May 2, 2026

Uber wants to turn its millions of drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.

The Download: how humans make decisions, and Moderna’s “vaccine” word games

April 13, 2026
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. You have no choice in reading this article—maybe How do humans make decisions? The question has been on Uri Maoz’s mind since he read an article in his early twenties suggesting…

Job titles of the future: Wildlife first responder

April 13, 2026
Grizzly bears have made such a comeback across eastern Montana that in 2017, the state hired its first-ever prairie-based grizzly manager: wildlife biologist Wesley Sarmento.  For some seven years, Sarmento worked to keep both the bears, which are still listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the humans, who are sprawling into once-wild…

You have no choice in reading this article—maybe

April 13, 2026
Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion.  Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his…