Amanda Smith is a freelance journalist and writer. She reports on culture, society, human interest and technology. Her stories hold a mirror to society, reflecting both its malaise and its beauty.

Amid a push toward AI agents, with both Anthropic and OpenAI shipping multi-agent tools this week, Anthropic is more than ready to show off some of its more daring AI coding experiments. But as usual ...

Claude Opus 4.6 AI agents built a Rust-based C compiler in two weeks The compiler passed 99 percent of GCC torture tests and compiled the game Doom Anthropic's AI can handle complex software ...

From simple text generation to autonomously powering robotic arms on production lines, AI technology offers enterprises a kaleidoscope of new capabilities. So which aspects of AI advancement have ...

According to the textbooks, we lost the ability to make vitamin C because our diet meant that we didn’t need it. But studies in animals suggest losing this ability actually helped our ancestors fight ...

Think your vitamin C comes from hand-picked oranges and sunshine? Try corn syrup, sulfuric acid, and genetically modified microbes instead. This isn’t a wellness fairy tale. It’s industrial chemistry ...

“What are you all doing about artificial intelligence?” It’s a question C&EN staffers get a lot. Journalism as a profession was already reeling with the collapse of business models based on robust ...

The C language has been a programming staple for decades. Here’s how it stacks up against C++, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Python, and the newest kid on the block—Carbon. The C programming language has been ...