November 2023

Grant Assistant wants to apply generative AI to grant proposals

November 1, 2023

Grants are the lifeblood of many organizations. But procuring them often turns out to be a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Writing a proposal can take hundreds of hours, require the services of a specialized grant writer and cost thousands of dollars — narrowing the pool of potential applicants. Sean Carroll, the former chief of staff and […]

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Security researchers observed ‘deliberate’ takedown of notorious Mozi botnet

November 1, 2023

Security researchers say they have observed what they believe is a takedown of the notorious Mozi botnet that infiltrated more than a million Internet of Things devices worldwide. In research shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication on Tuesday, researchers at cybersecurity company ESET say that they witnessed the “sudden demise” of Mozi during an investigation […]

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Tackling our biggest problems

November 1, 2023
For all of history we’ve turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. Technology gave us warmth and light when it was cold and dark. It helped us pull fish from the sea and crops from the earth so we would not be hungry. It enabled us to cross over…

What are the hardest problems in tech we should be more focused on as a society?

November 1, 2023
Technology is all about solving big thorny problems. Yet one of the hardest things about solving hard problems is knowing where to focus our efforts. There are so many urgent issues facing the world. Where should we even begin? So we asked dozens of people to identify what problem at the intersection of technology and…

China wants to win the gene therapy race—and it’ll spend millions

November 1, 2023
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. Last week, I worked with my colleague Antonio Regalado, our senior editor for biomedicine, to break a truly inspiring and honestly kind of wild story: Chinese scientists used gene therapy to restore…

Innovative new cell therapies could finally get at tough-to-target cancers

November 1, 2023
Over the past few years, the treatment of some hard-to-treat blood cancers has been revolutionized by therapies based on engineered T cells, which leverage the patient’s own immune system to destroy cancerous cells. But until recently researchers haven’t had much luck developing these T-cell therapies—called CAR T—for solid tumors, which make up the vast majority…

YouTube is now cracking down on ad-blockers globally

November 1, 2023

YouTube is now cracking down on ad-blocker usage globally, by showing warnings about breaking the platform’s terms of service. In some cases, the company is preventing users from viewing more videos unless they disable ad blocks. The video streaming platform started experimenting in June where it showed a message to users saying that the video […]

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Southeast Asia funding at its lowest level in six years

November 1, 2023

Every year, Temasek teams up with Bain & Company on the e-Conomy SEA report. It covers Southeast Asia’s digital economy and is published by Google. This year’s report, published today, underscores what many startups and investors already know—the region’s funding landscape is currently challenging to navigate. On the bright side, there’s still plenty of “dry […]

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Buy now, pay later platform Tabby nabs $200M in Series D funding at $1.5B valuation

November 1, 2023

The past year and a half have witnessed multiple startups facing valuation cuts as funding from VCs waned in an environment of rising interest rates. In this context, fintechs, especially buy now, pay later companies serving Western customers, including Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna, have encountered challenges in the public and private markets. Yet, Tabby, a […]

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Who’s going (and who’s not) to the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park?

November 1, 2023

Ahead of the AI Safety Summit starting tomorrow morning taking place outside of London in Bletchley Park, today, the U.K. government has confirmed more details about who is actually going to be attending the event. The list’s publication comes after weeks of speculation and criticism that the event’s line up — both in terms of […]

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