The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI
Yet it is “simplistic to think that if you have a real security problem in the wild and you’re trying...
World
The Download: parkour for robot dogs, and Africa’s AI ambitions
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made...
Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a...
Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment
Researchers used the system, called LucidSim, to train a robot dog in parkour, getting it to scramble over a box...
The Download: AI in Africa, and reporting in the age of Trump
It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial...
Science and technology stories in the age of Trump
Some of these changes will be well outside our lane as a publication. But very many of President-elect Trump’s stated...
What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player
It’s unclear what’s behind the second strategy, but Seydina Ndiaye, a program director at the Cheikh Hamidou Kane Digital University...
The Download: AI vs quantum, and the future of reproductive rights in the US
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a...
What’s next for reproductive rights in the US
Two years ago, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a legal decision that protected the right to abortion....
Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch
Modeling a weakly correlated system using DFT is not an exponentially scaling problem, though. This suggests that with more data...
The Download: what Trump’s victory means for the climate
—James Temple Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change. The Republican president-elect’s return...
Trump’s win is a tragic loss for climate progress
The US election could create global ripples as well, and very soon. US negotiators will meet with their counterparts at...
The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policy
What, exactly, Trump can do will depend on whether Republicans take control of both houses of Congress. A clean sweep...
Delivering the next-generation barcode
2D barcodes encode substantially more information than their 1D counterparts. This enables them to link physical objects to a wide...
The Download: ice-melting robots, and genetically modified trees
At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en...
Life-seeking, ice-melting robots could punch through Europa’s icy shell
Clipper has an impressive collection of remote sensing tools that will allow it to survey the ocean’s physical and chemical...
The Download: inside animals’ minds, and how to make AI agents useful
Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists don’t usually face: Your subjects can’t tell...
How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents
“These models sometimes seem to be really amazing at reasoning, but it’s just like they’re really good at pretending, and...
The Download: CRISPR’s climate promises, and protecting forests with tech
Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple...
How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change
“The exciting thing with CRISPR for gene editing is you can make changes exactly where you want them,” says Emma...
