The contentious path to a cleaner future
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The world is building solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other crucial climate technologies faster than ever. As the pace picks up, though, a challenge is looming: we need a whole…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/25/1087086/nickel-mining-cleaner-future/
How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies
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A collection of brown pipes emerge at odd angles from the mud and overgrown grasses on a pine farm north of the tiny town of Tamarack, Minnesota. Beneath these capped drill holes, Talon Metals has uncovered one of America’s densest nickel deposits—and now it wants to begin tunneling deep into the rock to extract hundreds…
The Download: how China’s regulating robotaxis
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How China is regulating robotaxis Not many technologies have had such a roller-coaster ride in the past year as robotaxis. In just a few months they went from San Francisco’s new darling to…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/24/1087035/the-download-how-chinas-regulating-robotaxis/
How China is regulating robotaxis
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This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Not many technologies have had such a roller-coaster ride in the past year as robotaxis. In just a few months they went from San Francisco’s new darling to a national scandal after…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/24/1086989/china-regulation-robotaxi-autonomous-driving/
The Download: disputes over green mining, and what’s next for robotaxis
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future In June last year, Talon, an exploratory mining company, submitted a proposal to Minnesota state regulators to begin digging up as…
What’s next for robotaxis in 2024
In 2023, it almost felt as if the promise of robotaxis was soon to be fulfilled. Hailing a robotaxi had briefly become the new trendy thing to do in San Francisco, as simple and everyday as ordering a delivery via app. However, that dream crashed and burned in October, when a fatal accident in downtown…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/23/1086936/whats-next-for-robotaxis-2024/
This town’s mining battle reveals the contentious path to a cleaner future
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Minnesota’s Highway 210 threads through the tiny towns of Aitkin County, a poor and sparsely populated stretch of forests, lakes, and wetlands that reaches just into the northeastern corner of the state. A short drive off the highway, due south past the Tamarack Church, delivers you to Jackson’s Hole, the last remaining business in the…
Why does AI being good at math matter?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week the AI world was buzzing over a new paper in Nature from Google DeepMind, in which the lab managed to create an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/23/1086944/why-does-ai-being-good-at-math-matter/
The Download: hope for new long covid treatments, and the future of chiplets
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. The news: For tens of millions of people, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic…
Three technology trends shaping 2024’s elections
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review‘s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. The Iowa caucuses on January 15 officially kicked off the 2024 presidential election. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—the biggest story of this…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/22/1086896/three-technology-trends-shaping-2024s-elections/
Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments.
For many people, covid is an illness that blusters in and out of our lives as cases spike and recede. But for tens of millions of others, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness that persists for months or even years. What makes individuals with long covid different…
The Download: gene-edited pig liver transplants, and AI to fight apartheid
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A brain-dead man was attached to a gene-edited pig liver for three days Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, the team…
Donated bodies are powering gene-edited organ research
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Hooked up to a ventilation machine, a person can be dead in the eyes of the law, medical professionals, and loved ones, yet still alive enough…
How satellite images and AI could help fight spatial apartheid in South Africa
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Raesetje Sefala grew up sharing a bedroom with her six siblings in a cramped township in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The township’s inhabitants, predominantly Black people, had inadequate access to schools, health care, parks, and hospitals. But just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy…
A brain-dead man was attached to a gene-edited pig liver for three days
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Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, a team he oversees at the University of Pennsylvania did something he’d never tried before. Working on the body of a brain-dead man, they attached his veins to a refrigerator-size machine with pig liver mounted in the…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/18/1086791/brain-dead-man-gene-edited-pig-liver/
The Download: exascale computing, and AI takes on geometry
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Exascale computers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 In May 2022, the global supercomputer rankings were shaken up by the launch of Frontier. It’s the fastest supercomputer in the world, and can perform as many…
The next generation of nuclear reactors is getting more advanced. Here’s how.
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This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’ve got nuclear power on the brain this week. The workings of nuclear power plants have always fascinated me. They’re massive, technically complicated, and feel a little bit magic (splitting the atom—what…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/18/1086753/advanced-nuclear-power/
How hot salt could transform nuclear power
For more than a month in total, 12 metric tons of molten salt coursed through pipes at Kairos Power in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company is developing a new type of nuclear reactor that will be cooled using this salt mixture, and its first large-scale test cooling system just completed 1,000 hours of operation in…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/17/1086736/how-hot-salt-could-transform-nuclear-power/
Google DeepMind’s new AI system can solve complex geometry problems
Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It’s a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say. Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/17/1086722/google-deepmind-alphageometry/
The Download: Twitter killers, and how China regulates AI
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Twitter killers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 For the better part of 17 years, the roiling, rolling, fractious, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, never-ever-ending global conversation had a central home: Twitter. If you wanted to…