Editorial policy

How a story gets picked

Three to eight items a day, drawn from the last 24 to 48 hours. Primary sources outrank intermediaries: a lab's own announcement outranks a site retelling it, because retelling loses nuance and adds excitement the original does not carry.

• It has to have changed something for someone who builds for the web.
• It has to be checkable. A claim that cannot be traced to a source does not run.
• It has to be new. A rewrite of last week is not a story.

What the verified mark means

Verified means one specific thing: the link was actually opened and the content confirmed. It is not a judgment of how much we trust the source. An item marked unverified is one where the claim comes from secondhand reporting and has not been traced to the primary source — and the piece says which part is unconfirmed.

Quotation and copyright

At most one quote per item, under fifteen words, in quotation marks, attributed. Everything else is our own text. We do not publish translations of other people's articles.

When we get it wrong

Corrections are public. A corrected story carries a dated note on the page itself, and the correction is listed on the corrections page. We do not quietly edit a published claim out of existence.

If you find an error, write to us. The fastest correction is the one that reaches us first.