How to break free of Spotify’s algorithm
“Spotify’s music database has a very rich set of various parameters, markup, and categories to classify music in a very...
World
What’s next for drones
These developments raise a number of questions: Are drones safe enough to be flown in dense neighborhoods and cities? Is...
This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little
Hébert declined to describe the session, which he said was not recorded “out of respect for those who preferred discretion.”...
Aging hits us in our 40s and 60s. But well-being doesn’t have to fall off a cliff.
For the study, Michael Snyder at Stanford University and his colleagues collected a vast amount of biological data from 108...
The Download: facial recognition for migrant children, and Japan’s megaquake
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at...
What Japan’s “megaquake” warning really tells us
Crucially, this advisory is not a warning that a megaquake is imminent. It means: “be ready for when the big...
The US government is still spending big on climate
For example, in December 2023 we learned how restrictions in the EV tax credits will affect vehicles with components made...
Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today
DAVID BISKUP If getting from point A to point B is becoming difficult, maybe you can travel without going anywhere....
DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children “down to the infant”
As Boyd explained at a conference in June, the key question for OBIM is, “If we pick up someone from...
The Download: a new AI risk database, and studying Jupiter’s mysterious moon
What’s new: Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive....
A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong
These findings may have implications for how we evaluate AI, as we currently tend to focus on ensuring a model...
The Download: greener steel, and join us for EmTech 2024
+ Riki Banerjee, CTO of brain-computer interface company Synchron, will give us an inside look at the future of minimally...
How the auto industry could steer the world toward green steel
“The relatively high value of cars, especially of premium brands, also means they can absorb the short-term green premium of...
The Download: how we’re using AI, and Trump’s campaign hack
When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools...
Here’s how people are actually using AI
Two years on, most of those productivity gains haven’t materialized. And we’ve seen something peculiar and slightly unexpected happen: People...
The Download: robotic table tennis, and future space habitats
What’s new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the...
Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis
The system is far from perfect. Although the table tennis bot was able to beat all beginner-level human opponents it...
This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit
There’s another way to make something compact for launch: inflate it in orbit. NASA has already done this—its experimental BEAM...
Watch a video showing what happens in our brains when we think
This is what the activity looked like: “This is basically the brain thinking,” says Rapoport. “You’re seeing the physical manifestation...
Advancing to adaptive cloud
A complex multi-cloud deployment can make it difficult for IT teams to perform mission-critical tasks, such as applying security patches,...
