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

Three things to love about batteries

February 15, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I wouldn’t exactly say I have favorites when it comes to climate technologies. Anything that could help us get closer to tackling climate change is worth writing about, both to share the…

Largest text-to-speech AI model yet shows ’emergent abilities’

February 14, 2024

Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits “emergent” qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see […]

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Providing the right products at the right time with machine learning

February 14, 2024
Whether your favorite condiment is Heinz ketchup or your preferred spread for your bagel is Philadelphia cream cheese, ensuring that all customers have access to their preferred products at the right place, at the right price, and at the right time requires careful supply chain organization and distribution. Amid the proliferation of e-commerce and shifting…

Y Combinator puts out a new call for startups in areas like AI, spatial computing, climate tech and more

February 14, 2024

Spatial computing, climate tech, and applications of AI technology join the newly announced list of startup incubator Y Combinator’s newest request for startups, announced on Wednesday. In a blog post penned by YC Managing Direct Dalton Caldwell, the organization put out a call for the types of startups it wants to know fund, in the […]

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

How sulfur could be a surprise ingredient in cheaper, better batteries

February 14, 2024
The key to building less-expensive batteries that could extend the range of EVs might lie in a cheap, abundant material: sulfur. Addressing climate change is going to require a whole lot of batteries, both to drive an increasingly electric fleet of vehicles and to store renewable power on the grid. Today, lithium-ion batteries are the…

How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

February 14, 2024
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. If you ask any child in China what’s the most exciting thing about welcoming another year, they are likely to answer: the red packets. It’s a festive tradition: During the holidays, people…

The Download: learning from environmental DNA, and why we should welcome watermarks

February 13, 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. How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and distribution of life.  Unlike previous…