December 18, 2024

The Download: AI tracking birds, and a pig kidney transplant

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. AI is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their…

Oropouche virus is spreading. Here’s what we know.

October 18, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the…

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

October 17, 2024
Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.  Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important…