February 10, 2025

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

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…

Technology

This solar giant is moving manufacturing back to the US

April 23, 2024
Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there. The country will soon be…

The Download: the future of geoengineering, and how to make stronger, lighter materials

April 23, 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. Why new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided —Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system…

Why new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided

April 23, 2024
The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system is heating up, as the dangers of climate instability rise and more groups look to study technologies that could cool the planet. Such interventions, commonly known as solar geoengineering, may include releasing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to cast away more sunlight,…

Three things we learned about AI from EmTech Digital London

April 23, 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. Last week, MIT Technology Review held its inaugural EmTech Digital conference in London. It was a great success! I loved seeing so many of you there asking excellent questions, and it was a…

This architect is cutting up materials to make them stronger and lighter

April 23, 2024
As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things: cameras, a spaceship cockpit, buildings for a town in outer space. It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she was playing around with some paper and scissors. It was…

A Grammy for Miguel Zenón

April 22, 2024
Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors are nearly routine at MIT, but a Grammy Award is something we don’t see every year. That’s what Miguel Zenón, an assistant professor of music and theater arts, has won: El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2, which he recorded with the pianist and composer Luis Perdomo, received the Grammy…

The Download: saving seals with artificial snow, and AI’s effects on politics

April 22, 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. These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change For millennia, during Finland’s blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved…

These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change

April 22, 2024
Just before 10 a.m., hydrobiologist Jari Ilmonen and his team of six step out across a flat, half-mile-wide disk of snow and ice. For half the year this vast clearing is open water, the tip of one arm of the labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland’s biggest lake, which reaches almost to Russia’s western border. As each…

TechCrunch Minute: Meta’s new Llama 3 models give open-source AI a boost

April 19, 2024

New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open-source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings from OpenAI and other well-known names. Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama […]

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