The Download: mining metals with plants, and our dystopian future
Nickel may not grow on trees—but there’s a chance it could someday be mined using plants. Many plants naturally soak...
World
How plants could mine metals from the soil
Metals like nickel, crucial for the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, are in high demand. But building new mines...
Integrating security from code to cloud
“Open source is critical,” says David Harmon, director of software engineering for AMD. “It provides an environment of collaboration and...
The Download: greenhouse gases, and how AI could affect inequality
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is used in high-voltage equipment on the grid. It’s also, somewhat inconveniently, a monster greenhouse gas.Greenhouse gases...
A brief guide to the greenhouse gases driving climate change
Greenhouse gases are those that trap heat in the atmosphere. SF6 and other fluorinated gases can be thousands of times...
The Download: climate tipping point alarms, and AI’s vision of the 3028 Olympics
If you can’t wait until then, we’ll reveal our Innovator of the Year during a live broadcast on LinkedIn on...
The UK is building an alarm system for climate tipping points
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will announce today that it’s seeking proposals to work on systems for two...
Coming soon: Our 2024 list of Innovators Under 35
MIT Technology Review has published its Innovators Under 35 list since 1999. The first edition was created for our 100th...
What this futuristic Olympics video says about the state of generative AI
With each shot requiring a new set of prompts, it’s also hard to instill a sense of continuity throughout a...
The Download: election tech fears, and AI for teachers
—Felix M. Simon is a research fellow in AI and News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism;...
Here’s how ed-tech companies are pitching AI to teachers
But this year, more and more educational technology companies are pitching schools on a different use of AI. Rather than...
AI’s impact on elections is being overblown
Concerns about AI and democracy, and particularly elections, are warranted. The use of AI can perpetuate and amplify existing social...
The Download: how to prove you’re human, and replacing the grid’s gas
1 X is a lot quieter without its Brazilian usersThe extremely online nation ran many of X’s most popular fan...
How “personhood credentials” could help prove you’re a human online
Martin Tschammer, head of security at startup Synthesia, which creates AI-generated hyperrealistic deepfakes, says he agrees with the principle driving...
The race to replace the powerful greenhouse gas that underpins the power grid
Despite their relatively small contributions so far, emissions of the gas are ticking up, and the growth rate has been...
The Download: monkey names, and smart masks for health monitoring
The news: Do animals have names? It seems so, after new research appears to have discovered that small monkeys called...
A new way to build neural networks could make AI more understandable
The simplification, studied in detail by a group led by researchers at MIT, could make it easier to understand why...
How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals
Some similar research tactics were reported earlier this year by Mickey Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher, now at Cornell University, who...
A new smart mask analyzes your breath to monitor your health
“The biggest challenge has always been collecting real-time samples. This problem has been solved. That's a paradigm shift,” says Rajan...
A prosthetic leg that feels like a real body part
Getting the neural interface hooked up to a prosthetic takes two steps. First is surgery involving the portions of muscle...
