Author: NY TIMES

In the year ahead, the use of biometrics — an individual’s unique physical identifiers, such as fingerprints and faces — will be expanded at airports in the United States and abroad, a shift to enhance security, replace physical identification such as passports and driver’s licenses, and reduce the amount of time required by travelers to pass through airports. Biometric technology will be seen everywhere from bag drops at the check-in counters to domestic security screening.In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration is expanding its program allowing passengers to opt in for a security screening relying on a facial recognition…

For four years, the computer scientist Trieu Trinh has been consumed with something of a meta-math problem: how to build an A.I. model that solves geometry problems from the International Mathematical Olympiad, the annual competition for the world’s most mathematically attuned high-school students.Last week Dr. Trinh successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on this topic at New York University; this week, he described the result of his labors in the journal Nature. Named AlphaGeometry, the system solves Olympiad geometry problems at nearly the level of a human gold medalist.While developing the project, Dr. Trinh pitched it to two research scientists at…

The newsCancer deaths in the United States are falling, with four million deaths prevented since 1991, according to the American Cancer Society’s annual report.At the same time, the society reported that the number of new cancer cases had ticked up to more than two million in 2023, from 1.9 million in 2022. Cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. Doctors believe that it is urgent to understand changes in the death rate, as well as changes in cancer diagnoses.Background: Treatment improvements help reduce cancer deaths.The cancer society highlighted three chief factors in…

This week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Lil Nas X’s comeback single “J Christ,” a continuation of his trollcore pop narrative, with its ostentatious video and punchline-heavy media rolloutThe new 21 Savage album “American Dream,” the first blockbuster hip-hop album of the year, with many high-profile features and some reckoning with the immigration case that nearly derailed his careerThe sonic shift in Ariana Grande’s new song, “Yes, And?,” her first solo single in three yearsNew tracks from Bizarrap featuring Young Miko, and Jastin MartinSnack of…

Travelers appear to be slowly returning to some Middle East nations despite the continuation of the Israel-Hamas conflict that all but decimated the region’s tourism since it began on Oct. 7. Travel operators said that bookings to countries including Egypt, Jordan and Oman are growing, welcome news for an area that’s dependent on tourist dollars and one that had received a record number of visitors since the height of the pandemic.“The Middle East was on track to be one of our biggest leaders in post-pandemic travel recovery, and with this momentum swinging back, it shows just how powerful its appeal…

Pakistan retaliated with strikes inside IranPakistan announced yesterday that it had carried out strikes against what it said were terrorist hide-outs in Iran. A day earlier, Iran hit what it called militant camps in Pakistan. The military exchange is the latest example of an expanding set of hostilities connected to the Israel-Hamas war.Pakistan indicated yesterday that it did not want its clash with Iran to escalate. The military called the two neighbors “brotherly countries,” and officials refrained from accusing Iran directly, saying that Pakistan targeted only separatists.Iran condemned the attacks, but also appeared to try to defuse tensions. Its foreign…

Viewers of award shows might have noticed a trend in recent years: Some of the red carpets have been colors other than red.But that doesn’t mean the color has been absent from the carpets. This year, red has been among the most popular colors worn by celebrities. Selena Gomez, Ayo Edebiri, Barry Keoghan, Dua Lipa, Meghann Fahy, Charles Melton, Michelle Yeoh, Suki Waterhouse and Margot Robbie are just some of the stars who have worn shades of red at recent awards shows like the Emmys and the Golden Globes.Danielle Brooks, an actress in “The Color Purple,” is another star who…

China’s ruling Communist Party is facing a national emergency. To fix it, the party wants more women to have more babies.It has offered them sweeteners, like cheaper housing, tax benefits and cash. It has also invoked patriotism, calling on them to be “good wives and mothers.”The efforts aren’t working. Chinese women have been shunning marriage and babies at such a rapid pace that China’s population in 2023 shrank for the second straight year, accelerating the government’s sense of crisis over the country’s rapidly aging population and its economic future.China said on Wednesday that 9.02 million babies were born in 2023,…

Google will cut 100 employees at its video platform, YouTube, on Wednesday, continuing piecemeal layoffs after shedding more than a thousand jobs in the past week.The tech giant notified workers from YouTube’s operations and creator management teams that their positions had been eliminated, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. YouTube, the world’s most popular video service, employed 7,173 people on Tuesday, a person with knowledge of the total said.“We’ve made the decision to eliminate some roles and say goodbye to some of our teammates,” YouTube’s chief business officer, Mary Ellen Coe, wrote in a note to…

In late December 2019, eight pages of genetic code were sent to computers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.Unbeknown to American officials at the time, the genetic map that had landed on their doorstep contained critical clues about the virus that would soon touch off a pandemic.The genetic code, submitted by Chinese scientists to a vast public repository of sequencing data run by the U.S. government, described a mysterious new virus that had infected a 65-year-old man weeks earlier in Wuhan. At the time the code was sent, Chinese officials had not yet warned of the unexplained…