Science & Environment

The quest to create an A.I. therapist has not been without setbacks or, as researchers at Dartmouth thoughtfully describe them, “dramatic failures.” Their first chatbot therapist wallowed in despair and expressed its own suicidal thoughts. A second model seemed to amplify all the worst tropes of psychotherapy, invariably blaming the user’s problems on her parents. Finally, the researchers came up …

President Trump’s decision to move a step closer to imposing tariffs on imported medicines poses considerable political risk, because Americans could face higher prices and more shortages of critical drugs. The Trump administration filed a federal notice on Monday saying that it had begun an investigation into whether imports of medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients threaten America’s national security, an effort …

In the months and years after research and working groups continued to assess procedures and rules. “The work that happened very quickly at the time around the event got us to 90% of where we are now…but that has been consolidated and put into specific safety measures,” Mr Nicholson said. Today there are three levels of volcanic ash contamination – …

Alfie Tobutt BBC World Service Getty Images The sandstorm blanketed parts of southern Iraq in an orange haze More than a thousand people have been left with respiratory problems after a sandstorm swept across Iraq’s central and southern parts of the country, health officials said. One official in Muthanna province reported to the AFP news agency at least 700 cases …

Danai Nesta Kupemba BBC News Guardia Civil Ministry of Interior Police say the couple’s activities were connected to a larger global trafficking organisation Spanish authorities have arrested a couple suspected of selling exotic cats online, including protected species like white tigers, pumas and clouded leopards. Civil Guard police raided the couple’s home on the island of Majorca after learning that …

Though women remain severely underrepresented in the aerospace field worldwide, they do regularly escape the Earth’s atmosphere. More than 100 have gone to space since Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so in 1983. If an all-women spaceflight were chartered by, say, NASA, it might represent the culmination of many decades of serious investment in female astronauts. …

Middle-aged and older adults who sought hospital or emergency room care because of cannabis use were almost twice as likely to develop dementia over the next five years, compared with similar people in the general population, a large Canadian study reported on Monday. When compared with adults who sought care for other reasons, the risk of developing dementia was still …

President Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda will be undermined by steep cuts to federal agencies that are said to be planned by the Trump administration, scientists, lawmakers and energy executives warned on Monday. Pleas from numerous quarters have streamed into the inboxes of cabinet secretaries, asking them to salvage various divisions of government agencies. Federal officials face a deadline today to …

An office in an obscure corner of the federal government that NASA has relied on to safely land astronauts on the moon and robotic probes on Mars is facing pressure to cut its tight-knit team of experts by at least 20 percent, according to two people familiar with the mandate. The thinning of the staff has already started at the …

It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties …