February 27, 2026

MIT Technology Review is a 2026 ASME finalist in reporting

The American Society of Magazine Editors has named MIT Technology Review as a finalist for a 2026 National Magazine Award in the reporting category.  The shortlisted story—“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard”—is part of the publication’s Power Hungry package on AI’s energy burden.  AI is often described…

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Walmart and Outlier Ventures’ web3 accelerator launches with five startups

October 24, 2023

Walmart’s incubation arm, Store Nº8, and Outlier Ventures have joined forces to launch its web3 accelerator program, Store Nº8 Base Camp. TechCrunch got a first look at its cohort. The 12-week virtual incubator program brought in a flagship group of five companies that specialize in web3 marketing, advertising and improving payment technology, among other themes. […]

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D-ID’s newest app uses AI to make videos from photographs

October 24, 2023

D-ID, the Tel Aviv-based startup best known as the tech behind those viral videos of animated family photos, is bringing its AI video technology to a new mobile app, launching today. Originally available as a web platform, D-ID’s Creative Reality Studio allows users to upload a still image and script and then turn that into […]

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How this Turing Award–winning researcher became a legendary academic advisor

October 24, 2023
Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip…

Death to captchas

October 24, 2023
Earlier this year, HBO Max users hoping to sign in to the service had to pass an audio challenge in which they listened to a bunch of tunes and had to select the one with a repeating pattern. When I signed in to LinkedIn recently, it asked me to prove I’m human with an unusual…

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

October 24, 2023
The NASA probe’s retrorockets pressed desperately against the apricot afternoon skies of Mars. It was November 26, 2018, by Earth’s calendar. As the InSight lander worked its way down, slowing from 12,000 miles per hour to a graceful landing, overhead a pair of robots coursing through space monitored its progress. Though InSight was the size…

In the wake of Dash’s closure due to fraud, 5 investors talk due diligence in Africa

October 24, 2023

It’s been a tough year for tech startups globally. These struggles have manifested in layoffs, down rounds and complete shutdowns caused by current market conditions, utter mismanagement or fraud. This August, SoftBank sued one of its portfolio companies, IRL, a social media platform poised to become an event organizing alternative for Gen Zs, for fraud. Earlier […]

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This new tool could give artists an edge over AI

October 24, 2023
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 artist-led backlash against AI is well underway. While plenty of people are still enjoying letting their imaginations run wild with popular text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion,…

New solar mini-grids in Africa to be powered by Husk Power Systems’ $103M Series D

October 24, 2023

Husk Power Systems, a clean energy company at the forefront of fueling rural electrification since 2008 and that announced plans to launch 500 solar mini-grids in Nigeria over the next five years, has raised $103 million Series D in equity and debt to meet its objectives. The capital injection includes $43 million in equity, which […]

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Oxolo bags €13M for Gen AI-driven video platform which can optimise engagement on the fly

October 24, 2023

Much has been made of AI-powered videos which can either make a real person speak different words or other languages, or generate a synthetic person which can speak on-demand. A few years ago former football star David Beckham helped push the idea into the mainstream via a video from Synthesia, where he spoke different languages […]

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