The Download: AI’s gaming prowess, and calculating methane emissions
The news: A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before...
World
Why methane emissions are still a mystery
The key is contrails, thin clouds that planes produce when they fly. Minimizing contrails means less warming, and changing flight...
Methane leaks in the US are worse than we thought
Methane emissions are responsible for nearly a third of the total warming the planet has experienced so far. While there...
An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step toward more useful machines
In training AI systems, games are a good proxy for real-world tasks. “A general game-playing agent could, in principle, learn...
The Download: what social media can teach us about AI
June 2023 Astronomy should, in principle, be a welcoming field for blind researchers. But across the board, science is full...
Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media
The reason for these outcomes is structural. The network effects of tech platforms push a few firms to become dominant,...
The Download: hacking VR headsets, and contrails to cool the planet
How it works: Jets release heat, water vapor, and particulate matter that can produce thin clouds in the sky, known...
Building a data-driven health-care ecosystem
To spark innovation by identifying gaps and pain points in the employer-based health-care system, JPMorgan Chase launched Morgan Health in...
Why we need better defenses against VR cyberattacks
I just published a story about a new kind of security vulnerability discovered by researchers at the University of Chicago. Inspired by...
How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet
For one thing, Barrett says, researchers still need to test, refine, and engineer systems that can reliably predict, with enough...
LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention
Even when the two sentences had the same meaning, the models were more likely to apply adjectives like “dirty,” “lazy,”...
VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack
In the attack, hackers create an app that injects malicious code into the Meta Quest VR system and then launch...
The Download: rise of the multimodal robots, and the SEC’s new climate rules
The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by...
An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans
The new model, called RFM-1, was trained on years of data collected from Covariant’s small fleet of item-picking robots that...
The SEC’s new climate rules were a missed opportunity to accelerate corporate action
Investor efforts to evaluate carbon emissions, decarbonization plans, and climate risks through ESG (environmental, social, and governance) rating schemes have...
The Download: organoid uses, and open source voting machines
How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections While vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord,...
A plan to bring down drug prices could threaten America’s technology boom
All told, the law sparked a national innovation renaissance that continues to this day. In 2002, the Economist dubbed it...
The many uses of mini-organs
An ultrasound, for example, might reveal that a fetus’s kidneys are smaller than they should be, but absent a glaring...
How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections
Back in Concord, Adida appeared to be persuasive to the public at large — or at least those invested enough...
The Download: hydropower’s rocky path ahead, and how to reverse falling birth rates
Hydropower is one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity.But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short...
