Technology

The Download: Harvard’s geoengineering failure, and extending nuclear plants’ lifetimes

April 4, 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. The hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment In March 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would…

Why the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longer

April 4, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Aging can be scary. As you get older, you might not be able to do everything you used to, and it can be hard to keep up with the changing times. Just…

The hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment

April 4, 2024
In late March of 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the first solar geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere. Instead, it became the focal point of a fierce public debate over whether it’s okay to research such…

TechCrunch Minute: Yahoo buys Artifact news app from Instagram’s co-founders

April 3, 2024

News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday. Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news. It had some devoted fans, but never reached the sort of scale that would have made it an attractive long-term project. So, the Instagram founders […]

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‘A Brief History of the Future’ offers a hopeful antidote to cynical tech takes

April 3, 2024

Cynicism is a quality taken almost for granted in tech journalism, and certainly we are as guilty as the next publication. But both the risk and the promise of technology are real, and a new documentary series tries to emphasize the latter while not discounting the former. “A Brief History of the Future,” hosted by […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

EU and US set to announce joint working on AI safety, standards & R&D

April 3, 2024

The European Union and the US expect to announce a cooperation on AI Friday at a meeting of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC), according to a senior Commission official who was briefing journalists on background ahead of the Confab. The mood music points to growing cooperation between lawmakers on both sides of the […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

The Download: fixing space weather-forecasting, and reopening a nuclear power plant

April 3, 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. The race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits As the number of satellites in space grows, and as we rely on them for increasing numbers of vital tasks on…

How to reopen a nuclear power plant

April 3, 2024
A shut-down nuclear power plant in Michigan could get a second life thanks to a $1.52 billion loan from the US Department of Energy. If successful, it will be the first time a shuttered nuclear power plant reopens in the US.   Palisades Power Plant shut down on May 20, 2022, after 50 years of generating…

Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

April 3, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released…