February 6, 2025

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

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…

Technology

The search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

February 19, 2024
We’ve known of Europa’s existence for more than four centuries, but for most of that time, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon was just a pinprick of light in our telescopes—a bright and curious companion to the solar system’s resident giant. Over the last few decades, however, as astronomers have scrutinized it through telescopes and six spacecraft have…

Roundtables: Building a Cleaner Future: Better Batteries and Their Materials

February 16, 2024
Recorded on February 15, 2024 Building a Cleaner Future: Better Batteries and Their Materials Speakers: Casey Crownhart, Climate reporter, David Rotman, Editor at large, James Temple, Sr Editor of Climate & Energy Electric vehicles are taking to the roads like never before, and a grid with a growing share of renewables like wind and solar…

Uruguay wants to use gene drives to eradicate devastating screwworms

February 16, 2024
On a warm, sunny day in Montevideo, Uruguay, the air is smogless and crisp. Inside a highly secured facility at the National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) are a sophisticated gene gun, giant microscopes, and tens of thousands of gene-edited flies, their bright blue wings fluttering against the walls of their small, white, netted cages.…

The Download: impressive new AI capabilities

February 16, 2024
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. OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a…

Anthropic takes steps to prevent election misinformation

February 16, 2024

Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, is testing a technology to detect when users of its GenAI chatbot ask about political topics and redirect those users to “authoritative” sources of voting information. Called Prompt Shield, the technology, which relies on a combination of AI detection models and rules, shows […]

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

How bacteria-fighting viruses could go mainstream

February 16, 2024
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. Lynn Cole had a blood infection she couldn’t shake. For years, she was in and out of the hospital. Each time antibiotics would force the infection…

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

February 15, 2024
OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long. Based on four sample videos that OpenAI shared with MIT Technology Review ahead of today’s announcement, the San Francisco-based firm has pushed the…

VR sickness happens. Here’s how to avoid and treat it.

February 15, 2024

Over the past week, a number of people have reported returning their Vision Pros for a number of reasons, including issues around headset comfort and sickness. Returns are par for the course with any nascent technology. No matter how polished a first-generation product is upon release, there’s a very real sense in which it serves […]

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

Responsible technology use in the AI age

February 15, 2024
The sudden appearance of application-ready generative AI tools over the last year has confronted us with challenging social and ethical questions. Visions of how this technology could deeply alter the ways we work, learn, and live have also accelerated conversations—and breathless media headlines—about how and whether these technologies can be responsibly used. Responsible technology use,…

Google’s new version of Gemini can handle far bigger amounts of data

February 15, 2024
Google DeepMind today launched the next generation of its powerful artificial intelligence model Gemini, which has an enhanced ability to work with large amounts of video, text, and images. It’s an advancement from the three versions of Gemini 1.0 that Google announced back in December, ranging in size and complexity from Nano to Pro to…