Technology

Last year, a humanoid warehouse robot named Digit set to work handling boxes of Spanx. Digit can lift boxes up to 16 kilograms between trolleys and conveyor belts, taking over some of the heavier work for its human colleagues. It works in a restricted, defined area, separated from human workers by physical panels or laser…

Apple has yet to deliver on some of the key technology advances that could modernize developers’ apps for the AI era.

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. IBM aims to build the world’s first large-scale, error-corrected quantum computer by 2028 The news: IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing…

IBM announced detailed plans today to build an error-corrected quantum computer with significantly more computational capability than existing machines by 2028. It hopes to make the computer available to users via the cloud by 2029.  The proposed machine, named Starling, will consist of a network of modules, each of which contains a set of chips,…

The Trump administration’s chainsaw approach to federal spending lives on, even as Elon Musk turns on the president. On May 28, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced he’d be gutting a key office at the Department of Defense responsible for testing and evaluating the safety of weapons and AI systems. As part of a string…

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 a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics —Jon Keegan As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While…

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. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has…

This week, I’ve been thinking about the powerful connection between mind and body. Some new research suggests that people with heart conditions have better outcomes when they are more hopeful and optimistic. Hopelessness, on the other hand, is associated with a significantly higher risk of death. The findings build upon decades of fascinating research into…