July 29, 2025

The Download: how to store energy underground, and what you may not know about Trump’s AI Action Plan

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. This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery Texas-based startup Quidnet Energy just completed a test showing it can store energy for up to six months by pumping water underground.…

Technology

Inside NASA’s bid to make spacecraft as small as possible

October 24, 2023
The NASA probe’s retrorockets pressed desperately against the apricot afternoon skies of Mars. It was November 26, 2018, by Earth’s calendar. As the InSight lander worked its way down, slowing from 12,000 miles per hour to a graceful landing, overhead a pair of robots coursing through space monitored its progress. Though InSight was the size…

This new tool could give artists an edge over AI

October 24, 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. The artist-led backlash against AI is well underway. While plenty of people are still enjoying letting their imaginations run wild with popular text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion,…

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

October 23, 2023
A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.  The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against…

The power of green computing

October 23, 2023
When performing radiation therapy treatment, accuracy is key. Typically, the process of targeting cancer-affected areas for treatment is painstakingly done by hand. However, integrating a sustainably optimized AI tool into this process can improve accuracy in targeting cancerous regions, save health care workers time, and consume 20% less power to achieve these improved results. This…

Web Summit confirms Lisbon and Qatar events still on, ex-CEO Paddy Cosgrave has 80% ownership of business

October 23, 2023

Over the weekend, Paddy Cosgrave and Web Summit made the bombshell announcement that Cosgrave would step down from his post as CEO of the technology conference business — a move made to try to close the book on a sea of controversy and high profile conference cancellations that had been pouring on him and his […]

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

The Download: teaching girls to build, and fixing government tech

October 23, 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 nonprofit that lets girls build the world they want to see Emily Pilloton-Lam didn’t grow up in a particularly handy household, but she did spend hours outside building treehouses out of logs…

How to make government technology better

October 23, 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. Last week I published a story about government and technology that I spent the better part of this past year reporting, and I think all of you…

The nonprofit that lets girls build the world they want to see

October 23, 2023
Emily Pilloton-Lam didn’t grow up in a particularly handy household, but she did spend hours and hours outside building treehouses out of logs and sticks: “I was more a spatial and physical thinker,” she says. “And making spaces and changing my environment was one of the earliest ways I began to make sense of the…