July 25, 2025

The Download: saving the US climate programs, and America’s AI protections are under threat

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 nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs Nonprofits are trying to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of…

Technology

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 […]

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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…

The Biggest Questions: Are we alone in the universe?

November 13, 2023
In 1977, the New York Times published an article titled “Seeking an End to Cosmic Loneliness,” describing physicists’ attempts to pick up radio messages from aliens. The endeavor, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was still in its early stages, and its proponents were struggling to persuade their peers and Congress that the…