Technology

The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

February 11, 2025
Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral…

The Download: DOGE’s influences, and rescuing federal data from deletion

February 10, 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. These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda  Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits that AI’s benefits may not be widely distributed

February 9, 2025

In a new essay on his personal blog, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is open to a “compute budget,” among other “strange-sounding” ideas, to “enable everyone on Earth to use a lot of AI” and ensure the benefits of the technology are widely distributed. “The historical impact of technological progress suggests that most […]

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These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda

February 7, 2025
Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.  The payment reports have been…

The Download: DOGE’s tech-enabled destruction, and Meta’s brain AI for typing

February 7, 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. Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper problem —Dan Hon is principal of Very Little Gravitas, where he helps turn around and modernize large and complex government services and products. In trying to…

How the tiny microbes in your mouth could be putting your health at risk

February 7, 2025
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human…

From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

February 7, 2025
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has…

Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab

February 7, 2025
Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year. Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs…

Meta launches new program to improve speech and translation AI

February 7, 2025

Meta is launching a new program in partnership with UNESCO to collect speech recordings and transcriptions the company said will help the development of future openly available AI. The program, the Language Technology Partner Program, is seeking collaborators who can contribute more than 10 hours of speech recordings with transcriptions, large amounts of written text, […]

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