The Download: milk beyond cows, and geoengineering’s funding boom
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. Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that’s raw, or unpasteurized,…
These board games want you to beat climate change
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It’s game night, and I’m crossing my fingers, hoping for a hurricane. I roll the die and it clatters across the board, tumbling to a stop to reveal a tiny icon of a tree stump. Bad news: I just triggered deforestation in the Amazon. That seals it. I failed to stop climate change—at least this…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/14/1093384/catan-climate-change-board-games/
The Download: the rise of gamification, and carbon dioxide storage
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 gamification took over the world It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow…
Why we need to shoot carbon dioxide thousands of feet underground
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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. There’s often one overlooked member in a duo. Peanut butter outshines jelly in a PB&J every time (at least in my eyes). For carbon capture and storage technology, the storage part tends…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/13/1093635/carbon-dioxide-storage/
How gamification took over the world
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It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one? Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/13/1093375/gamification-behaviorism-npcs-video-games/
The Download: Apple’s AI plans, and a carbon storage boom
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. Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work. At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product…
How Gogoro’s swap-and-go scooter batteries can strengthen the grid
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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. If you’ve ever been to Taiwan, you’ve likely run into Gogoro’s green-and-white battery-swap stations in one city or another. With 12,500 stations around the island, Gogoro has built a sweeping network that allows…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/12/1093581/gogoro-battery-swap-versatile-grid/
The world’s on the verge of a carbon storage boom
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Pump jacks and pipelines clutter the Elk Hills oil field of California, a scrubby stretch of land in the southern Central Valley that rests above one of the nation’s richest deposits of fossil fuels. Oil production has been steadily declining in the state for decades, as tech jobs have boomed and legislators have enacted rigorous…
Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work.
At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup with artificial intelligence. The key feature, which will run across virtually all of its product line, is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-based capabilities that promises to deliver personalized AI services while keeping sensitive data…
The Download: fighting blackouts with battery-swap networks, and AI surgery monitoring
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 battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the…
What using artificial intelligence to help monitor surgery can teach us
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Every year, some 22,000 Americans a year are killed as a result of serious medical errors in hospitals, many of them on operating tables. There have been cases where surgeons have…
How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts
On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/11/1093465/battery-swap-gogoro-taiwan-earthquake/
The data practitioner for the AI era
The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business—making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/10/1093132/the-data-practitioner-for-the-ai-era/
The Download: AI propaganda, and digital twins
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. Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it —Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/10/1093457/the-download-ai-propaganda-and-digital-twins/
Digital twins are helping scientists run the world’s most complex experiments
In January 2022, NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers’ calculations,…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/06/10/1093417/how-digital-twins-are-helping-scientists/
Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it
At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China,…
The Download: making surgery safer, and MDMA therapy has been dealt a blow
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 AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some…
This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer
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The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window. “My perception was that my performance was spectacular,” Grantcharov says, and then pauses—“until the moment I saw the video.” Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of…
FDA advisors just said no to the use of MDMA as a therapy
On Tuesday, the FDA asked a panel of experts to weigh in on whether the evidence shows that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a safe and efficacious treatment for PTSD. The answer was a resounding no. Just two out of 11 panel members agreed that MDMA-assisted therapy is effective. And only one panel member…
The Download: gaming climate change, and Boeing’s space mission leaks
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 classic game is taking on climate change —Casey Crownhart There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don’t I sound like…