October 17, 2024

The quest to figure out farming on Mars

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail—its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth,…

A prosthetic leg that feels like a real body part

August 29, 2024
When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. Now a new neural interface developed by MIT researchers and colleagues connects a bionic lower limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing it to be controlled by the…

This 21-Year-Old College Student Just Made History

August 29, 2024
Karsen Kitchen, a student at UNC, just became the youngest female passenger to cross the Kármán Line. She was one of six passengers aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin New Shepard 26 flight Thursday.

Architecting cloud data resilience

August 29, 2024
Cloud has become a given for most organizations: according to PwC’s 2023 cloud business survey, 78% of companies have adopted cloud in most or all parts of the business. These companies have migrated on-premises systems to the cloud seeking faster time to market, greater scalability, cost savings, and improved collaboration. Yet while cloud adoption is…

The Download: protecting tech workers, and Canada’s wildfire emissions

August 29, 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. Kamala Harris should stand with tech workers, not their bosses —Stephen McMurtry is a Google Software Engineer and Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Tangled up in the contest to be the…