July 16, 2025

Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for mitochondrial diseases and risked passing on severe disorders. The eight babies are healthy, say…

Technology

South Loop Ventures closes $21M fund in Houston to build up local tech ecosystem

May 20, 2025
South Loop Ventures, a Houston-based venture firm, announced a $21 million Fund I, with Rice Management Company and Chevron Technology Ventures serving as anchor investors.  The firm, which launched in 2022, focuses on seed and pre-seed companies, with $400,000 as the average check size. It also primarily hopes to focus on backing founders of color.  […]

The Download: introducing the AI energy package

May 20, 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. We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. It’s well documented that AI is a power-hungry technology. But there has been far less reporting on the extent…

AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come

May 20, 2025
The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the state. For years, they marketed the former agricultural fields as the Franklin Farm mega site, first to…

AI’s energy impact is still small—but how we handle it is huge

May 20, 2025
With seemingly no limit to the demand for artificial intelligence, everyone in the energy, AI, and climate fields is justifiably worried. Will there be enough clean electricity to power AI and enough water to cool the data centers that support this technology? These are important questions with serious implications for communities, the economy, and the…

The data center boom in the desert

May 20, 2025
In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, a business park bigger than the…

Everything you need to know about estimating AI’s energy and emissions burden

May 20, 2025
When we set out to write a story on the best available estimates for AI’s energy and emissions burden, we knew there would be caveats and uncertainties to these numbers. But, we quickly discovered, the caveats are the story too.  This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our…

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do

May 19, 2025
Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models (LLMs) might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse.   A multi-university team of researchers found that…

The real impact of AI on your organization

May 19, 2025
AI technologies are reshaping work, but not all workflows or roles will be equally transformed. Discover how AI is changing the way we work, given the technical capabilities and limitations of today’s systems. Through real-world use cases and strategic insights, this session equips business leaders with the knowledge to prioritize investments and identify the technologies…