, with 38 of them at Stanford. She will also do it with a higher winning percentage — about 82 percent of her games versus Krzyzewski’s 77 percent. She has won three N.C.A.A. championships,…

California has long championed renewable energy, but a change in the state’s policies last year has led to a sharp decline in the installation of residential rooftop solar in the state.Thousands of companies — including installers, manufacturers and distributors — are reeling from the new policy, which took effect in April and greatly reduced incentives that had encouraged homeowners to install solar panels. Since the change, sales of rooftop solar installations in California dropped as much as 85 percent in some months of 2023 from a year earlier, according to a report by Ohm Analytics, a research firm that tracks…

To understand the role of the Broadway orchestrator, seek out the composer Stephen Sondheim’s piano demo for the song “Losing My Mind” from the musical “Follies” and then compare it to the version on the original cast recording. The demo’s tone is wistful and resigned, with a touch of the whiskey bar about it. In the finished version, the song sounds transformed: Ascending notes on the strings, interjections from the brass and crashing cymbals build to a powerful climax, evoking the heartache and inner turmoil contained in the lyric.What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick.“I seem to have a nose…

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, spoke by phone with Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and later had to explain that the discussions were centered on providing humanitarian aid to Gaza. .South Africa’s case against Israel could generate a backlash globally and at home. U.S. officials have supported Israel, calling the case meritless. And some in the small but outspoken community of South African Jews, a group that played a key role in the anti-apartheid struggle, have criticized their government over the genocide case.Giving voice to those criticisms, Zev Krengel, the president of…