The Download: tracking animals, and biotech plants
Last week, MIT Technology Review hosted an event where we dug into the future of batteries and the materials that go into them. We got so many great questions, and we answered quite a few of them (subscribers should check out the recording of the full event).
But there were still a lot of questions, particularly about EVs, that we didn’t get to. So let’s take a look at a few of those.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter all about the technology that could combat the climate crisis. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The first US moon landing for over 50 years is due today
If all goes to plan, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft will touch down at 5.30pm ET. (WP $)
+ Here’s how you can watch it. (NYT $)
2 ChatGPT had a meltdown yesterday
Which is not necessarily worrying in itself… but it isn’t great that we have no idea why. (Ars Technica)
+ Gab’s racist chatbots have been trained to deny the Holocaust. (Wired $)
+ Soon, we might be using AI to do all sorts of tasks for us. (NPR)
3 You can buy Vision Pro headsets in Russia
Two years after Apple quit the country. (NBC)
4 Google is racing to fix a new “overly woke” AI-powered tool
It was returning women and people of color when asked to produce images of America’s founding fathers, for example. (BBC)
+ It’s pausing the ability for Gemini AI to generate images until it’s fixed the issue. (The Verge)
+ These new tools let you see for yourself how biased AI image models are. (MIT Technology Review)
+ How it feels to be sexually objectified by an AI. (MIT Technology Review)
5 American winters are getting warm
They’re also getting shorter, and less predictable. (Insider $)
