Author: zppiot

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week, we’re acknowledging a special birthday. It’s 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person’s brain. The finding was revolutionary. It helped people understand that epilepsy was a neurological disorder as opposed to a personality trait, for one thing (yes, really). The fundamentals of EEG have not changed much over the last century—scientists and doctors still put electrodes on people’s heads to try to work…

According to the group, an open-source AI system can be used for any purpose without securing permission, and researchers should be able to inspect its components and study how the system works. It should also be possible to modify the system for any purpose—including to change its output—and to share it with others to use, with or without modifications, for any purpose. In addition, the standard attempts to define a level of transparency for a given model’s training data, source code, and weights.  The previous lack of an open-source standard presented a problem. Although we know that the decisions of…

Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by legal scholars. But advancing technology could render the embryo issue moot. New ways of adding CRISPR, the revolutionary gene editing tool, to the bodies of people already born could let them easily receive changes as well. It’s possible that in 125 years, many people will be the beneficiaries of multiple rare, but useful, gene mutations currently found in only small segments of the population. These could protect us against common diseases and infections, but eventually they could also…

At the Innovative Genomics Institute, a center established by Doudna in Berkeley, California, researchers anticipate that as delivery improves, they will be able to create a kind of CRISPR conveyor belt that, with a few clicks of a mouse, allows doctors to design gene-editing treatments for any serious inherited condition that afflicts children, including immune deficiencies so uncommon that no company will take them on. “This is the trend in my field. We can capitalize on human genetics quite quickly, and the scope of the editable human will rapidly expand,” says Urnov, who works at the institute. “We know that…

Keeping up with climate   For a look inside what it’s really like to drive a hydrogen car, this reporter rented one and took it on a road trip, speaking to drivers along the way. (The Verge) → Here’s why electric vehicles are beating out hydrogen-powered ones in the race to clean up transportation. (MIT Technology Review) As temperatures climb, we’ve got a hot steel problem on our hands. Heat can cause steel, as well as other materials like concrete, to expand or warp, which can cause problems from slowing down trains to reducing the amount of electricity that power lines…

In one reactor, shown here at a recent MTU demonstration, some deconstructed plastics are subject to high heat and the absence of oxygen — a process called pyrolysis.KADEN STALEY/MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY That uncertainty was key. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, supports high-risk, high-reward projects. This means there’s a good chance that any individual effort will end in failure. But when a project does succeed, it has the potential to be a true scientific breakthrough. “Our goal is to go from disbelief, like, ‘You’re kidding me. You want to do what?’ to ‘You know, that might be actually…

But if you press harder, you may notice a second way of sensing the touch: through your knuckles and other joints. That sensation–a feeling of torque, to use the robotics jargon–is exactly what the researchers have re-created in their new system. Their robotic arm contains six sensors, each of which can register even incredibly small amounts of pressure against any section of the device. After precisely measuring the amount and angle of that force, a series of algorithms can then map where a person is touching the robot and analyze what exactly they’re trying to communicate. For example, a person…

1 Google will face a trial claiming that it misled Chrome users The lawsuit alleges that the browser collected user data without their permission. (WP $)+ The case was originally dismissed in 2022, but was reversed on appeal. (The Verge) 2 OpenAI will let companies customize its most powerful modelBusinesses can fine-tune GPT-4o to include their own data for the first time. (Bloomberg $)+ OpenAI has also hashed out a deal with media giant Condé Nast. (Wired $)+ How to fine-tune AI for prosperity. (MIT Technology Review) 3 CrowdStrike has had a rough monthThe cyber security firm has accused its rivals…

Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth’s surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn’t really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever wider array of material inputs to sustain it. So for nearly as long as we’ve systematically extracted these substances, we’ve been trying to predict how long they will be able to meet our demand. How much can we pump from a well, or wrest from…

Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from financial investments to where to spend your next vacation.But for economists, the most critical question around our obsession with AI is how the fledgling technology will (or won’t) boost overall productivity, and if it does, how long it will take. Can the technology lead to renewed prosperity after years of stagnant economic growth? Read the full story. —David Rotman Fighting for a future beyond the climate crisis When it comes to climate breakdown…

Less making and unmaking are also the solution—less making of what we do not need and more unmaking of harmful machines and ideas. The sprawling patrimony of bad ideas—that Homo sapiens reigns supreme over nature and so is miraculously independent of it, in defiance of ecology and physics; that market capitalism is the unassailable apogee of civilization and ongoing expansion the correct communal goal, including endless human procreation cheered on by neoliberal economists who whinge over declining birth rates in industrialized nations—should be dismantled as steadily as the destructive machines.  Neither the United States nor the world community has mechanisms…

Google’s James Manyika says AI’s impact on the economy is potentially huge but will depend on how quickly business users adopt and deploy the technology.ARNO MIKKOR/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS The call for policies is a recognition of the immense task ahead, and an acknowledgment that even giant AI companies like Google can’t do it alone. It will take widespread investments in infrastructure and additional innovations by governments and businesses. Companies ranging from small startups to large corporations will need to take the foundation models, such as Google’s Gemini, and “tailor them for their own applications in their own environments in their own…

Lately, that’s been changing. The agency recently granted Amazon’s Prime Air program approval to fly drones beyond the visual line of sight from its pilots in parts of Texas. The FAA has also granted similar waivers to hundreds of police departments around the country, which are now able to fly drones miles away, much to the ire of privacy advocates.  However, while the FAA doling out more waivers is notable, there’s a much bigger change coming in less than a month. It promises to be the most significant drone decision in decades, and one that will decide just how many…

Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today’s organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay—2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications to be distributed across still more locations in the next two years. Scott Sinclair, practice director at Enterprise Strategy Group, outlines the problem: “Data is becoming more distributed. Apps are becoming more distributed. The typical organization has multiple data centers, multiple cloud providers, and umpteen edge…

There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken on a digital camera in 2013, when she was almost one, but now lives on Google Photos.  But what if, one day, Google ceased to function? What if I lost my treasured photos forever? For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store…

Scott now works as “free-range archivist and software curator” with the Internet Archive, an online library started in 1996 by the internet pioneer Brewster Kahle to save and store information that would otherwise be lost.  As a society, we’re creating so much new stuff that we must always delete more things than we did the year before. Over the past two decades, the Internet Archive has amassed a gigantic library of material scraped from around the web, including that GeoCities content. It doesn’t just save purely digital artifacts, either; it also has a vast collection of digitized books that it…