What I learned from the UN’s “AI for Good” summit
The conference featured lots of robots (including one that dispenses wine), but what I liked most of all was how...
World
The Download: MDMA for PTSD, and Boeing’s rearranged space flight
MDMA has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. But now, this potent mind-altering drug is...
What’s next for MDMA
However, for drugs that carry a risk of serious side effects, the FDA can add a risk evaluation and mitigation...
The Download: Google’s AI Overviews nightmare, and improving search and rescue drones
When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google...
Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong
In the case of AI Overviews’ recommendation of a pizza recipe that contains glue—drawing from a joke post on Reddit—it’s...
What’s next for bird flu vaccines
Most of the flu virus used in vaccines is grown in eggs, but there are alternatives. The seasonal flu vaccine...
AI-directed drones could help find lost hikers faster
In virtual testing, Ewers’ algorithm beat both of those approaches in two key measures; the distance a drone would have...
The Download: the future of electroceuticals, and bigger EVs
In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor’s office. Research into how the nervous...
Why bigger EVs aren’t always better
There are a lot of reasons to be nervous about the ever-expanding footprint of vehicles, from pedestrian safety and road...
The messy quest to replace drugs with electricity
Starting in the 1990s, research by Linda Watkins, a neuroscientist leading a team at the University of Colorado, Boulder, suggested...
Industry- and AI-focused cloud transformation
“As applications move to the cloud, more and more opportunities are getting unlocked,” says Vinod Mamtani, vice president and general...
AI-readiness for C-suite leaders
Preparing an organization’s data for AI, however, unlocks a new set of challenges and opportunities. This MIT Technology Review Insights...
The Download: the minerals powering our economy, and Chinese companies’ identity crisis
It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial...
The Download: autocorrect’s surprising origins, and how to pre-bunk electoral misinformation
—This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published...
The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete
If Huang Zhenyu’s mastery of a complex alphanumeric code weren’t impressive enough, consider the staggering speed of his performance. He...
The Download: head transplants, and filtering sounds with AI
An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is...
Splashy breakthroughs are exciting, but people with spinal cord injuries need more
What’s exciting to me about this latest study is that the tech gave the participants skills they could use beyond...
That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday.
Aging bypass What is certain is that head transplantation—or body transplant, as some prefer to call it—is a subject of...
Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
That complexity is a problem when AI models need to work in real time in a pair of headphones with...
The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI’s carbon footprint
Quote of the day “The AI revolution starts with Nvidia, and in our view, the AI party is just getting...
