The return of pneumatic tubes
By the 1960s, pneumatic tubes were becoming standard in health care. As a hospital administrator explained in the January 1960...
World
Meta has created a way to watermark AI-generated speech
However, there are some big caveats. Meta says it has no plans yet to apply the watermarks to AI-generated audio...
Scaling green hydrogen technology for the future
Thyssenkrupp nucera has entered into a strategic partnership with the renowned German research institute Fraunhofer IKTS to move the technology...
The Download: AI’s limitations
The World Health Organization’s new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. The virtual avatar named SARAH,...
Why artists are becoming less scared of AI
This all should be reassuring news for any creative people worried that they could lose their job to a computer...
Why does AI hallucinate?
To guess a word, the model simply runs its numbers. It calculates a score for each word in its vocabulary...
The Download: artificial surf pools, and unfunny AI
For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. While...
The cost of building the perfect wave
Surf pools’ proponents frequently point to the far larger amount of water golf courses consume to argue that opposing the...
What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines
“If you make something that has a broad appeal to everyone, it ends up being nobody’s favorite thing,” says Mirowski.The...
The Download: milk beyond cows, and geoengineering’s funding boom
The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk...
This London non-profit is now one of the biggest backers of geoengineering research
“A lot of people are recognizing the obvious,” says Douglas MacMartin, a senior research associate in mechanical and aerospace engineering...
Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows
At Alpine Bio, a biotech company in San Francisco (also known as Nobell Foods), researchers have engineered soybeans to produce...
These board games want you to beat climate change
In late 2023, Catan Studios announced that it would be releasing a version of its game called New Energies, focused...
How to opt out of Meta’s AI training
Internet data scraping is one of the biggest fights in AI right now. Tech companies argue that anything on the...
The Download: the rise of gamification, and carbon dioxide storage
It’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter...
Why we need to shoot carbon dioxide thousands of feet underground
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) tech has two main steps (as you might guess from the name). First, carbon dioxide...
How gamification took over the world
For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to...
The Download: Apple’s AI plans, and a carbon storage boom
At its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, Apple for the first time unveiled its vision for supercharging its product lineup...
How Gogoro’s swap-and-go scooter batteries can strengthen the grid
“We started with the thesis of how smart energy, through portability and connectivity, can enable many use case scenarios,” Luke...
The world’s on the verge of a carbon storage boom
“Not taking this seriously risks potentially trillions of dollars and billions of tonnes of emissions, not to mention the trust...
