Even though the virus is of equal treatment, the working conditions are not. — Isabel Garcia has recently been given the option of working remotely. However, for the 32-year-old second-generation Guatemalan, the task is proving to be more challenging than she previously imagined. Quarantined in a 2-bedroom apartment with her two children, aged 18 months and four years, enduring a cut of her salary…

As the COVID-19 outbreak spurs mass buying, people are flocking stores for toilet paper, but why? — Last Saturday afternoon, Lucia, a 27-year-old marketing consultant, decided to head to her nearest shop in Madrid, Spain, to pick up some routine food supplies. What started as a quick errand turned into a four-hour nightmare, wandering several stores, seeing people fighting over toilet paper and canned tomatoes and navigating…

With climate crisis looming, white supremacists are using the environment as grounds for a racist nationalism ideology — On June 8, an anonymous manifesto was posted to 8chan, the online message board that’s become known as a haven for extremism. The post, though long gone (but preserved thanks to Google’s cache feature), expresses a deep fear of population growth: “Today, as a result of this industrial society, mass-consumption…

A new A.I. text generator has ability to write convincing prose. Can an algorithm imitate one of the most complex of human abilities? What if I tell you there’s a program that has the ability to write convincing texts? So much so, that one will only have to give it…

As more people fall deep into conspiratorial thinking. Is Silicon Valley doing enough to stop this threatening trend? — There’s never been a better time to become a conspiracy theorist. From the moon landing, staged in a TV studio, to global warming, a hoax invented by scientists, and even vaccinations being evil and causing autism, conspiracy theories are more alive, more pervasive and widespread than they have ever been…

The photo app is making us depressed, lonely and miserable. Why can’t we stop scrolling through the illusion? — Who would’ve thought that the simple use of photography could again revolutionize the world? After all, it was a long time ago since Kodak — once a very powerful company — branded our ‘moments’ with the introduction of the compact camera. Instagram has revived and re-awakened the phenomenon radically changing…

From taxes to travel and milk cartons in bulk: If you’re single, you’re being penalized for it — Singledom is appallingly expensive. Period. You pay more if you fly, sleep or eat by yourself. Not to mention if you’re carrying the full burden of a mortgage and insurance premiums, then it all adds up for us singletons. But why the penalties? Well, they are the high price one…

As computers learn how to mimic us, are we starting to be more like them? — Silicon Valley is predicting more and more how we are going to respond to an email, react on someone’s Instagram picture, determine which government services are we eligible for, and soon a forthcoming Google Assistant will be able to call our hairdresser for us in real-time. We have invited algorithms…

Imagine a world without cash. That world is coming — and sooner than you think. — Cash has been a key element in the evolution of civilization for more than 3000 years. However, in the last decade it has been losing predominance in favor of electronic money. As online commerce progressively expands and becomes widely adopted and as prepaid credit cards and electronic services such as…