February 7, 2025

How the tiny microbes in your mouth could be putting your health at risk

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. This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human…

Technology

From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

February 7, 2025
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has…

Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab

February 7, 2025
Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year. Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs…

Meta launches new program to improve speech and translation AI

February 7, 2025

Meta is launching a new program in partnership with UNESCO to collect speech recordings and transcriptions the company said will help the development of future openly available AI. The program, the Language Technology Partner Program, is seeking collaborators who can contribute more than 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text, […]

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India to launch new domain name for banks to fight digital fraud

February 7, 2025

India’s central bank is introducing an exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks from April 2025 as part of efforts to combat rising digital payment frauds and bolster trust in online banking services. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will serve as the exclusive registrar for the new domain, the Reserve Bank of […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Superlogic raises $13.7M at a $200M valuation to help consumers use reward points toward cool ‘experiences’

February 6, 2025

Superlogic, a startup that helps give consumers a way to apply rewards points toward experiences, has raised $13.7 million at a $200 million valuation, the company tells TechCrunch exclusively. Lin Dai, CEO and co-founder of Miami-based Superlogic, said his company’s technology is designed to “enhance the value of rewards points” by giving consumers a broader […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Download: AI companion dangers, and supersonic planes

February 6, 2025
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 AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…

Reframing digital transformation through the lens of generative AI

February 6, 2025
Enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies has undergone explosive growth in the last two years and counting. Powerful solutions underpinned by this new generation of large language models (LLMs) have been used to accelerate research, automate content creation, and replace clunky chatbots with AI assistants and more sophisticated AI agents that closely mimic human interaction.…

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

February 6, 2025
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…