Why methane emissions are still a mystery
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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. If you follow papers in climate and energy for long enough, you’re bound to recognize some patterns. There are a few things I’ll basically always see when I’m sifting through the latest…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/14/1089793/methane-mystery/
Decarbonizing production of energy is a quick win
Debate around the pace and nature of decarbonization continues to dominate the global news agenda, from the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change warning that the EU must double annual emissions cuts, to forecasts that it could cost more than $1 trillion to decarbonize the global shipping industry. Despite differing opinions on the right…
Methane leaks in the US are worse than we thought
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Methane emissions in the US are worse than scientists previously estimated, a new study has found. The study, published today in Nature, represents one of the most comprehensive surveys yet of methane emissions from US oil- and gas-producing regions. Using measurements taken from planes, the researchers found that emissions from many of the targeted areas…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/13/1089725/methane-leaks-oil-gas/
An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step towards more useful AI
Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D…
The Download: what social media can teach us about 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. Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media —Nathan E. Sanders is a data scientist and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Bruce…
Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. A decade ago, social media was celebrated for sparking democratic uprisings in the Arab world and beyond. Now front pages are splashed with stories of social platforms’ role in misinformation, business conspiracy, malfeasance, and risks to mental health. In a 2022 survey, Americans blamed social media for the coarsening…
The Download: hacking VR headsets, and contrails to cool the planet
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 VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into…
Building a data-driven health-care ecosystem
The application of AI to health-care data has promise to align the U.S. health-care system to quality care and positive health outcomes. But AI for health care hasn’t reached its full capacity. One reason is the inconsistent quality and integrity of the data that AI depends on. The industry—hospitals, providers, insurers, and administrators—uses diverse systems.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/12/1087405/building-a-data-driven-health-care-ecosystem/
Why we need better defenses against VR cyberattacks
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I remember the first time I tried on a VR headset. It was the first Oculus Rift, and I nearly fainted after experiencing an intense but visually clumsy VR roller-coaster. But…
How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet
A handful of studies have concluded that making minor adjustments to the routes of a small fraction of airplane flights could meaningfully reduce global warming. Now a new paper finds that these changes could be pretty cheap to pull off as well. The common climate concern when it comes to airlines is that planes produce…
LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention
Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that…
VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack
In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious. A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/11/1089686/hack-vr-headsets-inception/
The Download: rise of the multimodal robots, and the SEC’s new climate rules
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. An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being…
The SEC’s new climate rules were a missed opportunity to accelerate corporate action
This week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a set of long-awaited climate rules, requiring most publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate risks building up on their balance sheets. Unfortunately, the federal agency watered down the regulations amid intense lobbying from business interests, undermining their ultimate effectiveness—and missing the…
The Download: organoid uses, and open source voting machines
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. The many uses of mini-organs This week, we reported on a team of researchers who managed to grow lung, kidney, and intestinal organoids from fetal cells. Because these tiny 3D cell clusters mimic…
A plan to bring down drug prices could threaten America’s technology boom
Forty years ago, Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was full of deserted warehouses and dying low-tech factories. Today, it is arguably the center of the global biotech industry. During my 30 years in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, I witnessed this transformation firsthand, and I know it was no accident. Much of it was the direct…
How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections
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While the vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, the election officials in the room gasped. They whispered, “No way.” They nodded their heads and filled out the scorecards in their laps. Interrupting if they had to, they asked every kind of question: How much does the new scanner…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/07/1089524/open-source-voting-machines-us-elections/
The Download: hydropower’s rocky path ahead, and how to reverse falling birth rates
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. Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower. Hydropower is one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major…
Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower.
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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. Hydropower is a staple of clean energy—the modern version has been around for over a century, and it’s one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/03/07/1089585/hydropower-trouble-droughts/
The Download: AI comics, and US tensions with China over EVs
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. I used generative AI to turn my story into a comic—and you can too —Will Douglas Heaven Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story…