October 31, 2025

Here’s the latest company planning for gene-edited babies

A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into the taboo technology.   The new company, called Preventive, is being formed to research so-called “heritable genome editing,” in which the DNA of embryos would be…

Technology

This American nuclear company could help India’s thorium dream

August 29, 2025
For just the second time in nearly two decades, the United States has granted an export license to an American company planning to sell nuclear technology to India, MIT Technology Review has learned. The decision to greenlight Clean Core Thorium Energy’s license is a major step toward closer cooperation between the two countries on atomic…

RFK Jr’s plan to improve America’s diet is missing the point

August 29, 2025
A lot of Americans don’t eat well. And they’re paying for it with their health. A diet high in sugar, sodium, and saturated fat can increase the risk of problems like diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease, to name a few. And those are among the leading causes of death in the US. This is hardly…

The Download: Google’s AI energy use, and the AI Hype Index

August 28, 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. Google’s still not giving us the full picture on AI energy use  —Casey Crownhart Google just announced that a typical query to its Gemini app uses about 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. That’s about…

From pilot to scale: Making agentic AI work in health care

August 28, 2025
Over the past 20 years building advanced AI systems—from academic labs to enterprise deployments—I’ve witnessed AI’s waves of success rise and fall. My journey began during the “AI Winter,” when billions were invested in expert systems that ultimately underdelivered. Flash forward to today: large language models (LLMs) represent a quantum leap forward, but their prompt-based…

3 problems with Google’s AI energy use data

August 28, 2025
Google just announced that a typical query to its Gemini app uses about 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. That’s about the same as running a microwave for one second—something that, to me, feels virtually insignificant. I run the microwave for so many more seconds than that on most days. I was excited to see this report…

Pixel 10 Pro review: familiar hardware, filled with Google’s AI

August 27, 2025
Pixel devices have always been a reflection of how Google sees Android, as well as a platform to showcase its own apps and technology advances. In the current era, this vision encompasses Google’s consumer AI suite. Google wants Pixel owners to live and breathe Google AI in all aspects of their lives through the new […]

The AI Hype Index: AI-designed antibiotics show promise

August 27, 2025
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Using AI to improve our health and well-being is one of the areas scientists and researchers are most excited about. The last month…

Unlocking enterprise agility in the API economy

August 27, 2025
Across industries, enterprises are increasingly adopting an on-demand approach to compute, storage, and applications. They are favoring digital services that are faster to deploy, easier to scale, and better integrated with partner ecosystems. Yet, one critical pillar has lagged: the network. While software-defined networking has made inroads, many organizations still operate rigid, pre-provisioned networks. As…

The Download: introducing: the Security issue

August 27, 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. Introducing: the Security issue It would be naïve to think we are going back to a world without AI. We’re not. But it’s only one of many urgent problems we need to address…