Technology

From slop to Sotheby’s? AI art enters a new phase

October 17, 2025
In this era of AI slop, the idea that generative AI tools like Midjourney and Runway could be used to make art can seem absurd: What possible artistic value is there to be found in the likes of Shrimp Jesus and Ballerina Cappuccina? But amid all the muck, there are people using AI tools with…

Take our quiz: How much do you know about antimicrobial resistance?

October 16, 2025
This week we had some terrifying news from the World Health Organization: Antibiotics are failing us. A growing number of bacterial infections aren’t responding to these medicines—including common ones that affect the blood, gut, and urinary tract. Get infected with one of these bugs, and there’s a fair chance antibiotics won’t help.  The scary truth…

Unlocking the potential of SAF with book and claim in air freight

October 16, 2025
Used in aviation, book and claim offers companies the ability to financially support the use of SAF even when it is not physically available at their locations. As companies that ship goods by air or provide air freight related services address a range of climate goals aiming to reduce emissions, the importance of sustainable aviation…

The Download: creating the perfect baby, and carbon removal’s lofty promises

October 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. The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess An emerging field of science is seeking to use cell analysis to predict what kind of a person an embryo might…

Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization

October 16, 2025
You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. The year is 2025.  This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and…

The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess

October 16, 2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of a grain of sand pulled from a powdery white Caribbean beach, contains the…

The problem with Big Tech’s favorite carbon removal tech

October 16, 2025
Sucking carbon pollution out of the atmosphere is becoming a big business—companies are paying top dollar for technologies that can cancel out their own emissions. Today, nearly 70% of announced carbon removal contracts are for one technology: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Basically, the idea is to use trees or some other types…

The Download: Big Tech’s carbon removals plans, and the next wave of nuclear reactors

October 15, 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. Big Tech’s big bet on a controversial carbon removal tactic Microsoft, JP MorganChase, and a tech company consortium that includes Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and Stripe have all recently struck multimillion-dollar deals to pay…