July 8, 2025

The Download: hunting an asteroid, and unlocking the human mind

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. Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it might not seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet,…

Technology

The Download: how AI can improve a city, and inside OpenAI’s empire

June 16, 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. How AI can help make cities work better In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are…

How AI can help make cities work better for residents

June 16, 2025
In recent decades, cities have become increasingly adept at amassing all sorts of data. But that data can have limited impact when government officials are unable to communicate, let alone analyze or put to use, all the information they have access to. This dynamic has always bothered Sarah Williams, a professor of urban planning and…

The U.S. Navy is more aggressively telling startups, ‘We want you’

June 15, 2025
While Silicon Valley executives like those from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI are grabbing headlines for trading their Brunello Cucinelli vests for Army Reserve uniforms, a quieter transformation has been underway in the U.S. Navy. How? Well, the Navy’s Chief Technology Officer Justin Fanelli says he has spent the last two and a half years focused […]

Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries 

June 13, 2025
Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…

The Download: gambling with humanity’s future, and the FDA under Trump

June 13, 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. Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond…

Tech billionaires are making a risky bet with humanity’s future

June 13, 2025
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” the famed computer scientist Alan Kay once said. Uttered more out of exasperation than as inspiration, his remark has nevertheless attained gospel-like status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in particular a handful of tech billionaires who fancy themselves the chief architects of humanity’s future.  Sam…

Here’s what food and drug regulation might look like under the Trump administration

June 13, 2025
Earlier this week, two new leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration published a list of priorities for the agency. Both Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad are controversial figures in the science community. They were generally highly respected academics until the covid pandemic, when their contrarian opinions on masking, vaccines, and lockdowns turned many…

Bluesky backlash misses the point

June 12, 2025
Not only is Bluesky more than just a Twitter/X alternative, it’s just one app in a wider social ecosystem built on open technology.

Shoring up global supply chains with generative AI

June 12, 2025
The outbreak of covid-19 laid bare the vulnerabilities of global, interconnected supply chains. National lockdowns triggered months-long manufacturing shutdowns. Mass disruption across international trade routes sparked widespread supply shortages. Costs spiralled. And wild fluctuations in demand rendered tried-and-tested inventory planning and forecasting tools useless. “It was the black swan event that nobody had accounted for,…