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

How battery-swap networks are preventing emergency blackouts

June 11, 2024
On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet…

Apple brings Apple Intelligence to developers via SiriKit and App Intents

June 10, 2024

Apple Intelligence, Apple’s new generative AI offering, won’t only be a consumer-facing feature — developers will be able to take advantage of the latest technology too. In its keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, the company announced that developers would be able to integrate the experience powered by Apple Intelligence into their […]

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The data practitioner for the AI era

June 10, 2024
The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business—making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations…

The Download: AI propaganda, and digital twins

June 10, 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. Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it —Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on…

Digital twins are helping scientists run the world’s most complex experiments

June 10, 2024
In January 2022, NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers’ calculations,…

Propagandists are using AI too—and companies need to be open about it

June 8, 2024
At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China,…

The Download: making surgery safer, and MDMA therapy has been dealt a blow

June 7, 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. This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some…

This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

June 7, 2024
The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window.   “My perception was that my performance was spectacular,” Grantcharov says, and then pauses—“until the moment I saw the video.” Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of…

FDA advisors just said no to the use of MDMA as a therapy

June 6, 2024
On Tuesday, the FDA asked a panel of experts to weigh in on whether the evidence shows that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a safe and efficacious treatment for PTSD. The answer was a resounding no. Just two out of 11 panel members agreed that MDMA-assisted therapy is effective. And only one panel member…

The Download: gaming climate change, and Boeing’s space mission leaks

June 6, 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. This classic game is taking on climate change —Casey Crownhart There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don’t I sound like…