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

Apple releases security updates for iOS, iPadOS and macOS, fixing two actively exploited zero-days

December 1, 2023

Apple has released security updates for iPhones, iPads and Macs to patch against two vulnerabilities, which the company says are being actively exploited to hack people. The technology giant rolled out new software updates, iOS and iPadOS 17.1.2, and macOS 14.1.2, following a vulnerability disclosure by security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates […]

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The Download: generative AI’s carbon footprint, and a CRISPR patent battle

December 1, 2023
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. Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone The news: Generating a single image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your…

A high school’s deepfake porn scandal is pushing US lawmakers into action

December 1, 2023
On October 20, Francesca Mani was called to the counselor’s office at her New Jersey high school. A 14-year-old sophomore and a competitive fencer, Francesca wasn’t one for getting in trouble. That day, a rumor had been circulating the halls: over the summer, boys in the school had used artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit…

The first CRISPR cure might kickstart the next big patent battle

December 1, 2023
That’s a real nice CRISPR cure you have there. It would be a pity if anything happened to it.  Okay. Drop the tough-guy accent and toss the black fedora aside. But I do believe that similar conversations could be occurring now that a historic gene-editing cure is coming to market, as soon as this year.…

Sustainability starts with the data center

November 30, 2023
When asked why he targeted banks, notorious criminal Willie Sutton reportedly answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Similarly, when thoughtful organizations target sustainability, they look to their data centers—because that’s where the carbon emissions are. The International Energy Agency (IEA) attributes about 1.5% of total global electricity use to data centers and data transmission…

The Download: abandoning carbon offsets, and creating new materials

November 30, 2023
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 University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too In the fall of 2018, the University of California tasked a team of researchers with identifying projects from which…

The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too

November 30, 2023
In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses.  The researchers found next to nothing. “We took a look across the whole market…

Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials

November 29, 2023
From EV batteries to solar cells to microchips, new materials can supercharge technological breakthroughs. But discovering them usually takes months or even years of trial-and-error research.  Google DeepMind hopes to change that with a new tool that uses deep learning to dramatically speed up the process of discovering new materials. Called graphical networks for material…