Inside the US government’s brilliantly boring websites
The US Digital Service (USDS) was set up “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and...
World
Job title of the future: Space debris engineer
Engineering the ins and outs: Step one in reducing orbital clutter—or, colloquially, space trash—is designing spacecraft that safely leave space...
Puzzle Corner history
When Allan Gottlieb ’67 began editing the Puzzle Corner column in 1966, he was a junior at MIT, majoring in...
Depression is different for women. One-size-fits-all drugs aren’t helping.
Chen’s research suggests it doesn’t have to be that way. She investigates the interaction between sex differences, stress, and mental...
Stress test
Being one of those few women was not easy. In the 1960s and ’70s, when she continued at MIT for...
Artificial reefs could protect coastlines and marine life
What they propose is a series of vertical cylinders, each surrounded by four long, rudder-like slats. The engineers found that...
SuperLimbs for astronauts
It’s hard not to laugh at NASA’s blooper reel of astronauts falling and bouncing in slow motion on the moon....
Fighting fatphobia
Unshrinking joins the growing literature on anti-fat bias, including the work of sociologist Sabrina Strings, whose book Fearing the Black...
Synthesia’s hyperrealistic deepfakes will soon have full bodies
“It’s very impressive. No one else is able to do that,” says Jack Saunders, a researcher at the University of...
Roundtables: The Future of AI Games
The Future of AI GamesSpeakers: Niall Firth, executive editor, and Allison Arieff, editorial director Generative AI is coming for games...
The Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and using math to shape wood
1 Big Tech firms are going all-in on experimental clean energy projectsDue to the fact AI is so horribly polluting....
Meet the architect creating wood structures that shape themselves
Instead of viewing these natural tendencies as liabilities, Achim Menges, an architect and professor at the University of Stuttgart in...
The Download: replacing animal testing, and underwater drones
Animal studies are notoriously bad at identifying human treatments. Around 95% of the drugs developed through animal research fail in...
Should social media come with a health warning?
Other studies have found that social media has no effect on mental health. In a study published last year, Plackett...
Is this the end of animal testing?
Shuler had hoped to develop a computer model of a multi-organ system, but there were too many unknowns. The living...
How underwater drones could shape a potential Taiwan-China conflict
The report’s authors detail a number of ways that use of drones in any South China Sea conflict would differ...
The Download: playing games with AI
To make them feel alive, open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are inhabited by vast crowds of computer-controlled characters....
How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play
Inworld wants to make this type of interaction more polished. It’s offering a product for AAA game studios in which...
The Download: video-generating AI, and Meta’s voice cloning watermarks
You may not be familiar with Kuaishou, but this Chinese company just hit a major milestone: It’s released the first...
I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China
The short-video platform, which has over 600 million active users, announced the new tool on June 6. It’s called Kling....