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...
World
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...
Emissions hit a record high in 2023. Blame hydropower.
But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major way, with generation dropping by a record...
The Download: AI comics, and US tensions with China over EVs
—Will Douglas Heaven Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about...
Chinese EVs have entered center stage in US-China tensions
Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the security risks posed by Chinese-made smart cars, which could “collect...
I used generative AI to turn my story into a comic—and you can too
The narrator sits on the floor and eats breakfast with the cats. LORE MACHINE / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN After more than...
The Download: rise of the robots, and what organoids can teach us
—This is an excerpt from a new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT...
Nobody knows how AI works
Recently we’ve seen some AI failures on a far bigger scale. In the latest (hilarious) gaffe, Google’s Gemini refused to...
The robots are coming. And that’s a good thing.
What if we could throw our sight, hearing, touch, and even sense of smell to distant locales and experience these...
Roundtables: The AI Economy
The AI EconomySpeakers: Mat Honan, Editor in chief and David Rotman, Editor at large There’s no doubt that generative AI...
