What are AI agents?
Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra,...
World
AI lie detectors are better than humans at spotting lies
This reliance can shape our behavior. Normally, people tend to assume others are telling the truth. That was borne out...
The Download: recycling clothing, and fish-friendly hydropower
The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or...
What new hydropower tech says about climate action
The presentation was from our ClimateTech event in 2022, when we invited scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in fields from fusion...
A polyester-dissolving process could make modern clothing recyclable
Nevertheless, the process could be difficult to scale, says Bryan Vogt, a chemical engineer at Penn State University, who was...
The Download: listening robots, and Google’s AI emissions
We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to...
A way to let robots learn by listening will make them more useful
Researchers at the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab at Stanford University set out to change that. They first built a...
The Download: mind-controlled prosthetics, and the price of AI training data
What’s new: When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most...
AI companies are finally being forced to cough up for training data
But there’s a problem. AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and many websites and data set owners...
People can move this bionic leg just by thinking about it
Getting the neural interface hooked up to a prosthetic takes two steps. First, patients undergo surgery. Following a lower leg...
The Download: fish-safe hydropower, and fixing space debris
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Apple is planning to...
How fish-safe hydropower technology could keep more renewables on the grid
Since many of those facilities were started up, there have been significant changes to environmental requirements, and some plants may...
The Download: AI video games’ research potential, and US government website redesigns
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Trump-Biden debate conspiracies are...
How AI video games can help reveal the mysteries of the human mind
Spiers himself is interested in learning how people hunt, whether for food, clothes, or a missing pet. “We still use...
The Download: the future of music AI, and climate tech funding
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The Supreme Court ruled the White...
These climate tech companies just got $60 million
The challenge in cleaning up the process lies, at least in part, in the fact that lava-hot temperatures are required...
Training AI music models is about to get very expensive
Indeed, the tools will block a request if it names an artist. But the record labels allege that the safeguards...
The Download: Introducing the Play issue
To understand why, you need to consider the potential for conflict between China and Taiwan, and the fact that the...
Why China’s dominance in commercial drones has become a global security matter
Last week, my colleague James O’Donnell wrote about a report by the think tank Center for a New American Security...
Learning from catastrophe
Engineers are renowned clock-problem solvers. They’re also notorious for treating every problem like a clock. Increasing specialization and cultural expectations...