Heads in the game
The Argentina v. France final of the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar was shaping up to be one of the most epic games in soccer history. With just 12 minutes remaining in the extra t…
Opening a door to mental-health help online
Rob Morris, SM ’09, PhD ’15, didn’t know where to turn when he first felt symptoms of depression as a teenager: “I had no exposure to healthy coping strategies. I had no vocabular…
The Download: the future of chipmaking and Anthropic’s government clash
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The $400 million machine powering the fut…
The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking
Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine. It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleami…
Elephant alert! AI warning systems aim to avoid deadly clashes
India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Fore…
Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer una…
The Download: record-breaking subsea tunnels and flexible data centers
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the world’s deepest and longest su…
Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel
It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a …
The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it broke through a bottl…
A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs
Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back lar…
Brain-computer interface trials are taking off
This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell—a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paral…
The inevitable weakness of metrics
There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail …
The Download: a new hunt for dark matter and Kenya’s case for going solar
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The search for dark matter has been blown…
Geoengineering still faces major practical challenges
Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounc…
The search for dark matter has been blown wide open
Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky sh…
The Download: a reality check for geoengineering and the science of interoception
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering ge…
Hacking the atmosphere: Geoengineering gets a reality check
Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-looking aircraft with massive wings stretching ou…
Entrepreneurs in Nairobi make the case for going solar
Most of Kenya’s power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering u…
Exclusive eBook: How AI is becoming the next military advisor
A collection of stories about how militaries are using AI models to make decisions. This subscriber-only eBook is a package of six stories that were originally published in MIT Te…
The Download: the first brain implant power user and South Korea’s AI obsession
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This man with ALS is the first “power use…
Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex.
At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so…
Why do South Koreans love AI so much?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 1…
This man with ALS is “the first power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak
Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost three years. Harrell, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is paralyzed, first used his brain…
The Download: cutting AC emissions, and nature’s drug designer
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These new solid-state ACs promise a cool …