Technology

The clean cement industry might be facing the end of the road, before it ever really got rolling.  On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that it was canceling $3.7 billion in funding for 24 projects related to energy and industry. That included nearly $1.3 billion for cement-related projects. Cement is a massive climate…

Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says he’s ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos. If he goes forward, it would be the first major commercial investment in one of medicine’s most fraught ideas. In a post on X June 2, Armstrong announced he was looking for…

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. What’s next for AI and math The modern world is built on mathematics. Math lets us model complex systems such as the way air flows around an aircraft, the way financial markets fluctuate,…

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. The way DARPA tells it, math is stuck in the past. In April, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency kicked off a new initiative called expMath—short…

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. Four reasons to be optimistic about AI’s energy usage Two weeks ago, we launched Power Hungry, a new series shining a light on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial intelligence…

After working on it for months, my colleague Casey Crownhart and I finally saw our story on AI’s energy and emissions burden go live last week.  The initial goal sounded simple: Calculate how much energy is used each time we interact with a chatbot, and then tally that up to understand why everyone from leaders…

IBM on Monday said that it has acquired Seek AI, an AI platform that allows users to ask questions about enterprise data using natural language, for an undisclosed sum. Seek CEO and founder Sarah Nagy said that the startup’s technology will be a key part of Watsonx AI Labs, IBM’s new NYC-based AI accelerator, which […]

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. The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change, according to an…

The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising risks of a warming world. The move will cut off what’s likely to amount to tens of millions of dollars for…

JPMorgan released its annual summer reading list, geared to high-net-worth people who are curious about technology, art, and finding true happiness.