Imagine you decide to sell your home. You contact a realtor and ask them to value your house. However, if the realtor doesn’t offer any insight into how they arrive at their estimate—for example, what ...

Increasingly, businesses rely on algorithms that use data provided by users to make decisions that affect people. For example, Amazon, Google, and Facebook use algorithms to tailor what users see, and ...

Algorithms have taken on an almost mythical significance in the modern world. They determine what you see on social media and when browsing online, help form people’s belief systems, and impact the ...

One of the most interesting and useful slang terms to emerge from Reddit in my opinion is ELI5, from its subreddit of the same name, which stands for "Explain It Like I'm 5" years old. The idea is ...

Clinicians rely daily on electrocardiograms (ECG) to detect common cardiovascular conditions, but accurate diagnoses require high levels of expertise. In a new study that reviewed nearly 1 million ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle ...