The "lungs of the planet" are burning.

As thousands of fiery infernos rage across the Amazon rainforest, tropical vegetation, trees, and the fauna they house are being razed. Since August 15, more than 9,500 new forest fires have started across Brazil, primarily in the Amazon basin.

This year so far, scientists have recorded more than 74,000 fires in Brazil. That's nearly double 2018's total of about 40,000 fires. The surge marks an 83% increase in wildfires over the same period of 2018, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research reported. The largest state in Brazil, Amazonas, declared a state of emergency on Monday.

Already, 2019 has the highest number of fires observed in a single year since researchers began keeping track in 2013 — and there are still four months to go.

'The sky randomly turned dark'

A satellite image from the NOAA shows parts of the western Amazon rainforest on fire on August 12. NOAA

As the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon plays a crucial role in keeping our planet's carbon-dioxide levels in check. Plants and trees take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen back into the air in their process of photosynthesis. This is why the Amazon, which covers 2.1 million square miles, is often referred to as the "lungs of the planet": The forest produces 20% of the oxygen in our planet's atmosphere.

Typically, the Amazonian dry season runs from July to October, peaking in late September. Wetter weather during the rest of the year minimizes the risk of fires at other times. But during the dry season, blazes can spark from natural sources, like lightning strikes. Farmers and loggers also purposefully set fire to the rainforest to clear swaths of the Amazon for industrial or agricultural use.

The fires raging in the Amazon now have widespread effects on the rest of Brazil. The smoke plumes from the blazes spread from the state of Amazonas to the nearby states of Pará and Mato Grosso, and even blotted out the sun in São Paulo — a city more than 2,000 miles away.

On Monday, people in São Paulo reported on social media that the sky had gone dark between 3 and 4 p.m. local time.

In total, the blazes have created a layer of smoke estimated to be 1.2 million square miles wide. This image from the European Union's Copernicus Satellite shows the smoke slicing north to south through Brazil like a knife.

'Setting the Amazon aflame'

This week of fires comes on the heels of another worrisome milestone for the world's largest rainforest. The month of July set a new record for the most deforestation ever in the Amazon in a single month, The Guardian reported. The Amazon shrunk by 519 square miles (1,345 square kilometers). That's more than twice the area of Tokyo.

Data from Brazilian satellites indicated that about three football fields' worth of Amazonian trees fell every minute last month. The total deforested area in July was up 39% from the same month last year.

The deforestation is directly linked to fires in the Amazon, since farmers sometimes set the forest ablaze to make room for livestock pastures and crop fields. These purposeful burns can then get out of control.

A tract of Amazon jungle that was burned by loggers and farmers in Amazonas state, Brazil, on August 20. REUTERS/Bruno Kelly

Brazil controls a lion's share of the Amazon. However, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has indicated that protecting the rainforest is not one of his top priorities. Bolsonaro supports development projects like a highway and hydroelectric dam in the Amazon.

His administration has also cut down on the seizing of illegally harvested timber. In 2018 (under the previous administration), 883,000 cubic feet of illegal timber was seized. As of May 15, Bolsonaro's government agencies had seized only 1,410 cubic feet, Pacific Standard reported.

What's more, between January and May, Bolsonaro's government lowered the number of fines it levied for illegal deforestation and mining (down 34% from the same period in 2018) and decreased its monitoring of illegal activity in the rainforest.

On Tuesday, when Reuters reporters asked Bolsonaro about the record rate of uncontrolled fires in Brazil, he pointed to the fact that it's a time of year when farmers purposefully use fire to clear land — a seasonal cycle called "queimada."

"I used to be called Captain Chainsaw. Now I am Nero, setting the Amazon aflame," Bolsonaro said. "But it is the season of the queimada."

Warmer, drier conditions make it easier for flames to spread

Warmer conditions because of climate change can allow blazes that crop up during the dry season to grow bigger than they otherwise might have. Global warming also increases the likelihood and frequency of wildfires around the world.

Wildfires rage near Batagay, in Russia's Sakha Republic, on June 11. Pierre Markuse/Flickr

Overall, this year is on pace to be the third hottest on record globally, according to Climate Central. Last year was the fourth warmest, behind 2016 (the warmest), 2015, and 2017.

Read more: The northernmost reaches of the Earth are on fire. Here's what this record-breaking hot summer looks like from space.

Hot and dry conditions in the Northern Hemisphere are a consequence of this unprecedented warming. That's because warming leads winter snow cover to melt earlier, and hotter air sucks away the moisture from trees and soil. Decreased rainfall also makes for parched forests that are prone to burning.

Combined, that has created ideal conditions for wildfires in Brazil and elsewhere around the world.

As of today, parts of British Columbia, Canada, and Alaska are also burning, while more than 13.5 million acres of Siberia are ablaze too.

When Jupiter was young, about 4.5 billion years ago, a protoplanet with 10 times the mass of Earth crashed head-on into its surface.

The impact shook Jupiter to its core — literally.

That's the finding of a new study from astronomers at Rice University and China's Sun Yat-sen University, which was published last week in the journal Nature.

An ancient collision, the researchers suggest, would explain why Jupiter's core is less dense and more diffuse than scientists expected.

NASA's Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft, Juno, has been collecting information about the internal structure and composition of our solar system's largest planet since it arrived there in July 2016. Two years ago, it sent back some odd gravitational readings.

An artist’s concept of the Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. NASA

Scientists expected that heavy elements would be concentrated at Jupiter's center, leaving an outer "envelope" of light-weight hydrogen and helium around the densest part of the core. But instead, Juno's measurements showed that heavy elements are diffuse throughout Jupiter's center, in an area up to half of the planet's radius.

"This is puzzling," Andrea Isella, a Rice astronomer and study co-author, said in a press release. "It suggests that something happened that stirred up the core, and that's where the giant impact comes into play."

Shang-Fei Liu, who worked as a postdoctoral researcher on Isella's team, was the first to suggest that an early collision could be to blame for scrambling Jupiter's core.

"It sounded very unlikely to me," Isella said. "Like a one-in-a-trillion probability. But Shang-Fei convinced me, by sheer calculation, that this was not so improbable."

Liu is now a faculty member at Sun Yat-sen University and the lead author of the new study.

Our solar system's violent history

Our solar system's early history was full of giant collisions.

The moon formed after a huge body collided with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, and its craters are the scars of a billion-year bombardment of asteroids. Scientists think the significant tilts in the rotational axes of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune could also indicate that the planets sustained massive collisions long ago.

Uranus is tilted on its axis by 98 degrees. Scientists think that may be the result of an early collision.NASA/ESA/A. Simon (GSFC)/M.H. Wong and A. Hsu (UC Berkeley); Business Insider

To look into Jupiter's past, Liu's team estimated the probabilities of different collision scenarios at various angles and ran thousands of computer simulations. The team found that young Jupiter's huge mass and gravitational pull strongly influenced "embryos" of planets nearby — bodies made of slowly coalescing dust and debris.

So head-on collisions were more likely than glancing blows because of the effect of Jupiter's gravity. In every scenario the team analyzed, there was at least a 40% chance that Jupiter absorbed another planet in its first few million years, the scientists concluded.

"The only scenario that resulted in a core-density profile similar to what Juno measures today is a head-on impact with a planetary embryo about 10 times more massive than Earth," Liu said.

The core of that crashing planet would have then merged with Jupiter's core.

"Because it's dense, and it comes in with a lot of energy, the impactor would be like a bullet that goes through the atmosphere and hits the core head-on," Isella said. "Before impact, you have a very dense core, surrounded by atmosphere. The head-on impact spreads things out, diluting the core."

A rendering shows the effect of a major impact on the core of a young Jupiter, as calculated by scientists at Rice and Sun Yat-sen universities.Illustration by Shang-Fei Liu/Sun Yat-sen University

The crash's effects on Jupiter linger today

Jupiter's diluted core is likely still recovering from that ancient crash.

"It could still take many, many billions of years for the heavy material to settle back down into a dense core under the circumstances suggested by the paper," Isella said.

This artist concept illustrates how a massive collision of objects perhaps as large as the planet Pluto could have created the dust ring around the nearby star Vega within the last million years.NASA/JPL-Caltech

Information about these planetary collisions might also help scientists studying star systems beyond our own.

Isella is a co-investigator on NASA's CLEVER Planets team, which investigates the origins of elements essential to life on young rocky planets. That project, he said, has observed spurts of infrared light in faraway star systems.

"As some people have been looking for planets around distant stars, they sometimes see infrared emissions that disappear after a few years," Isella said.

One explanation, he said, could be that those observations are showing violent, head-on collisions like the one Jupiter experienced. If two rocky planets collide and shatter, that could produce a cloud of dust that reflects the nearby star's light. To astronomers' telescopes, that would appear as a bright yet fleeting flash, since the reflected light would disappear as the dust particles in the cloud float apart.

Thankfully, however, our own solar system has settled down in the 4.5 billion years since Jupiter's big collision.

Marvel Cinematic Universe fans freaked out on Tuesday after news broke that Sony and Disney's Spider-Man deal was in danger.

Deadline reported that the two companies were unable to come to an agreement over the character's on-screen future. Disney wanted a better deal, Sony wouldn't budge, and now Marvel Studios and president Kevin Feige will not be involved in future "Spider-Man" movies unless something drastically changes.

Sony said it was Disney's decision in a statement late Tuesday, as Feige's "many new responsibilities do not allow time for him to work on IP they do not own."

READ MORE: Spider-Man's movie adventures have been a headache for Sony for over a decade, but the character is too valuable to compromise on

Hashtags like #SaveSpidey and #SaveSpiderManFromSony were trending on Wednesday. The concern from fans was expected.

Sony botched its "Amazing Spider-Man" reboot not that long ago and the character has enjoyed a nice revival since actor Tom Holland's portrayal debuted in 2016's "Captain America: Civil War." Since then, he's starred in two solo movies — "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and "Spider-Man: Far From Home" — that have grossed nearly $2 billion combined as part of a deal between Sony and Marvel Studios.

But "Spider-Man" movies have been successful outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too.

They were successful long before the MCU existed and Sony's own movies since the deal was made — "Venom" and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," which Marvel was not explicitly involved in — have been hits, too. "Venom" made over $800 million worldwide and "Into the Spider-Verse" won the Oscar for best animated feature earlier this year.

Tom Holland as Peter Parker, with Tony Stark's glasses, in "Spider-Man: Far From Home." Sony

Deadline reported that Sony is still hoping that Holland and "Far From Home" director Jon Watts return for two more movies. If they do, and a deal with Disney isn't made between now and then, the movies wouldn't include any MCU characters.

It's natural that this could cause some frustration with fans who have come to admire this iteration of Spider-Man, but with the same cast and same director, those movies could maintain a high quality without Marvel Studios' involvement. Obviously Feige's touch, and the Marvel Studios brand, was a huge factor in the movies' popularity. But it wasn't all Feige. Former Sony executive and longtime "Spider-Man" producer Amy Pascal also produced "Homecoming" and "Far From Home."

From a story standpoint, it would give Holland's Peter Parker an opportunity to definitively step out of Tony Stark's shadow and finally grow up.

READ MORE: Sony blamed Disney for the 'Spider-Man' deal falling apart and said it hoped 'this might change in the future'

The initial deal between Sony and Disney was that Sony retained distribution and creative rights over Spider-Man while the character could appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel received up to 5% of first-dollar gross from the movies and all merchandising revenue. Disney recently asked for a 50/50 cofinancing stake in future movies and that's when the deal imploded.

Spider-Man is simply too valuable an asset for Sony to compromise on, and it makes sense that the studio would want to maximize its control over its biggest film property.

Sony has owned the film rights to Spider-Man and 900 related characters since 1998 and can keep them as long as it releases a "Spider-Man" movie every five years. The success of "Venom" and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" clearly gave it extra confidence that it could carry on the Spider-Man movies without Disney and Marvel Studios.

Sony said in its statement that it hoped things could change in the future, implying that there could still be hope for a deal with Disney. But if not, Spider-Man's future on the big screen isn't dead. Far from it.

Y Combinator's Demo Day, which actually spans two full days in a massive warehouse in San Francisco, is a see-and-be-seen type of event straight out of an HBO parody show. The men's restroom line surpasses the women's. A flock of electric scooters flanks the entrance. Puffy vests outnumber traditional business attire. And everyone has a backpack with an impressive name stitched on the back.

But for all the amusing clichés of the ambiance, the bi-annual event still delivers an impressive display of fresh ideas and hungry startups. On Monday and Tuesday, an ambitious group of entrepreneurs took to the stage to pitch hundreds of investors on their early-stage companies.

Rahil Sondhi was among the almost 200 companies that presented over the two-day event. His company PopSQL, pronounced "popsicle," is a database collaboration and communication tool built on the database language SQL. Sondhi has been running the startup completely on his own since founding it two years ago.

Before stepping on to the stage, he told Business Insider he had already raised $1 million in venture funding. PopSQL already has more than 100 customers, Sondhi said. He's eager to bring in employees so he can pursue fundraising for the remainder of his seed round while simultaneously building new products and features.

"I need people to take anything off my plate," Sondhi said. "If a strong engineer comes on board, awesome. A strong designer comes on board, perfect. A marketer, content marketing is really important for us. What else? Sales. Really anything, I need help in all departments."

Born on the fourth of July

Sondhi began building PopSQL while he was working as a software engineer at the grocery delivery startup Instacart in October 2016. He said he would work on his side project for almost 35 hours a week in addition to his full-time role. PopSQL launched on Product Hunt, a popular forum for startups, in May 2017, and Sondhi was off to the races.

"I stayed in the July 4th weekend writing the code for the billing system and shipping it. We got our first customer on July 4th," Sondhi said. "I still have that email and they're still a paying customer and I think it was $32 or something, but it was so meaningful. Imagine waking up on July 4th to that after 10 months of work."

Now, Sondhi says PopSQL has over 100 customers, including his previous employer, Instacart, as well as food delivery startup DoorDash, and security startup Auth0.

Read More: Startup founders need to distance themselves from big tech, according to the CEO of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator

"If you take the SQL editors that have existed, they're just very legacy, they're heavy weighed, they're clunky, they have outdated UIs," Sondhi told Business Insider. "And then imagine somebody gives you Chrome for the first time or somebody gives you Google Docs for the first time. It's fast. It's lightweight, it looks good, it just has the right amount of buttons, it's intuitive."

Building a team that can work from anywhere

For the last three months in the Y Combinator program, Sondhi said he's been chipping away at growing the company instead of building new features.

Unlike past Y Combinator alumni companies, Sondhi isn't counting on building the company and hiring a team in San Francisco, although that's home for him. Between skyrocketing costs and an incredibly tight labor market, the Toronto native is "completely open" to building a distributed team from the beginning.

"The tools exist, it's just the culture and the willingness to do it," Sondhi said of building his team.

It's a philosophy being embraced by a growing number of tech entrepreneurs, including Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, who recently said that "no one in their right mind" would build a company entirely in San Francisco these days. Ohanian, who now leads VC firm Initialized Capital, has employees based all over the US.

But even if he assembles a dispersed team, PopSQL's Sondhi isn't planning to move back to his native Toronto anytime soon. "I loved Toronto but San Francisco's become home. Once you get rid of winter, you can't take it back."

The 11 best startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 1

Insight Timer popped up this message after my daily morning meditation yesterday.

I’ve been meditating on and off for a while. But it’s been an on and off thing, not a daily habit.

In April, after some complex emotional dynamics (how’s that for a euphemism), I decided to start meditating daily. I missed a few days here and there and then in mid-May decided to cut the bullshit with myself and just do it first thing every morning when I woke up.

Last week, both Fred Wilson and Seth Godin blogged about the power of streaks and how they’ve both built daily blogging habits. Fred highlighted the same section of Seth’s post that I’m highlighting below, which is just pure gold.

Streaks are their own reward.
Streaks create internal pressure that keeps streaks going.
Streaks require commitment at first, but then the commitment turns into a practice, and the practice into a habit.
Habits are much easier to maintain than commitments.

I made a conscious decision many years ago that I wouldn’t blog daily, but regularly, partly in reaction to my desire to go off the grid for chunks of time (digital sabbath, weekends, weeks, or even longer in some cases.) I didn’t want the blog to be a habit that I did daily, but then took vacations from.

I’m the same with running. It’s a deeply developed habit that I love, but I know the importance of rest, so I don’t try to run every day.

But, for me, meditation is different. I’m 90 days into a daily routine and it has definitely become a habit. It’ll be interesting to see if the streak lasts 180 days, or 365 days, or 3653 days.

Tesla unveiled the production Model X SUV in the shadows of its Fremont, California, factory on September 29, 2015.

A few hours before the festive event where the Tesla faithful convened to hear their almighty leader preach the gospel of Falcon Wing doors and Bio-Weapon Defense Mode, I became one of the first people to drive the Model X.

Since then, Tesla's crossover SUV has become a benchmark in the industry. As a large premium electric crossover SUV, it inhabits a segment with only a handful of rivals like the Audi e-tron and the Jaguar I-Pace.

A few years had passed since I most recently drove the Model X. So I figured a road trip from northern New Jersey to Wilmington, Delaware, would be a good opportunity to check out a new Model X Performance and get reacquainted with the Tesla SUV.

In addition, the 120-mile drive would finally give me the opportunity to try out Tesla's vaunted Supercharger network.

Though I've spent plenty of time behind the wheel of Tesla's Model S and Model 3, they've generally been drives near Business Insider's headquarters in New York. That means I usually never burn off enough range to require a recharge.

For our road trip, Tesla provided us with a fully loaded Deep Blue Metallic Model X Performance that costs a hefty $163,250. The Tesla Model X Long Range starts at a more affordable $75,315.

Here's a closer look at our road trip with the Tesla Model X Performance.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories »

This was a close one, but the Honda Accord takes it by a hair.

Both are strong contenders with virtually identical levels of refinement, ride quality, comfort, interior ergonomics, cabin space, and even fuel economy. Interior fit and finish as well as build quality are tied too.

The Camry's silky smooth V6 and trick camera system impressed us greatly. And while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, we certainly found the Toyota to be the more aesthetically pleasing of the pair.

For us, the Accord won in two major departments: driving dynamics and infotainment.

Though the Accord's 2.0-liter turbo four and the Camry's 3.5-liter V6 return similar performance stats, they go about their business in very different manners.

And the Accord is the more exciting of the two — certainly the case with our six-speed manual-equipped test car.

The 2.0-liter, 252-horsepower turbo four is a pint-sized powerhouse. It's as gutsy as they come, and it loves to be pushed. The higher the revs, the sweeter the tune it sings.

The Accord simply felt more comfortable and eager to please at high speeds. The Camry was certainly capable of delivering when the driving got spirited, but it never truly felt at home.

And then there's the Accord's new touchscreen infotainment system. For the first time, a Japanese automaker has stepped up to the plate with a system capable of going toe to toe with its rivals from Germany and the US.

This is a major letdown for the Camry and other Toyota products we have tested in recent years. In an age when infotainment is growing in prominence, a great, user-friendly system in a must-have these days, and Toyota's just isn't good enough.

Which brings us to our verdict.

"It's fun, yet sensible. It's a high-tech car, yet approachable. It's lighter and smaller, yet roomier," I said in my review of the Accord. "It's a great car. This is really Honda at its finest."

And for that, it's our winner.

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted that a "report just out" showed that Google "manipulated" millions of votes in favor of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

"Google should be sued," the president declared in his tweet, which said that Google manipulated between 2.6 million and 16 million votes in Clinton's favor. "My victory was even bigger than thought!"

President Trump, who received 2.9 million fewer votes than Clinton in the 2016 election despite winning the Electoral College, did not link to or explicitly cite the report. His tweet immediately sent surprised industry observers scrambling to find the blockbuster research report they had somehow missed.

It turns out, the report Trump appears to have been referring to was a 2017 report by a San Diego psychologist with a history of feuding with Google. The report, which one expert on the US election process characterized to Business Insider as having a "weird" methodology and lots of "red flags," was based on 95 participants.

So what is this report?

One of the figures Trump cited in his tweet (2.6 million votes) tied his comments to the recent testimony of San Diego psychologist Robert Epstein, who appeared before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in July entitled, "Google and Censorship through Search Engines."

In his testimony, Epstein — a self-proclaimed Democrat — said that at a "rock bottom minimum" Google swayed 2.6 million votes in favor of Hillary Clinton because of biases present in its search results.

"The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes depending on how aggressively they were in using the techniques that I've been studying now for six-and-a-half years," Epstein told the committee. (It's not clear where Trump arrived at the 16 million votes figure, at the high end of his range).

But Epstein told CNN on Monday that President Trump misrepresented his findings, saying that he didn't have evidence to prove Google actively "manipulated" millions of voters, but rather the bias he found in its search results was "sufficient to have shifted between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes" to Clinton.

Epstein, a former Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today, is Senior Research Psychologist at American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, a non-profit California group that promotes and conducts research that has the potential to "increase the well-being and functioning of people worldwide."

C-Span

In 2012, Epstein had a public spat with Google, after the search engine warned users that his website had been infected by malware. Epstein also is quoted about Google's supposed search manipulation in a series of 2016 articles on sites such as RT and Sputniknews.com that claimed the search engine was hiding information about Hilary Clinton's health problems.

Just how Epstein got to his "rock bottom" number of how many votes were swayed due to the alleged Google bias is being questioned by law experts.

What's the evidence Google "manipulated" 2.6 million votes for Clinton?

Epstein's findings are based on a phenomenon he says he's been studying for more than six years. He calls it the "Search Engine Manipulation Effect."

The crux of the theory, as he explained it in the 2016 sputniknews article, is simple: "All Google has to do is show people search results that favor one candidate, in this case Hillary Clinton, higher in search results."

In other words, the higher positive information about one candidate shows up in search results, the more likely voters will be to favor that candidate.

How Google ranks its search results is a black box. The algorithms Google uses to decide which websites are most relevant are considered one of its crown jewels. And while Google provides guidance on how websites can improve their search rankings, it keeps the specific criteria a secret to prevent the system from being gamed.

The lack of transparency by Google has caused a lot of suspicion over the years, with competitors such as Yelp arguing that the search engine does not give everyone equal treatment. And in 2017 the European Union fined Google $2.9 billion for demoting rival comparison shopping sites in its search results. More recently, conservative commentators have charged that Google is deliberately suppressing them from its results — a claim that has so far not been proven.

The 2.6 million Hillary Clinton vote number appears to have originally turned up in a 2017 study co-authored by Epstein, which aimed at finding whether Google introduced bias in search results in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election and whether those results had an impact on the election itself.

The study — which was based on 95 participants in 24 US states — stated, in part, that when extrapolating from a 2015 study also authored by Epstein, at least 2.6 million votes might be "shifted" in favor of Clinton due to bias in Google's search results.

But the 2015 study's findings were based on asking US residents to cast hypothetical votes for candidates in Australia's 2010 prime ministerial election based on information they saw in Google search results.

Google

Dr. Michael McDonald, an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Florida, told Business Insider that he didn't necessarily believe Epstein's 2015 findings regarding Google's search rankings influencing American decisions about elections in Australia — a topic most Americans study participants would have little information about beforehand — could be applied directly to the US presidential elections.

"I'm not sure if this really apples to US elections where we have partisan politics going on and lots of other information that people have," Dr. McDonald said. "You don't need to look at the top of Google search results for your information about how you're going to cast your vote for president."

"That's something that sets off a bunch of red flags."

Justin Levitt, an Associate Dean for Research and professor at Loyola Law School who focuses on constitutional law and the law of democracy, told Business Insider that there are multiple points of contention with Epstein's 2017 findings, which have become the basis for the president's contentious tweet on Monday.

For one, Epstein writes in his report that after the study was completed, results from participants using Google's email service, Gmail, were discarded, thus changing the number of eligible participants to a lower, undisclosed number.

Epstein said Gmail users were removed because some of their search queries appeared "automated" and overall, those using Google's email service saw results that were far less biased than non-Gmail users.

"That's a weird methodological choice to take some of your results and throw them out after you've done the experiment because they seem to not fit your designed story," Levitt said. "That's something that sets off a bunch of red flags."

In his study, Epstein writes that the decisions to discard Gmail-using participants came, in part, to the possibility that Google itself had identified the study's "confidants through its gmail system and targeted them to receive unbiased results."

Another problem Levitt has with the study is Epstein's definition of the word "bias" itself. Levitt says that the mainstream media tends to be left-leaning and so finding more pro-Clinton results in 2016 might have been less Google bias and more a result of the media landscape.

What does Google say?

Google told Business Insider that Epstein's claims were "inaccurate" and said that his 2015 study, which found search rankings can easily influence undecided voters, had since been "debunked."

"This researcher's inaccurate claim has been debunked since it was made in 2016. As we stated then, we have never re-ranked or altered search results to manipulate political sentiment. Our goal is to always provide people with access to high quality, relevant information for their queries, without regard to political viewpoint," a Google spokesperson said.

Rick Pildes, a New York University Law Professor, told Business Insider that tech companies — including Google — indeed have the power to sway elections in major ways, but that doesn't necessarily mean search results have the potential to shift millions of votes, like Epstein's report claims.

"We absolutely have to worry about the social media giants manipulating election-related information, whether intentionally or not," Pildes said. "But it's massively irresponsible to claim to know anything this specific and concrete about what information moved millions of voters to cast votes as they did."

Got a tip? Contact Nick Bastone via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email atThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at@nickbastone.