February 6, 2025

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…

Technology

This octopus-inspired adhesive can stick to just about anything

October 10, 2024
A new adhesive technology pays homage to one of nature’s strongest sources of suction: an octopus tentacle. Researchers replicated an octopus’s strong grip and controlled release to create a tool that manipulates a wide array of objects. It could help improve underwater construction methods or find application in everyday devices like an assistive glove.  Each…

Preventing Climate Change: A Team Sport

October 9, 2024
This sponsored session was presented by MEDC at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event. Michigan is at the forefront of the clean energy transition, setting an example in mobility and automotive innovation. Other states and organizations can learn from Michigan’s approach to public-private partnerships, actionable climate plans, and business-government alignment. Progressive climate policies are…

Productivity Electrified: Tech That Is Supercharging Business

October 9, 2024
This sponsored session was presented by Ford Pro at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event. A decarbonized transportation system is a necessary pre-requisite for a sustainable economy. In the transportation industry, the road to electrification and greater technology adoption can also increase business bottom lines and reduce downstream costs to tax payers. Focusing on…

The Download: another Nobel Prize for AI, and Adobe’s anti-scraping tool

October 9, 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. Google DeepMind wins joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein prediction AI   Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using artificial intelligence to predict the structures…

Google DeepMind wins joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein prediction AI  

October 9, 2024
In a second Nobel win for AI, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, for their work on using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins,…

Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping

October 8, 2024
Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models. The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast…

The Download: Geoffrey Hinton’s Nobel Prize, and multimodal AI

October 8, 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. Geoffrey Hinton, AI pioneer and figurehead of doomerism, wins Nobel Prize Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful…

Geoffrey Hinton just won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on machine learning

October 8, 2024
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and 90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement,…

Why artificial intelligence and clean energy need each other

October 8, 2024
We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what’s been too often left out of the conversation is that AI’s huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the…

Forget chat. AI that can hear, see and click is already here

October 8, 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. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage of multimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and…