March 13, 2025

Y Combinator’s police surveillance darling Flock Safety raises $275M at $7.5B valuation

Flock Safety and one of its long-time VCs, Bedrock Capital, announced Thursday that the startup raised a fresh $275 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Flock makes computer vision-enabled video surveillance technology used by law enforcement as well as businesses, property management companies, and so on. It’s best known for its automatic license plate recognition […]

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Studying the uninvited guests

February 25, 2025
Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very…

The poetry of data

February 25, 2025
Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class. Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid…

The man who reinvented the hammer

February 25, 2025
A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. “I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace…

An environmentally friendly alternative to plastic microbeads

February 25, 2025
The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-­lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used…

Tiny tubes wrap around brain cells

February 25, 2025
Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells. These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons…

Perplexity launches $50M seed and pre-seed VC fund

February 25, 2025

Perplexity, the developer of an AI-powered search engine, is raising a $50 million seed and pre-seed investment fund, CNBC reported. Although the majority of the capital is coming from limited partners, Perplexity is using some of the capital it raised for the company’s growth to anchor the fund.  Perplexity has reportedly raised $500 million at […]

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Anthropic’s Claude AI is playing Pokémon on Twitch — slowly

February 25, 2025

On Tuesday afternoon, Anthropic launched Claude Plays Pokémon on Twitch, a live stream of Anthropic’s newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, playing a game of Pokémon Red. It’s become a fascinating experiment of sorts, showcasing the capabilities of today’s AI tech and people’s reactions to them. AI researchers have used all sorts of video games, […]

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Turning a seaweed crisis into an energy opportunity

February 25, 2025
In 2019, Legena Henry, SM ’10, and the students in her renewable energy course at the University of the West Indies in Barbados wondered how to help their island stop using fossil fuel by 2030. Their first thought was to emulate Brazil—home to the world’s largest fleet of cars that run on sugar-based ethanol. But the small…