January 22, 2026

Why Commodity Scarcity Is Becoming the Biggest Bottleneck for Clean-Tech Entrepreneurs

Clean-tech startups are hitting a scaling wall because material supply, not technology or capital, is now the real constraint.

Technology

Providing the right products at the right time with machine learning

February 14, 2024
Whether your favorite condiment is Heinz ketchup or your preferred spread for your bagel is Philadelphia cream cheese, ensuring that all customers have access to their preferred products at the right place, at the right price, and at the right time requires careful supply chain organization and distribution. Amid the proliferation of e-commerce and shifting…

Y Combinator puts out a new call for startups in areas like AI, spatial computing, climate tech and more

February 14, 2024

Spatial computing, climate tech, and applications of AI technology join the newly announced list of startup incubator Y Combinator’s newest request for startups, announced on Wednesday. In a blog post penned by YC Managing Direct Dalton Caldwell, the organization put out a call for the types of startups it wants to know fund, in the […]

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How sulfur could be a surprise ingredient in cheaper, better batteries

February 14, 2024
The key to building less-expensive batteries that could extend the range of EVs might lie in a cheap, abundant material: sulfur. Addressing climate change is going to require a whole lot of batteries, both to drive an increasingly electric fleet of vehicles and to store renewable power on the grid. Today, lithium-ion batteries are the…

How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

February 14, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you ask any child in China what’s the most exciting thing about welcoming another year, they are likely to answer: the red packets. It’s a festive tradition: During the holidays, people…

The Download: learning from environmental DNA, and why we should welcome watermarks

February 13, 2024
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 environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and distribution of life.  Unlike previous…

Why Big Tech’s watermarking plans are some welcome good news

February 13, 2024
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 week I am happy to bring you some encouraging news from the world of AI. Following the depressing Taylor Swift deepfake porn scandal and the proliferation of political deepfakes, such as AI-generated robocalls…

How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world

February 13, 2024
In the late 1980s, at a federal research facility in Pensacola, Florida, Tamar Barkay used mud in a way that proved revolutionary in a manner she could never have imagined at the time: a crude version of a technique that is now shaking up many scientific fields. Barkay had collected several samples of mud —…

A Waymo robotaxi was vandalized and burned in San Francisco

February 12, 2024

A Waymo robotaxi was vandalized and then set on fire by a crowd of people Saturday evening in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood. The incident is the latest encounter between driverless vehicles and the public in San Francisco, a city where autonomous vehicle companies have spent years testing the technology on public streets.  The Saturday night […]

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