The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk…
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. Microbes could extract the metal needed for cleantech In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a…
In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a time when carmakers want the metal for electric-vehicle batteries, nickel concentration at Eagle Mine is falling and could soon drop too low to warrant digging. But earlier this year, the…