February 17, 2026

The Download: the rise of luxury car theft, and fighting antimicrobial resistance

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 curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis Across the world, unsuspecting people are unwittingly becoming caught up in a new and growing type of organized criminal enterprise: vehicle transport fraud and theft. Crooks…

Diaper genius

August 22, 2023
By infusing a salt into a material used in disposable diapers, MIT engineers have synthesized a superabsorbent gel that can soak up a record amount of moisture from even the driest air, offering a possible way to harvest drinkable water. The transparent, rubbery material combines the advantages of lithium chloride, a salt that can absorb…

Smart sutures for better healing

August 22, 2023
Inspired by a technology developed thousands of years ago, MIT engineers have designed “smart” sutures that can not only hold tissue in place but also detect inflammation and release drugs. The new sutures are derived from animal tissue, similar to the “catgut” sutures first used by the ancient Romans. Catgut—which is made from strands of…

Large language models may speed drug discovery

August 22, 2023
Computational models have been a major time saver when it comes to predicting which protein molecules could make effective drugs, but many of those methods themselves take a lot of time and computing power.  Now researchers at MIT and Tufts have devised an alternative approach based on an algorithm known as a large language model,…

Like palm oil, but better for the planet

August 22, 2023
Palm oil is used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces and crackers, but its production can be environmentally devastating. Producers burn down rainforests and swamps to make way for plantations, decimating wildlife habitats and producing staggering greenhouse-gas emissions. A company started by MIT classmates has used synthetic biology to develop an alternative. David…

OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo

August 22, 2023
OpenAI customers can now bring custom data to the lightweight version of GPT-3.5, GPT-3.5 Turbo — making it easier to improve the text-generating AI model’s reliability while building in specific behaviors. OpenAI claims that fine-tuned versions of GPT-3.5 can match or even outperform the base capabilities of GPT-4, the company’s flagship model, on “certain narrow […]