July 8, 2025

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and…

Technology

Google DeepMind’s weather AI can forecast extreme weather faster and more accurately

November 14, 2023
This year the Earth has been hit by a record number of unpredictable extreme weather events made worse by climate change. Predicting them faster and with greater accuracy could enable us to prepare better for natural disasters and help save lives. A new AI model from Google DeepMind could make that easier.  In research published…

Courtesy of AI: Weather forecasts for the hour, the week, and the century

November 14, 2023

Machine learning models are taking over in the field of weather forecasting, from a quick “how long will this rain last” to a 10-day outlook, all the way out to century-level predictions. The technology is increasingly important to climate scientists as well as apps and local news stations — and yet it doesn’t “understand” the […]

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The Download: the origins of life, and building Facebook’s AI empire

November 14, 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. How did life begin? How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and…

How Facebook went all in on AI

November 14, 2023
The following is excerpted from BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Horwitz. In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing…

AI is at an inflection point, Fei-Fei Li says

November 14, 2023
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. “This moment in AI is an inflection moment,” Fei-Fei Li told me recently. Li is co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and one of the most prominent computer science researchers of…

The Biggest Questions: How did life begin?

November 14, 2023
How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well.  But we don’t know what does the trick. Somehow a soup of…

Uber takes steps to combat unfair driver deactivations

November 13, 2023

Uber is introducing new features geared toward addressing the issues of unfair deactivations that ride-hail and delivery drivers often face. Starting Monday across the U.S., Uber will roll out a technology that identifies riders or Uber Eats customers who consistently give bad ratings or feedback with the intent of getting a refund. Allegations by those […]

© 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Download: are we alone, and private military data for sale

November 13, 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. Are we alone in the universe? The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained greater scientific footing over the past 50 years. Back then, astronomers had yet to…

The US military’s privacy problem in three charts

November 13, 2023
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Highly personal and sensitive data about military members, such as home addresses, health and financial information, and the names of family members and friends, is…