Crossword answers revealed
Give up? Here’s the solution to the May/June 2024 crossword puzzle “Not that MIT.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/16/1091333/crossword/
The Download: the problem with police bodycams, and how to make useful robots
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 AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened? When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a…
Three reasons robots are about to become more way useful
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The holy grail of robotics since the field’s beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream.…
AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened?
On July 25 last year, in circuit court in Dane County, Wisconsin, a motion was filed to dismiss a criminal case as a result of what defense attorneys described as “institutional bad-faith actions” by a local police department. The evidence was unearthed, in part, because of artificial intelligence. Attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz had been preparing…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/16/1090846/ai-police-body-cams-cops-transparency/
The Download: saving Louisiana from sinking, and the promise of thermal batteries
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 to stop a state from sinking In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, more storms…
The Download: saving Louisiana from sinking, and the promise of thermal batteries
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 to stop a state from sinking In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, more storms…
How thermal batteries are heating up energy storage
We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to clean up industry, a growing number of companies are working to supply that…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/15/1091042/thermal-batteries-heat-energy-storage/
How to stop a state from sinking
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There is more than one way to raise a house. Many of the mobile homes, Creole cottages, and other dwellings that have been flagged for flood risk along Louisiana’s low-lying coastline can be separated from their foundations and slowly raised into the sky on hydraulic jacks. While a home is held aloft by temporary support…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/15/1090733/louisiana-sinking-climate-change-flooding/
The Download: a history of brainwashing, and America’s chipmaking ambitions
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 brief, weird history of brainwashing On a spring day in 1959, war correspondent Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.”…
The effort to make a breakthrough cancer therapy cheaper
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. CAR-T therapies, created by engineering a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, are typically reserved for people who have exhausted other treatment options. But last week, the FDA…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/12/1091161/car-t-cancer-therapy-treatment-expense/
A brief, weird history of brainwashing
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On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book…
This US startup makes a crucial chip material and is taking on a Japanese giant
It can be dizzying to try to understand all the complex components of a single computer chip: layers of microscopic components linked to one another through highways of copper wires, some barely wider than a few strands of DNA. Nestled between those wires is an insulating material called a dielectric, ensuring that the wires don’t…
Scaling individual impact: Insights from an AI engineering leader
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Traditionally, moving up in an organization has meant leading increasingly large teams of people, with all the business and operational duties that entails. As a leader of large teams, your contributions can become less about your own work and more about your team’s output and impact. There’s another path, though. The rapidly evolving fields of…
The Download: AI is making robots more helpful, and the problem with cleaning up pollution
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. Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, have…
Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?
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Silent. Rigid. Clumsy. Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, have hosted a slew of robots in their home. In 2002, at age 40, Henry had a massive stroke, which left him with quadriplegia and an inability to speak.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/11/1090718/household-robots-ai-data-robotics/
Modernizing data with strategic purpose
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Data modernization is squarely on the corporate agenda. In our survey of 350 senior data and technology executives, just over half say their organization has either undertaken a modernization project in the past two years or is implementing one today. An additional one-quarter plan to do so in the next two years. Other studies also…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/10/1091021/modernizing-data-with-strategic-purpose/
The Download: generating AI memories, and China’s softening tech regulation
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. Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed As a six-year-old growing up in Barcelona, Spain, during the 1940s, Maria would visit a neighbor’s apartment in her building…
Why China’s regulators are softening on its tech sector
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. If you’re a longtime subscriber to this newsletter, you know that I talk about China’s tech policies all the time. To me, it’s always a challenge to understand and explain the government’s…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/10/1091044/china-tech-regulation-angela-zhang/
Open-sourcing generative AI
The views expressed in this video are those of the speakers, and do not represent any endorsement or sponsorship. Is the open-source approach, which has democratized access to software, ensured transparency, and improved security for decades, now poised to have a similar impact on AI? We dissect the balance between collaboration and control, legal ramifications,…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/09/1087440/open-sourcing-generative-ai/
Taking AI to the next level in manufacturing
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Few technological advances have generated as much excitement as AI. In particular, generative AI seems to have taken business discourse to a fever pitch. Many manufacturing leaders express optimism: Research conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights found ambitions for AI development to be stronger in manufacturing than in most other sectors. Manufacturers rightly view AI…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/09/1090880/taking-ai-to-the-next-level-in-manufacturing/