COVER STORY This issue: Pope Leo XIV will be the first American to lead the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion followers.  Addressing an ecstatic crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square as the newly annointed leader of the Roman Catholic Church, American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost used the world’s most famous pulpit to promote a vision that, of late, has been more wish than reality. “To all people, wherever they are, to all the people of the earth, may peace be with you,” he said, in fluent Italian…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Researchers are racing to understand why. Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one that stayed with him. In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited for in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient…

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley in January, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many over-looked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese artificial intelligence model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new AI systems. It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising…