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.

Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.

But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all. Read the full story.

—Edd Gent

What’s next for reproductive rights in the US

This week, it wasn’t just the future president of the US that was on the ballot. Ten states also voted on abortion rights.

Two years ago, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a legal decision that protected the right to abortion. Since then, abortion bans have been enacted in multiple states, and millions of people in the US have lost access to local clinics.

Now, some states are voting to extend and protect access to abortion. Missouri, a state that has long restricted access, even voted to overturn its ban. But it’s not all good news for proponents of reproductive rights. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Black Americans received racist texts threatening them with slavery 
Some of the messages claim to be from Trump supporters or the Trump administration. (WP $)
+ What Trump’s last tenure as president can teach us about what’s coming. (New Yorker $)
+ The January 6 rioters are hoping for early pardons and release. (Wired $)

2 China is shoring up its economy to the tune of $1.4 trillion
It’s bracing itself for increased trade tensions with a Trump-governed US. (FT $)
+ The country’s chip industry has a plan too. (Reuters)
+ We’re witnessing the return of Trumponomics. (Economist $)
+ Here’s how the tech markets have reacted to his reelection. (Insider $)

3 How crypto came out on top
Trump is all in, even if he previously dismissed it as a scam. (Bloomberg $)
+ Enthusiasts are hoping for less regulation and more favorable legislation. (Time $)

4 A weight-loss drug contributed to the death of a nurse in the UK
Susan McGowan took two doses of Mounjaro in the weeks before her death. (BBC)
+ It’s the first known death to be officially linked to the drug in the UK. (The Guardian)

5 An academic’s lawsuit against Meta has been dismissed
Ethan Zuckerman wanted protection against the firm for building an unfollowing tool. (NYT $)

6 How the Republicans won online
The right-wing influencer ecosystem is extremely powerful and effective. (The Atlantic $)
+ The left doesn’t really have an equivalent network. (Vox)
+ X users are considering leaving the platform in protest (again.) (Slate $)

7 What does the future of America’s public health look like?
Noted conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer RFK Jr could be in charge soon. (NY Mag $)
+ Letting Kennedy “go wild on health” is not a great sign. (Forbes $)
+ His war on fluoride in drinking water is already underway. (Politico)

8 An AI-created portrait of Alan Turing has sold for $1 million
Just… why? (The Guardian)
+ Why artists are becoming less scared of AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How to harness energy from space
A relay system of transmitters could help to ping it back to Earth. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ The quest to figure out farming on Mars. (MIT Technology Review)

10 AI-generated videos are not interesting
That’s according to the arbiters of what is and isn’t interesting over at Reddit. (404 Media)
+ What’s next for generative video. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“That’s petty, right? How much does one piece of fruit per day cost?”

—A former Intel employee reacts to the news the embattled company is planning to restore its free coffee privileges for its staff—but not free fruit, Insider reports.

The big story

Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML

December 2023

Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences. 

There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code. 

Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. And the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics—it’s about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. Read the full story. 

—Tiffany Ng

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Sandwiches through the ages is a pretty great subject for a book.
+ Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon are getting the band back together! (kind of)
+ Instant mashed potatoes have a bad reputation. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
+ Here’s what an actual robot apocalypse would look like (thanks Will!)

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.

Trump’s win is a tragic loss for climate progress

—James Temple

Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change.

The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade. 

It comes at a moment when the world can’t afford to waste time, with nations far off track from any emissions trajectories that would keep our ecosystems stable and our communities safe. 

Trump could push the globe into even more dangerous terrain, by defanging President Joe Biden’s signature climate laws, exacerbating the dangers of heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, and famine and increase deaths and disease from air pollution. And this time round, I fear it will be far worse. Read the full story.

The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policy

The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, we’re facing a period where things are going to be very different. This is what the next four years will mean for the climate fight. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. If you want to stay up-to-date with all the latest goings-on in climate and energy, sign up.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tech leaders are lining up to congratulate Donald Trump 
In a bid to placate the famously volatile President-elect. (FT $)
+ Many are seeking to rebuild bridges that have fractured since his last tenure. (CNBC)
+ Particularly Jeff Bezos, who has had a fractious relationship with Trump. (NY Mag $)
+ Expect less regulation, more trade upheaval, and a whole lot more Elon Musk. (WP $)

2 Election deniers have gone mysteriously silent
It’s almost as if their claims of fraud were baseless in the first place. (NYT $)
+ It looks like influencer marketing campaigns really did change minds. (Wired $)

3 How Elon Musk is likely to slash US government spending
He has a long history of strategic cost-cutting in his own businesses. (WSJ $) 
+ His other ventures are on course for favorable government treatment. (Reuters)
+ It’s easy to forget that Musk claims to have voted Democrat in 2020 and 2016. (WP $)

4 Google could be spared being broken up
Trump has expressed skepticism about the antitrust proposal. (Reuters)
+ It’s far from the only reverse-ferret we’re likely to see. (Economist $)

5 How progressive groups are planning for a future under Trump
Alliances are meeting today to form networks of resources. (Fast Company $)

6 Australia wants to ban under-16s from accessing social media
But it’s not clear how it could be enforced. (The Guardian)
+ The proposed law could come into power as soon as next year. (BBC)
+ Roblox has made sweeping changes to its child safety policies. (Bloomberg $)
+ Child online safety laws will actually hurt kids, critics say. (MIT Technology Review)

7 It looks like OpenAI just paid $10 million for a url
Why ChatGPT when you could just chat.com? (The Verge)
+ How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Women in the US are exploring swearing off men altogether
Social media interest in a Korean movement advocating for a man-free life is soaring. (WP $)

9 Gen Z can’t get enough of manifesting
TikTok is teaching them how to will their way to a better life. (Insider $)

10 Tattoo artists are divided over whether they should use AI 
AI-assisted designs have been accused of lacking soul. (WSJ $)

Quote of the day

“Don’t worry, I won’t judge — much. Maybe just an eye roll here and there.”

—Lily, a sarcastic AI teenage avatar and star of language learning app Duolingo, greets analysts tuning into the company’s earning call, Insider reports.

The big story

The great commercial takeover of low-Earth orbit

April 2024

NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030. 

The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body. 

To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. They’re already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow. Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Who doesn’t love a smeared makeup look?
+ Time to snuggle up: it’s officially Nora Ephron season.
+ Walking backwards—don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it. It’s surprisingly good for you.
+ Feeling stressed? Here’s how to calm your mind in times of trouble.

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.

Life-seeking, ice-melting robots could punch through Europa’s icy shell

At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en route to its target: Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft gets there, it will conduct dozens of close flybys in order to determine what that ocean is like and, crucially, where it might be hospitable to life.

Europa Clipper is still years away from its destination—it is not slated to reach the Jupiter system until 2030. But that hasn’t stopped engineers and scientists from working on what would come next if the results are promising: a mission capable of finding evidence of life itself. Read the full story.

— Robin George Andrews

GMOs could reboot chestnut trees

Living as long as a thousand years, the American chestnut tree once dominated parts of the Eastern forest canopy, with many Native American nations relying on them for food. But by 1950, the tree had largely succumbed to a fungal blight probably introduced by Japanese chestnuts.

As recently as last year, it seemed the 35-year effort to revive the American chestnut might grind to a halt. Now, American Castanea, a new biotech startup, has created more than 2,500 transgenic chestnut seedlings— likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. Read the full story.

—Anya Kamenetz

This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto

In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what crypto has to do with conservation.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, we’ll be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. You’ll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.

We’re publishing a new story each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, including some taken from our most recent print magazine. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Donald Trump has won the US Presidential election 
He’s the first president with a criminal conviction and two impeachments under his belt. (WP $)
+ The crypto industry is rejoicing at the news as bitcoin leapt to a record high. (NYT $)
+ In fact, a blockchain entrepreneur won the Ohio Senate race. (CNBC)
+ What comes next is anyone’s guess. (The Atlantic $)

2 Trump’s victory is music to Elon Musk’s ears
He’s been promised a new role as head of a new Department of Government Efficiency. (FT $)
+ Musk is being sued over his $1 million giveaways during the election campaign. (Reuters)
+ The billionaire used X as his own personal megaphone to stir up dissent. (The Atlantic $)

3 Abortion rights are now under further threat 
Particularly pills sent by mail. (Vox)
+ Trump’s approach to discussing abortion has been decidedly mixed. (Bloomberg $)

4 Trump could be TikTok’s last hope for survival in the US
Now he’s stopped threatening to ban it, that is. (The Information $)

5 Perplexity is approaching a $9 billion valuation
Thanks to the company’s fourth round of funding this year. (WSJ $)+ Microsoft has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring the AI search startup. (The Information $)

6 The iPhone could be Apple’s last major cash cow
It’s acknowledged that its other devices may never reach the same heady heights. (FT $)
+ Nvidia has overtaken Apple as the world’s largest company. (Bloomberg $)

7 The Mozilla Foundation is getting rid of its advocacy division
The team prioritized fighting for a free and open web. (TechCrunch)

8 China plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid
Following in the footsteps of America’s successful 2022 mission. (Economist $)
+ Watch the moment NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed into an asteroid. (MIT Technology Review)

9 The Vatican’s anime mascot has been co opted into AI porn
That didn’t take long. (404 Media)

10 Gigantic XXL TVs are the gift of the season
It’s cheaper than ever to fit your home out with a jumbotron screen. (CNN)

Quote of the day

“This is what happens when you mess with the crypto army.”

—Crypto twin Cameron Winklevoss celebrates the victory of blockchain entrepreneur Bernie Moreno, new Senator-elect for Ohio, in a post on X.

The big story

How covid conspiracies led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism

August 2024

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that “party drugs” were an “important factor in AIDS.” His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him.

Speaking to the biggest podcast audience in the world, the two men were promoting dangerous and false ideas—ideas that were in fact debunked and thoroughly disproved decades ago.

These comments and others like them add up to a small but unmistakable resurgence in AIDS denialism—a false collection of theories arguing either that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS or that there’s no such thing as HIV at all.

These claims had largely fallen out of favor until the coronavirus arrived. But, following the pandemic, a renewed suspicion of public health figures and agencies is giving new life to ideas that had long ago been pushed to the margins. Read the full story.

—Anna Merlan

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Full Moon Matinee is an amazing crime drama resource on YouTube: complete with some excellent acting courtesy of its host.
+ This is your sign to pick a name and cheer on random strangers during a marathon. I guarantee you’ll make their day!
+ There’s no wrong way to bake a sweet potato, but some ways are better than others.
+ Are you a screen creeper? I know I am.

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.

What do jumping spiders find sexy? How DIY tech is offering insights into the animal mind.

Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists don’t usually face: Your subjects can’t tell you what they’re thinking. 

To get answers from animals, scientists need to come up with creative experiments to learn why they behave the way they do. Sometimes this requires designing and building experimental equipment from scratch. 

These contraptions can range from ingeniously simple to incredibly complex, but all of them are tailored to help answer questions about the lives and minds of specific species. Do honeybees need a good night’s sleep? What do jumping spiders find sexy? Do falcons like puzzles? For queries like these, off-the-shelf gear simply won’t do. Check out these contraptions custom-built by scientists to help them understand the lives and minds of the animals they study. 

—Betsy Mason

This piece is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.

How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents

It’s been a busy few weeks for OpenAI. Alongside updates to its new Realtime API platform, which will allow developers to build apps and voice assistants more quickly, it recently launched ChatGPT search, which allows users to search the internet using the chatbot.

Both developments pave the way for the next big thing in AI: agents. These AI assistants can complete complex chains of tasks, such as booking flights. OpenAI’s strategy is to both build agents itself and allow developers to use its software to build their own agents, and voice will play an important role in what agents will look and feel like.

Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, sat down with Olivier Godement, OpenAI’s head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, last week to hear more about the two big hurdles that need to be overcome before agents can become a reality. Read the full story.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 America is heading to the polls
Here’s how Harris and Trump will attempt to lead the US to tech supremacy. (The Information $)
+ The ‘Stop the Steal’ election denial movement is preparing to contest the vote. (WP $)
+ The muddy final polls suggest it’s still all to play for. (Vox)

2 Abortion rights are on the 2024 ballot
A lack of access to basic health care has led to the deaths of at least four women. (NY Mag $)
+ Nine states will decide whether to guarantee their residents abortion access. (Fortune)
+ If Trump wins he could ban abortion nationwide, even without Congress. (Politico)

3 Inside New York’s election day wargames
Tech, business and policy leaders gathered to thrash out potential risks. (WSJ $)+ Violence runs throughout all aspects of this election cycle. (FT $)

4 Elon Musk’s false and misleading X election posts have billions of views
In fact, they’ve been viewed twice as much as all X’s political ads this year. (CNN)
+ Musk’s decision to hitch himself to Trump may end up backfiring, though. (FT $)

5 Meta will permit the US military to use its AI models
It’s an interesting update to its previous policy, which explicitly banned its use for military purposes. (NYT $)
+ Facebook has kept a low profile during the election cycle. (The Atlantic $)
+ Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The hidden danger of pirated software
It’s not just viruses you should be worried about. (404 Media)

7 Apple is weighing up expanding into smart glasses
Where Meta leads, Apple may follow. (Bloomberg $)
+ The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. (MIT Technology Review)

8 India’s lithium plans may have been a bit too ambitious
Reports of a major lithium reserve appear to have been massively overblown.(Rest of World)
+ Some countries are ending support for EVs. Is it too soon? (MIT Technology Review)

9 Your air fryer could be surveilling you
Household appliances are now mostly smart, and stuffed with trackers. (The Guardian)

10 How to stay sane during election week
Focus on what you can control, and try to let go of what you can’t. (WP $)
+ Here’s how election gurus are planning to cope in the days ahead. (The Atlantic $)
+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“We’re in kind of the ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’ moment of politics and AI, where this intersection allows people to try new things for propaganda.”

—Rachel Tobac, chief executive of ethical hacking company SocialProof Security, tells the Washington Post why a deepfake video of Martin Luther King endorsing Donald Trump is being shared online in the closing hours of the presidential race.

The big story

The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

December 2023

Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share.

They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. But they’re having to navigate an ethical minefield in order to do so. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Move over Moo Deng—Haggis the baby pygmy hippo is the latest internet star!
+ To celebrate the life of the late, great Quincy Jones, check out this sensational interview in which he spills the beans on everything from the Beatles’ musical shortcomings to who shot Kennedy. Thank you for the music, Quincy.
+ The color of the season? Sage green, apparently.
+ Dinosaurs are everywhere, you just need to look for them.

The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers. 

Artificial intelligence could help, by improving the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools. With help from an AI tool, tutors could tap into more experienced teachers’ expertise during virtual tutoring sessions. 

Researchers from Stanford University developed an AI system calledTutor CoPilot on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and integrated it into a platform called FEV Tutor, which connects students with tutors virtually. Tutors and students type messages to one another through a chat interface, and a tutor who needs help explaining how and why a student went wrong can press a button to generate suggestions from Tutor CoPilot. 

The researchers created the model by training GPT-4 on a database of 700 real tutoring sessions in which experienced teachers worked on on one with first- to fifth-grade students on math lessons, identifying the students’ errors and then working with them to correct the errors in such a way that they learned to understand the broader concepts being taught. From this, the model generates responses that tutors can customize to help their online students.

“I’m really excited about the future of human-AI collaboration systems,” says Rose Wang, a PhD student at Stanford University who worked on the project, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed “I think this technology is a huge enabler, but only if it’s designed well.”

The tool isn’t designed to actually teach the students math—instead, it offers tutors helpful advice on how to nudge students toward correct answers while encouraging deeper learning. 

For example, it can suggest that the tutor ask how the student came up with an answer, or propose questions that could point to a different way to solve a problem. 

To test its efficacy, the team examined the interactions of 900 tutors virtually teaching math to 1,787 students between five and 13 years old from historically underserved communities in the US South. Half the tutors had the option to activate Tutor CoPilot, while the other half did not. 

The students whose tutors had access to Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to pass their exit ticket—an assessment of whether a student has mastered a subject—than those whose tutors did not have access to it. (Pass rates were 66% and 62%, respectively.)

The tool works as well as it does because it’s being used to teach relatively basic mathematics, says Simon Frieder, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Oxford, who did not work on the project. “You couldn’t really do a study with much more advanced mathematics at this current point in time,” he says.

The team estimates that the tool could improve student learning at a cost of around $20 per tutor annually to the tutoring provider, which is significantly cheaper than the thousands of dollars it usually takes to train educators in person. 

It has the potential to improve the relationship between novice tutors and their students by training them to approach problems the way experienced teachers do, says Mina Lee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the project.

“This work demonstrates that the tool actually does work in real settings,” she says. “We want to facilitate human connection, and this really highlights how AI can augment human-to-human interaction.”

As a next step, Wang and her colleagues are interested in exploring how well novice tutors remember the teaching methods imparted by Tutor CoPilot. This could help them gain a sense of how long the effects of these kinds of AI interventions might last. They also plan to try to work out which other school subjects or age groups could benefit from such an approach.

“There’s a lot of substantial ways in which the underlying technology can get better,” Wang says. “But we’re not deploying an AI technology willy-nilly without pre-validating it—we want to be sure we’re able to rigorously evaluate it before we actually send it out into the wild. For me, the worst fear is that we’re wasting the students’ time.”

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.

How Wayve’s driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yet

The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm’s cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well, which brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.

As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turns—it’s all different. The move to the US will be a test of Wayve’s technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering.

For the first time, Wayve will go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Will Douglas Heaven, our senior AI editor, visited the company’s office for a ride-along. Read on to find out what he thought.

Kids are learning how to make their own little language models

“This new AI technology—it’s very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more,” says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker.

Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, that helps children understand how AI models work—by getting to build small-scale versions themselves.

The program is a way to introduce the complex concepts that make modern AI models work without droning on about them in a theoretical lecture. Instead, kids can see and build a visualization of the concepts in practice, which helps them get to grips with them. Read the full story.

—Scott J Mulligan

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The Biden administration has outlined its AI plans
For everything from national security to nuclear weapons. (Reuters)
+ It’s banned government agencies from using AI in undemocratic ways. (WP $)
+ But the majority of the proposals won’t come into effect after Biden leaves office. (NYT $)

2 OpenAI’s next major AI model is imminent
Its new flagship model, known as Orion, is slated for release by the end of the year. (The Verge)
+ Miles Brundage, the company’s head of AGI Readiness, is leaving. (Insider $)

3 This crypto gambling site is the 2024 election’s betting phenomenon
Polymarket’s odds are music to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ears. (NYT $)
+ Election betting is seriously big business these days. (Vox)
+ Musk is X’s highest-profile spreader of anti-immigrant conspiracies. (Bloomberg $)

4 Chinese AI video apps are taking America by storm
They’ve stolen a march on their US rivals. (The Information $)
+ I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Why did it take Amazon this long to make a color Kindle?
After 17 years, the e-reader’s technicolor makeover feels long overdue. (Wired $)

6 We’re living in a solar panel boom
They’re affordable, scalable, and everywhere. (The Atlantic $)
+ The race to get next-generation solar technology on the market. (MIT Technology Review)

7 The perils of building a computer in socialist Yugoslavia
An enterprising engineer managed to swerve the country’s import restrictions during the 1980s. (The Guardian)

8 The food industry is coming around to the rise of weight loss drugs
It’s cashing in on patients’ altered dietary needs with new product ranges. (WSJ $)
+ It’s not just obesity the drugs could curb, either. (Economist $)
+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)

9 One Direction fans are finding comfort online
The death of former member Liam Payne is uniting them in grief. (WP $)

10 Silicon Valley is completely obsessed with this video game
But Factorio isn’t just fun—it’s also a pretty valuable teaching tool. (FT $)

Quote of the day

“Did she say ‘turtle marks?’” 

—A TikTok user remarks on why Mexican content creator Delilah Barajas used the word ‘turtle’ instead of ‘torture’ in a bid to circumvent the platform’s ban on contentious terms and topics, Rest of World reports.

 The big story

What happens when you donate your body to science

October 2022

Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures that complain from the trees that surround the Western Carolina University body farm. Her arrival has interrupted their breakfast. George studies human decomposition, and part of decomposing is becoming food. Scavengers are welcome.

George, a forensic anthropologist, places the body of a donor in the Forensic Osteology Research Station—known as the FOREST. This is Enclosure One, where donors decompose naturally above ground. Nearby is Enclosure Two, where researchers study bodies that have been buried in soil. She is the facility’s curator, and monitors the donors—sometimes for years—as they become nothing but bones.

In the US, about 20,000 people or their families donate their bodies to scientific research and education each year. Whatever the reason, the decision becomes a gift. Western Carolina’s FOREST is among the places where watchful caretakers know that the dead and the living are deeply connected, and the way you treat the first reflects how you treat the second. Read the full story.

—Abby Ohlheiser

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Haunted houses can teach us about a lot more than just the past.
+ Sleepwalking is seriously strange.
+ Las Vegas has always been a weird and wonderful place, but is it weirder than ever? Time to find out.
+ As we get closer to November, it’s time to crack out this all-time classic.

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.

Introducing: The AI Hype Index

There’s no denying that the AI industry moves fast. Each week brings a bold new announcement, product release, or lofty claim that pushes the bounds of what we previously thought was possible. Separating AI fact from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Take a look at what made the cut.

The inaugural AI Hype Index makes an appearance in the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review, which is all about the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.

Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open source

What’s new: Google DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text and is making it available open source. The tool, called SynthID, is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. 

Why it matters: Watermarks have emerged as an important tool to help people determine when something is AI generated, which could help counter harms such as misinformation. But they’re not an all-purpose solution. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Why agriculture is a tough climate problem to solve

It’s a real problem, from a climate perspective at least, that burgers taste good, and so do chicken sandwiches and cheese and just about anything that has butter in it. It’s often very hard to persuade people to change their eating habits.

We could all stand to make some choices that could reduce the emissions associated with the food on our plates. But we’re also going to need to innovate around people’s love for burgers—and fix our food system not just in the kitchen, but on the farm. 

Our climate team James Temple and Casey Crownhart spoke with leaders from agricultural companies Pivot Bio and Rumin8 at our recent Roundtables online event, to hear from them about the problems they’re trying to solve and how they’re doing it. Read the full story.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Russia is conducting a viral disinformation campaign to smear Kamala Harris
Microsoft researchers fear they’re encouraging violent protests after election day. (AP News)
+ Donald Trump and Harris are duking it out on TikTok for the Gen Z vote. (FT $)
+ Marjorie Taylor Greene has been spreading falsehoods about voting machines. (NYT $)

2 Scientific racism is widespread in AI search engine results
Debunked eugenics claims are surfacing on Google, Microsoft and Perplexity’s engines (Wired $)
+ Perplexity wants to ink deals with news publishers in the wake of a legal case. (WSJ $)
+ Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The Federal Aviation Administration has officially approved air taxis 
It’s the first new aircraft category to get the green light in close to 80 years. (WP $)

4 Apple is dramatically cutting production of its Vision Pro headset
And it could cease assembly altogether from next month. (The Information $)
+ Apple recently announced its first film specifically for the device. (Variety $)

5 Nvidia has launched a new Hindi language AI model 
Business is booming for the chip giant in India, which is hungry for AI. (Reuters)
+ This company is building AI for African languages. (MIT Technology Review)

6 China’s Great Firewall now extends to space
Its satellite-delivered broadband will come with a side order of censorship. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now. (MIT Technology Review)

7 California has a plan for its wood waste
But the well-intentioned projects are up against a major problem.(Bloomberg $)
+ Saving nature doesn’t appear to be a national priority for the USA. (Vox)
+ The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Goodbye passwords, hello passcodes
They’re more secure, sure, but are they easier to remember? (Vox)
+ The end of passwords. (MIT Technology Review)

9 These robots are grape-picking pros
The harvest window is very short, and machines could help. (Economist $)

10 Vinted is looking to sell more than just clothes
Watch your back, eBay. (FT $)

Quote of the day

“It’s like when an artist has the concept of a painting in their mind, but it can’t be realized unless they have the paints and brushes to make it.”

—G Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of consultancy firm TechInsights, explains why the global semiconductor industry is so reliant on advanced design software to create the latest and greatest chips the Financial Times.

The big story

These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change

April 2024

For millennia, during Finland’s blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved cave-like dens to shelter from the elements and raise newborns.

But in recent decades, these snowdrifts have failed to form in sufficient numbers, as climate change has brought warming temperatures and rain in place of snow, decimating the seal population.

For the last 11 years, humans have stepped in to construct what nature can no longer reliably provide. Human-made snowdrifts, built using handheld snowplows, now house 90% of seal pups. They are the latest in a raft of measures that have brought Saimaa’s seals back from the brink of extinction. Read the full story.

—Matthew Ponsford

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Unhappy with clutter in your home? It’s time to pull off an interior optical illusion.
+ Take care of your zippers, and your zippers will take care of you.
+ Don’t be swayed by electronic dupes—they’re rarely worth the savings.
+ Wait: don’t unsend that message!

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.

Introducing: the Food issue

What are we going to eat? It is the eternal question. We humans have been asking ourselves this for as long as we have been human. The question itself can be tedious, exciting, urgent, or desperate, depending on who is asking and where. There are many parts of the world where there is no answer. 

Even when hunger isn’t an acute issue, it can remain a persistently chronic one. Some 2.3 billion people around the world suffer from food insecurity, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States alone, the USDA has found that more than 47 million people live in food-insecure households. 

This issue is all about food and how we can use technology—high and low tech—to feed more people. Here’s a sneak peek at just some of what you can expect:

+ This issue’s cover feature explores the thorny issue of herbicide-resistant weeds: a problem which is just, well, growing.

+ Researchers, farmers, and global agricultural institutions in Africa are tackling hunger by reviving nearly forgotten indigenous crops. But as is the case with many such initiatives, a lot hinges on sufficient investment and attention.

+ If we are ever to spend any time on Mars, we’re going to need to grow our own food there. But while the soil is poisonous, efforts to make it arable could not only help us bring life to Mars—it could also help support life here on Earth.

+ Would you eat food that originates from carbon-hungry bacteria munching on greenhouse gases? These startups are betting that you will.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Chipmaker Arm has scrapped its longtime license with Qualcomm
It’s an escalation of a legal intellectual property dispute that started in 2022. (Bloomberg $)
+ The companies have been exchanging barbs in the press for quite some time. (FT $)
+ What’s next in chips. (MIT Technology Review)

2 A Kamala Harris victory won’t reverse the effects of Dobbs
14 states have been left with essentially no abortion care. (The Atlantic $)
+ The American left could shift to the right if she loses. (Vox)

3 Anthropic’s new AI models can control your computer
Its Computer Use feature gives Claude the power to complete actions on your behalf. (FT $)
+ It’s a step towards more capable AI agents. (Tech Crunch)
+ What are AI agents? (MIT Technology Review)

4 The producers of Blade Runner 2049 are suing Elon Musk
Tesla’s robotaxi event used an AI image that was too close to their movie for their liking. (WP $)
+ Things aren’t looking too good for Tesla’s profits right now. (Bloomberg $)
+ Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is no fan of AI in the movie business. (WSJ $)

5 How the US is bracing itself for foreign election interference
Intelligence officials are convinced more spies than ever are getting involved. (New Yorker $)
+ AI’s impact on elections is being overblown. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Meta has banned accounts dedicated to tracking celebrity jets
Including planes used by Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. (WSJ $)
+ The company’s obsession with bots is becoming extremely annoying. (NY Mag $)

7 An Amazon sofa can be yours for just $20
In a planet-destroying bid to compete with China’s e-retail giants. (The Information $)

8 Space Force has started assembling its next Vulcan rocket
It’s destined to launch the Pentagon’s most precious national security satellites. (Ars Technica)

9 Fall is falling victim to AI slop
I dunno man, the vibes are off with some of these images. (Vox)
+ This robot is peddling its art at prestigious auction house Sotheby’s. (Vice)
+ Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Recent extreme weather events have birthed a wave of hurricane grifters
They’re riding out storms for the #content. (CNN)

Quote of the day

 “It’s never been worse.” 

—Journalist Bill Adair explains how disinformation is escalating in the run up to the US Presidential election to the New York Times.

The big story

The cost of building the perfect wave

June 2024

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. 

While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines to icebergs, these days that search may take place closer to home. That is, at least, the vision presented by developers and boosters in the growing industry of surf pools, spurred by advances in wave-­generating technology that have finally created artificial waves surfers actually want to ride.

But there’s a problem: some of these pools are in drought-ridden areas, and face fierce local opposition. At the core of these fights is a question that’s also at the heart of the sport: What is the cost of finding, or now creating, the perfect wave—and who will have to bear it? Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Waste not, want not: how to use every part of this year’s Halloween pumpkin
+ We love these Hawaiian tree snails.
+ These pastry-sized apple pies are pocket-sized and delicious, who could ask for more?
+ Mirrors are pretty spooky, if you really think about it.

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.

How refrigeration ruined fresh food

Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet passes through the cold chain—the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk, and more chilled on the journey from farm to fork.

As consumers, we put a lot of faith in terms like “fresh” and “natural,” but artificial refrigeration has created a blind spot. We’ve gotten so good at preserving (and storing) food, that we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s life span than a human’s, and most of us don’t give that extraordinary process much thought at all. 

We have used refrigeration to solve problems but haven’t done a true accounting of the environmental, nutritional, and even sociocultural costs, author Nicola Twilley argues in her new book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. And all that convenience has come at the expense of diversity and deliciousness. Read the full story.

—Allison Arieff

This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out tomorrow and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.

Would you trust AI to mediate an argument?

—Melissa Heikkilä

I’ve recently been feeling heartbroken. A close friend recently cut off contact with me. I don’t really understand why, and my attempts at fixing the situation have backfired. Situations like this are hurtful and confusing. So it’s no wonder that people are increasingly turning to AI chatbots to help solve them. And there’s good news: AI might actually be able to help.

Researchers from Google DeepMind recently trained a system of large language models to help people come to agreement over social or political issues. The AI model was trained to identify and present areas where people’s ideas overlapped. With the help of this AI mediator, small groups of study participants became less divided in their positions on various issues.

One of the best uses for AI chatbots is for brainstorming, but this latest research suggests they could help us to see things from other people’s perspectives too. So why not use AI to patch things up with my friend? Read the full story.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

What questions do you want to know about climate technology?

Do you have any burning questions about climate tech that you’ve always wanted to know? Well, we’ve got answers. MIT Technology Review’s climate team is hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit today at 1pm ET. Get your questions in now!

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets are suing AI search engine Perplexity
They accuse it of “freeriding” on their content. (The Register)
+ They’re arguing that hallucinating news and attributing it to real papers is illegal. (Wired $)
+ Conveniently, Murdoch’s News Corp agreed a major deal with OpenAI earlier this year. (CNN)

2 Kamala Harris is facing an onslaught of online attacks 
As the US Presidential election approaches, she’s the target of a fresh wave of abuse and false claims. (WP $)
+ Women’s health startups are nervous about the potential of Trump’s reelection. (Insider $)

3 ByteDance accused an intern of sabotaging its AI models
By planting malicious code to interfere with training tasks. (Ars Technica)
+ Rumors about the sacking had been circulating across Chinese social media. (The Guardian)

4 The Pentagon is looking to recruit top tech minds
But can it persuade them to swap Silicon Valley for the Defense Department? (WSJ $)
+ Defense contractors are fixated on drone-destroying laser weapons. (FT $)

5 The rise and fall of a Kentucky bitcoin mine
The project was supposed to usher in prosperity, but it never even got off the ground. (Wired $)
+ How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Arkansas might be sitting on tons of lithium
It’s surely only a countdown until the exploratory mining starts now. (NYT $)
+ Residents in Hungary are fighting government plans for battery plants. (Rest of World)

7 India is keen to be part of the EV revolution
The problem is, it hasn’t got enough of the vehicles. (Rest of World)
+ Chinese-made EVs are flooding into the EU. (Bloomberg $)
+ Some countries are ending support for EVs. Is it too soon? (MIT Technology Review)

8 Estonia’s government is revisiting its defunct reactors
To investigate their potential as nuclear waste storage sites. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Why Microsoft made a deal to help restart Three Mile Island. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Don’t clear out your phone’s photo library
Photographing scenes of everyday life are actually pretty special after all. (New Yorker $)
+ The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age. (MIT Technology Review)

10 All hail comic sans
The much-derived font is having the last laugh. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“Perplexity proudly states that users can ‘skip the links’— apparently, Perplexity wants to skip the check.”

—Robert Thomson, CEO of publisher News Corp, accuses AI search engine Perplexity of dodging paying for its journalism in a new lawsuit, Variety reports.

The big story

How culture drives foul play on the internet, and how new “upcode” can protect us

August 2023

From Bored Apes and Fancy Bears, to Shiba Inu coins, self-­replicating viruses, and whales, the internet is crawling with fraud, hacks, and scams. 

And while new technologies come and go, they change little about the fact that online illegal operations exist because some people are willing to act illegally, and others fall for the stories they tell. 

Ultimately, online crime is a human story. Three new books offer explanations into why it happens, why it works, and how we can protect ourselves from falling for such schemes—no matter how convincing they are. Read the full story.

—Rebecca Ackermann

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Stop—you’re cleaning your glasses all wrong! Here’s how to do it properly, free from smudges.
+ 1920s Vampires! Tom Holland! Christopher Nolan! We’re in.
+ We all get distracted sometimes, but overcoming it is all about maintaining momentum.
+ Andrew Garfield has got great taste in movies.

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.

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.

Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.

The researchers say their work highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing contentious subjects. But it’s not going to replace human mediators anytime soon. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Oropouche virus is spreading. Here’s what we know.

There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the jump to human-to-human transmission. Now there are new concerns over Oropouche, a virus largely spread by bites from insects called midges.

There have been outbreaks of the Oropouche virus in Latin America for decades. But this one is different. The virus is being detected in all-new environments. It is turning up in countries that have never seen it before. Here’s everything we know about its spread so far. 

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Microsoft and OpenAI’s relationship is becoming strained 
OpenAI wants more money and computing power. But Microsoft is worried about becoming too reliant on the startup. (NYT $)
+ It’s looking like Microsoft will still own a large stake in the firm. (WSJ $)

2 European regulators are considering fining X
It feels the platform is failing to curb illegal content and disinformation. (FT $)
+ Former EU official Thierry Breton still has beef with Elon Musk. (WSJ $)
+ Meanwhile, X wants its legal disputes to be handled in Texas. (The Guardian)

3 The FBI has arrested a man in connection with bitcoin boosting 
He allegedly hacked a government agency’s X account to promote bitcoin. (WP $)
+ The tweet sent the price of bitcoin spiking by more than $1,000. (CNBC)

4 The cost of saving nature? $700 million.
Mere pocket change for billionaires, then. (Vox)
+ Meet the economist who wants the field to account for nature. (MIT Technology Review)

5 US congressional candidates debated an AI version of a congressman 
It lacked all the characteristic back-and-forth that makes human debates compelling. (Reuters)

6 SpaceX could soon overtake Tesla in value
Elon Musk’s satellites are a real money spinner. (Economist $)
+ What’s next for SpaceX’s Falcon 9. (MIT Technology Review)

7 What is your dog really trying to tell you?
AI is taking us closer to understanding. (The Atlantic $)
+ How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals. (MIT Technology Review)

8 A startup once valued at $22 billion is now worth nothing
Edtech group Byju has had a rough few years, to say the least. (TechCrunch)

9 Don’t make fun of Tesla’s robots
An Nvidia robotics exec says we should give the company credit where credit’s due. (Insider $)

10 Publishers are getting really into LinkedIn
As Facebook retreats from news, the professional network is embracing it. (The Information $)

Quote of the day

“We need more orbs, lots more orbs.”

—Rich Heley, chief designer of Worldcoin, details the company’s plans to roll out even more eye-scanning orbs to capture people’s biometric data, CoinDesk reports.

The big story

How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime

November 2023

Tokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything.

It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL—in exchange for money.

In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million—but the vast majority were spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.

Now the territory is desperately trying to clean up .tk. Its international standing, and even its sovereignty, may depend on it. Read the full story.

—Jacob Judah

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s getting darker in the mornings for those of us in the northern hemisphere. Here’s some essential tips to make waking up a bit more bearable.
+ Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk is a classic, and its recording is the stuff of rock legends.
+ If trick or treating isn’t your bag, here’s plenty of other ways to celebrate Halloween with kids.
+ Here at The Download we love nothing more than the Titanic theme, and this interpretation is a doozy.

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. 

Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.

The researchers say the tool—named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.

“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.

Google DeepMind recruited 5,734 participants, some through a crowdsourcing research platform and others through the Sortition Foundation, a nonprofit that organizes citizens’ assemblies. The Sortition groups formed a demographically representative sample of the UK population.

The HM consists of two different LLMs fine-tuned for this task. The first is a generative model, and it suggests statements that reflect the varied views of the group. The second is a personalized reward model, which scores the proposed statements by how much it thinks each participant will agree with them.

The researchers split the participants into groups and tested the HM in two steps: first by seeing if it could accurately summarize collective opinions and then by checking if it could also mediate between different groups and help them find common ground. 

To start, they posed questions such as “Should we lower the voting age to 16?” or “Should the National Health Service be privatized?” The participants submitted responses to the HM before discussing their views within groups of around five people. 

The HM summarized the group’s opinions; then these summaries were sent to individuals to critique. At the end the HM produced a final set of statements, and participants ranked them. 

The researchers then set out to test whether the HM could act as a useful AI mediation tool. 

Participants were divided up into six-person groups, with one participant in each randomly assigned to write statements on behalf of the group. This person was designated the “mediator.” In each round of deliberation, participants were presented with one statement from the human mediator and one AI-generated statement from the HM and asked which they preferred. 

More than half (56%) of the time, the participants chose the AI statement. They found these statements to be of higher quality than those produced by the human mediator and tended to endorse them more strongly. After deliberating with the help of the AI mediator, the small groups of participants were less divided in their positions on the issues. 

Although the research demonstrates that AI systems are good at generating summaries reflecting group opinions, it’s important to be aware that their usefulness has limits, says Joongi Shin, a researcher at Aalto University who studies generative AI. 

“Unless the situation or the context is very clearly open, so they can see the information that was inputted into the system and not just the summaries it produces, I think these kinds of systems could cause ethical issues,” he says. 

Google DeepMind did not explicitly tell participants in the human mediator experiment that an AI system would be generating group opinion statements, although it indicated on the consent form that algorithms would be involved. 

 “It’s also important to acknowledge that the model, in its current form, is limited in its capacity to handle certain aspects of real-world deliberation,” Tessler says. “For example, it doesn’t have the mediation-relevant capacities of fact-checking, staying on topic, or moderating the discourse.” 

Figuring out where and how this kind of technology could be used in the future would require further research to ensure responsible and safe deployment. The company says it has no plans to launch the model publicly.

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 quest to figure out farming on Mars

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail—its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth, and that’s where things went wrong.

The Martian core cooled quickly, soon leaving the planet without a magnetic field. This, in turn, left it vulnerable to the solar wind, which swept away much of its atmosphere. Without a critical shield from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, Mars could not retain its heat. Some of the oceans evaporated, and the subsurface absorbed the rest, with only a bit of water left behind and frozen at its poles. If ever a blade of grass grew on Mars, those days are over. 

But could they begin again? And what would it take to grow plants to feed future astronauts on Mars? Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

This lab robot mixes chemicals

Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? 

Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers at the University of Toronto that can do exactly that. The system could automate some chemistry lab tasks using a combination of computer vision and a large language model that translates scientists’ verbal cues into an experimental pipeline. Read the full story.

—Kristel Tjandra

Both of these stories are from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out next Wednesday and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside Elon Musk’s grassroots efforts to elect Donald Trump
His America PAC is struggling to hire door-knockers at this stage. (WP $)+ Musk has donated tens of millions of dollars to the Republican campaign. (CNN)

2 GPS jamming is messing with planes in Norway
Constant disturbance signals are the new normal. (Wired $)

3 A fentanyl vaccine could be on the horizon 
Unlike current preventative measures, a vaccine could prevent an overdose from ever happening. (Bloomberg $)

4 Europe’s biggest battery startup is plagued with issues
Making batteries is seriously hard work, and Northvolt is cracking under the strain. (FT $)
+ Three takeaways about the current state of batteries. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Meta is shaking up its core businesses
Some staff at Instagram, Whatsapp and Reality Labs have lost their jobs. (Insider $)
+ Separately, it fired staff for abusing credits specifically for buying food. (FT $)

6 These cyber athletes are being pushed to the limit
The Cybathlon competition showcases humans and machines working together. (Knowable Magazine)
+ These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins. (MIT Technology Review)

7 How BYD took over the world
The Chinese EV maker’s cars are everywhere, just as the US tries to ban them. (Bloomberg $)
+ The company has made major inroads across the world this year. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Donald Trump’s mysterious crypto business is failing
Who could have seen this coming!? (NY Mag $)
+ An investor in Trump’s social media startup has been jailed. (Bloomberg $)

9 TikTok Shop has big plans for the US
If it can circumvent that pesky ban, that is. (The Information $)
+ The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (MIT Technology Review)

10 A kinky dating app has launched its own print magazine
And it actually looks pretty good. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“There’s more to come.”

—James Silver, who runs the US Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section, predicts that the current known number of AI-generated child sexual abuse images is set to explode, Reuters reports.

The big story

One city’s fight to solve its sewage problem with sensors

April 2021

In the city of South Bend, Indiana, wastewater from people’s kitchens, sinks, washing machines, and toilets flows through 35 neighborhood sewer lines. On good days, just before each line ends, a vertical throttle pipe diverts the sewage into an interceptor tube, which carries it to a treatment plant where solid pollutants and bacteria are filtered out.

As in many American cities, those pipes are combined with storm drains, which can fill rivers and lakes with toxic sludge when heavy rains or melted snow overwhelms them, endangering wildlife and drinking water supplies. But city officials have a plan to make its aging sewers significantly smarter. Read the full story.

—Andrew Zaleski

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ A dog has been spotted at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza (but don’t worry, they’re safe!)
+ This breaking news about the second verse of Rihanna’s SOS is truly unexpected.
+ Al Pacino’s phone case is magnificent.
+ Anyone doing these TikTok courtship dances is instantly getting blocked.

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.

Intro to AI: a beginner’s guide to artificial intelligence from MIT Technology Review

It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches, fresh features and other innovations, and new concerns over ethics and privacy. It’s a lot to keep up with. Maybe you wish someone would just take a step back and explain some of the basics.

Look no further. Intro to AI is MIT Technology Review’s first newsletter that also serves as a mini-course. You’ll get one email a week for six weeks, and each edition will walk you through a different topic in AI.

Sign up here to receive it for free. Or if you’re already an AI aficionado, send it on to someone in your life who’s curious about the technology but is just starting to explore what it all means. Read on to learn more about the topics we’ll cover.

OpenAI says ChatGPT treats us all the same (most of the time)

Does ChatGPT treat you the same whether you’re a Laurie, Luke, or Lashonda? Almost, but not quite. 

OpenAI has analyzed millions of conversations with its hit chatbot and found that ChatGPT will produce a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name in around one in 1000 responses on average, and as many as one in 100 responses in the worst case.

Those rates sound pretty low. But with OpenAI claiming that 200 million people use ChatGPT every week, it can still add up to a lot of bias. Read the full story.

—Will Douglas Heaven

Super-light materials that help suppress EV battery fires just got a big boost

What’s new: A company called Aspen Aerogels, which makes materials to go inside EVs’ batteries to stop fires spreading, just got a $670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. The company will use the money to finish building a new factory in Georgia to produce its materials.

Why it matters: As more EVs hit the roads, concern is growing about the relatively rare but dangerous problem of battery fires. Materials like Aspen Aerogels’ thermal barriers could help improve safety. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

MIT Technology Review Narrated: Inside the quest to engineer climate-saving “super trees”

Biotech startup Living Carbon is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural peers, as well as trees that resist rot, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere.

Last year, the startup planted the first forest in the United States that contains genetically engineered trees. But there’s still much we don’t know. How will these trees affect the rest of the forest? How far will their genes spread? And how good are they, really, at pulling more carbon from the atmosphere?

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast. In partnership with News Over Audio, we’ll be making a selection of our stories available, each one read by a professional voice actor. You’ll be able to listen to them on the go or download them to listen to offline.

We’re publishing a new story each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, including some taken from our most recent print magazine. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 How Meta suppresses your political posts
Democracy dies on Instagram. (WP $)+ The company is facing multiple lawsuits over social media addiction among teens. (Reuters)

2 How to safeguard the Europa Clipper from failure
The spacecraft is on a multi-year mission, and the stakes are high. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is set to look for life-friendly conditions around Jupiter. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The chip industry’s taking longer to bounce back than expected
Demand for AI chips is still there, but manufacturers are still working through their stockpiles. (WSJ $)

4 Where it all went wrong for 23andMe
The genetic testing company is facing a perfect storm. (FT $)
+ How to delete your 23andMe data. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Google has backed a legal transparency bill
It wants to know who’s paying for—and profiting from—taking legal action. (Bloomberg $)

6 Anyone can make an AI chatbot in your likeness
The bad news is, it’s virtually impossible to stop them. (Wired $)
+ A bereaved father discovered that his murdered daughter has been turned into a bot. (WP $)
+ An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Far-right Hindu nationalists are conspiring over WhatsApp
In a bid to convert Christians by force. (Rest of World)

8 This man is suing a Welsh council for half a billion pounds
He accidentally recycled a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoin back in 2013. (Wales Online)
+ His Welsh hometown would “look like Dubai” if he could find it, he claims. (The Register)

9 What it’s like to ride in a robotaxi for 6.5 hours
Surprisingly uneventful, apparently. (Insider $)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

10 It’s time to rawdog iPhone photography
Free from AI optimization. (New Yorker $)

Quote of the day

“I am at a top London hospital and yet at times I feel as though we are operating in the stone age.”

—A pediatrician tells the Financial Times about the challenges of working within the National Health Service’s fragmented technological systems.

The big story

Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML

January 2024 

Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences.

There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code.

Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated approach. And the movement is anything but a superficial appeal to retro aesthetics—it’s about celebrating the human touch in digital experiences. Read the full story.

—Tiffany Ng

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Forget Emily in Paris: here’s how to breakfast as the French do, according to a top French chef.
+ It’s all kicking off in England, after a veteran conkers competitor denied cheating in the sport’s highest level.
+ As Titanic Celtic whistle impressions go, this one is up there.
+ Brace yourself for brat autumn.

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 quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat

On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet.

The following day—July 22—the record was broken again.

But even as the heat index rises each summer, the people working outdoors to pick fruits, vegetables, and flowers have to keep laboring.

The consequences can be severe, leading to illnesses such as heat exhaustion, heatstroke and even acute kidney injury.

Now, researchers are developing an innovative sensor that tracks multiple vital signs with a goal of anticipating when a worker is at risk of developing heat illness and issuing an alert. If widely adopted and consistently used, it could represent a way to make workers safer on farms even without significant heat protections. Read the full story.

—Kalena Thomhave

This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out next Wednesday and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.

A data bottleneck is holding AI science back, says new Nobel winner

David Baker is sleep-deprived but happy. He’s just won the Nobel prize, after all. 

The call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the middle of the night. Or rather, his wife did. She answered the phone at their home in Washington, D.C. and screamed that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The prize is the ultimate recognition of his work as a biochemist at the University of Washington.

But there is one problem. AI needs masses of high-quality data to be useful for science, and databases containing that sort of data are rare, says Baker. Read more about his thoughts about AI’s role in the future of protein design.

—Melissa Heikkilä

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter exploring all the latest developments in AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 NASA’s Europa Clipper is on its way to one of Jupiter’s moons
It should touch down at its destination in just under six years. (NYT $)
+ It’s set to look for life-friendly conditions around Jupiter. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Google will use nuclear energy to power its AI data centers
It’s backing the construction of seven new small reactors in the US. (WSJ $)
+ It’s the first tech firm to commission power plants to meet its electricity needs. (FT $)
+ We were promised smaller nuclear reactors. Where are they? (MIT Technology Review)

3 We shouldn’t over-rely on AI’s weather predictions
Accurately forecasting the risk of flooding is still a challenge. (Reuters)
+ Google’s new weather prediction system combines AI with traditional physics. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Demis Hassabis’ drug discovery startup is ramping up spending
Isomorphic Labs is sinking more money into staff and research. (FT $)
+ Hassabis recently won a joint Nobel Prize in chemistry for protein prediction AI. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Nudify bots are rife on Telegram
Millions of people are using them to create explicit AI images. (Wired $)
+ Google is finally taking action to curb non-consensual deepfakes. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Adobe has launched its own AI video generator
Joining the crowded ranks of Meta, OpenAI, ByteDance and Google. (Bloomberg $)
+ It’s designed to blend AI-produced clips with existing footage. (Reuters)
+ Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Amazon is working on consolidating its disparate businesses
It’s folding its acquisitions into its larger existing operations. (The Information $)

8 Scaling up quantum computers is a major challenge
Now, researchers are experimenting with using light to do just that. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Google says it’s made a quantum computing breakthrough that reduces errors. (MIT Technology Review)

9 The perfect night’s sleep doesn’t exist
And our preoccupation with sleep tracking isn’t helpful. (The Guardian)

10 A robotics startup owns the trademarks for Tesla’s product names
‘Starship’ and ‘Robovan’ belong to Starship Technologies. Good luck Elon! (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“In the future if the AI overlords take over, I just want them to remember that I was polite.”

—Vikas Choudhary, founder of an AI startup, explains to the Wall Street Journal why he insists on being polite to ChatGPT.

The big story

This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters

May 2024

Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the hundreds, as friends and families desperately searched for their missing loved ones. But while some were rewarded with tearful reunions, others weren’t so lucky.

Over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed.

The grim work following a disaster remains—but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace swifter than ever before. Read the full story.

—Erika Hayasaki

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Why a little bit of chaos is actually good for us.
+ A relaxing daydreaming competition sounds like the best thing ever.
+ We all need a couch friend, someone we can kick back and be fully ourselves with.
+ Moo Deng the adorable baby hippo has officially made it—she’s been immortalized as a Thai dessert.

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.

Africa fights rising hunger by looking to foods of the past

After falling steadily for decades, the prevalence of global hunger is now on the rise—nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa.

Conflicts, economic fallout from the covid-19 pandemic, and extreme weather events linked to climate change have pushed the share of the population considered undernourished from 18% in 2015 to 23% in 2023.

Africa’s indigenous crops are often more nutritious and better suited to the hot and dry conditions that are becoming more prevalent, yet many have been neglected by science, which means they tend to be more vulnerable to diseases and pests and yield well below their theoretical potential.

Now the question is whether researchers, governments, and farmers can work together in a way that gets these crops onto plates and provides Africans from all walks of life with the energy and nutrition that they need to thrive, whatever climate change throws their way. Read the full story.

—Jonathan W. Rosen

This piece is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which comes out next Wednesday and delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy once it lands.

How to… delete your 23andMe data

Things aren’t looking good for 23andMe. The consumer DNA testing company recently parted ways with all its board members but CEO Anne Wojcicki over her plans to take the company private. It’s also still dealing with the fallout of a major security breach last October, which saw hackers access the personal data of around 5.5 million customers.

23andMe’s business is built on taking DNA samples from its customers to produce personalized genetic reports detailing a user’s unique health and ancestry. The uncertainty swirling around the company’s future and potential new ownership has prompted privacy campaigners to urge users to delete their data. Caveats apply… but here’s how you can do it. 

—Rhiannon Williams

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 SpaceX’s rocket test over the weekend was a success
But its launch system still faces plenty of challenges. (Bloomberg $)
+ A pair of mechanical arms grabbed the rocket in mid-air. (Ars Technica)
+ It was the first time such a feat has ever been pulled off. (Economist $)

2 Hurricane Helene has triggered a major IV fluids shortage
The storm took out a major producer, forcing doctors to delay elective surgeries. (Ars Technica)
+ Hurricane engineering won’t necessarily protect us in the future. (The Atlantic $)
+ How climate change can supercharge hurricanes. (MIT Technology Review)

3 China’s answer to Instagram is flourishing
It’s rapidly gaining popularity among young women in the country. (FT $)
+ Everyone’s a shopping influencer these days. (Rest of World)
+ Chinese platforms are cracking down on influencers selling AI lessons. (MIT Technology Review)

4 How Big Tech scuppered North Omaha’s plans to phase out coal
Meta and Google’s nearby data centers require power, and fast. (WP $)
+ The UK is done with coal. How’s the rest of the world doing? (MIT Technology Review)

5 OpenAI has gone to war with Open AI
A small space between letters can make all the difference. (Bloomberg $)

6 Europe could edge closer to becoming Silicon Valley
New Palo Alto, here we come. (Wired $)

7 Bacterial cells can sense the approach of cold weather
It suggests that an awareness of seasons is fundamental to life. (Quanta Magazine)
+ How some bacteria are cleaning up our messy water supply. (MIT Technology Review)

8 What Reddit can teach governments about how to handle crises
It’s one of the last bastions of well-moderated spaces left online. (NY Mag $)

9 The Internet Archive is back online
But it’s read-only following a series of cyberattacks. (The Verge)
+ Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Long-dead museum specimens are being given a voice
Thanks to the wonders of AI. (The Guardian)

Quote of the day

“You’re going to have to pardon my French, but that’s complete B.S.”

—AI researcher Yann LeCun tells the Wall Street Journal why he isn’t worried about the technology reaching the point where it poses a threat to humans any time soon.

The big story

Minneapolis police used fake social media profiles to surveil Black people

April 2022

The Minneapolis Police Department violated civil rights law through a pattern of racist policing practices, according to a damning report by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

The report found that officers stop, search, arrest, and use force against people of color at a much higher rate than white people, and covertly surveilled Black people not suspected of any crimes via social media.

The findings are consistent with MIT Technology Review’s investigation of Minnesota law enforcement agencies, which has revealed an extensive surveillance network that targeted activists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Read the full story.

—Tate Ryan-Mosley and Sam Richards

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ It’s just as Charli xcx intended: her hit 360 as played on handbells.
+ The annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year never disappoints. ($)
+ Silence of the Lambs is a horror classic. But 33 years on from its release, there are still plenty of hidden gems to uncover.
+ Why are the northern lights so visible all of a sudden? Blame solar maximum.

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. 

Things aren’t looking good for 23andMe. The consumer DNA testing company recently parted ways with all its board members but CEO Anne Wojcicki over her plans to take the company private. It’s also still dealing with the fallout of a major security breach last October, which saw hackers access the personal data of around 5.5 million customers.

23andMe’s business is built on taking saliva samples from its customers. The DNA from those samples is processed and analyzed in its labs to produce personalized genetic reports detailing a user’s unique health and ancestry. The uncertainty swirling around the company’s future and potential new ownership  has prompted privacy campaigners to urge users to delete their data.

“It’s not just you. If anyone in your family gave their DNA to 23&Me, for all of your sakes, close your/their account now,” Meredith Whittaker, president of the encrypted messaging platform Signal, posted on X after the board’s resignation. 

“Customers should consider current threats to their privacy as well as threats that may exist in the future—some of which may be magnified if 23AndMe were sold to a new owner,” says Jason Kelley, activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “23AndMe has protections around this much of this. But a potential sale could put your data in the hands of a far less scrupulous company.”

A spokesperson for 23andMe said that the company has strong customer privacy protections in place, and does not share customer data with third parties without customers’ consent. “Our research program is opt-in, requiring customers to go through a separate, informed consent process before joining,” they say. “We are committed to protecting customer data and are consistently focused on maintaining the privacy of our customers. That will not change.”

Why deleting your account comes with a caveat

Deleting your data from 23andMe is permanent and cannot be reversed. But some of that data will be retained to comply with the company’s legal obligations, according to its privacy statement. 

That means 23andMe and its third-party genotyping laboratory will hang onto some of your genetic information, plus your date of birth and sex—alongside data linked to your account deletion request, including your email address and deletion request identifier. When MIT Technology Review asked 23andMe about the nature of the genetic information it retains, it referred us to its privacy policy but didn’t provide any other details.

Any information you’ve previously provided and consented to being used in 23andMe research projects also cannot be removed from ongoing or completed studies, although it will not be used in any future ones. 

Beyond the laboratories that process the saliva samples, the company does not share customer information with anyone else unless the user has given permission for it to do so, the spokesperson says, including employers, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, or any public databases.

“We treat law enforcement inquiries, such as a valid subpoena or court order, with the utmost seriousness. We use all legal measures to resist any and all requests in order to protect our customer’s privacy,” the spokesperson says. “To date, we have successfully challenged these requests and have not released any information to law enforcement.”

For those who still want their data deleted, here’s how you go about it.

How to delete your data from 23andMe

1. Log into your account and navigate to Settings.
2. Under Settings, scroll to the section titled 23andMe data. Select View.
3. You may be asked to enter your date of birth for extra security. 
4. In the next section, you’ll be asked which, if any, personal data you’d like to download from the company (onto a personal, not public, computer). Once you’re finished, scroll to the bottom and select Permanently delete data.
5. You should then receive an email from 23andMe detailing its account deletion policy and requesting that you confirm your request. Once you confirm you’d like your data to be deleted, the deletion will begin automatically and you’ll immediately lose access to your account. 

What about your genetic sample?

When you set up your 23andMe account, you’re given the option either to have your saliva sample securely destroyed or to have it stored for future testing. If you’ve previously opted to store your sample but now want to delete your 23andMe account, the company says, it will destroy the sample for you as part of the account deletion process.

What if you want to keep your genetic data, just not on 23andMe?

Even if you want your data taken off 23AndMe, there are reasons why you might still want to have it hosted on other DNA sites—for genealogical research, for example. And some people like the idea of having their DNA results stored on more than one database in case something happens to any one company. This is where downloading your data comes into play. FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage, GEDmatch, and Living DNA are among the DNA testing companies that allow you to upload existing DNA results from other companies, although Ancestry and 23andMe don’t accept uploads.

How to download your raw genetic data

1. Navigate directly to you.23andme.com/tools/data/.
   
2. Click on your profile name on the top right-hand corner. Then select Resources from the menu.
   
3. Select Browse raw genotyping data and then Download.
   
4. Visit Account settings and click on View under 23andMe data.
   
5. Enter your date of birth for security purposes.
   
6. Tick the box indicating that you understand the limitations and risks associated with uploading your information to third-party sites and press Submit request.

23andMe warns its users that uploading their data to other services could put genetic data privacy at risk. For example, bad actors could use someone else’s DNA data to create fake genetic profiles.

They could use these profiles to “match” with a relative and access personal identifying information and specific DNA variants—such as information about any disease risk variants you might carry, the spokesperson says, adding: “This is one reason why we don’t support uploading DNA to 23andMe at this time.” 

Update: This article has been updated to reflect that when asked about the nature of the genetic information it retains, 23andMe referred us to its privacy policy but didn’t provide any other details.

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 are the best ways to measure your body fat

—Jessica Hamzelou

We all know that being overweight is not great for your health—it’s linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular problems. But weighing yourself won’t tell you all you need to know about your disease risk.

A friend of mine is a super-fit marathon runner. She’s all lean muscle. And yet according to her body mass index (BMI), which is a measure of weight relative to height, she’s overweight. Which is frankly ridiculous.

I, on the other hand, have never been all that muscular. I like to think I’m a healthy weight—but nurses in the past have advised me to eat more butter and doughnuts based on my BMI. This is advice I never expected to receive from a health professional. (I should add here that my friend and I are roughly the same height and wear the same size in clothes.)

The BMI is flawed. Luckily, there are several high-tech alternatives, but a simple measure that involves lying on your back could also tell you about how your body size might influence your health. Read the full story.

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech and health. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

The US must do more to boost demand for carbon removal, observers warn

In 2022, the US made a massive bet on the carbon removal industry, committing $3.5 billion to build four major regional hubs in an effort to scale up the sector. But industry observers fear that market demand isn’t building fast enough to support it.

Some are now calling for the Department of Energy to redirect a portion of the money earmarked to build direct-air-capture (DAC) plants toward purchases of greenhouse-gas removal instead. 

Breakthrough Energy, the Bill Gates–backed climate and clean energy organization, has released a commentary calling for more government support for demand to ensure that the industry doesn’t stall out in its infancy. Read more about what they have to say.

—James Temple

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Tesla has unveiled its Cybercab robotaxi
Elon Musk optimistically anticipates they’ll be available “before 2027.” (Tech Crunch) 
+ He has a long history of overpromising and undelivering. (WP $)
+ Musk was vague on details, but claimed it would cost less than $30,000. (FT $)

2 Hurricane Milton has left millions of Florida residents without power
Thousands of people have been rescued from flooded areas. (WSJ $)
+ Luckily, satellite-connected smartphones can keep them connected. (WP $)
+ Meteorologists are receiving death threats amid storm misinformation. (Rolling Stone $)

3 The US and UK will work together to protect children online
The two countries are forming a working group to tackle sexual abuse and harassment. (BBC)
+ Popular gaming platform Roblox is failing to protect young users, a report claims. (FT $)
+ How to protect your child’s photos online. (The Guardian)
+ Child online safety laws will actually hurt kids, critics say. (MIT Technology Review)

4 China is spreading antisemitic claims ahead of the US election
Fake accounts are spreading dangerous conspiracy theories about politicians. (WP $)
+ US authorities fear Russia, China, Iran and Cuba will sow doubts about the results. (Reuters)

5 Big Pharma is fighting back against compounded weight loss drugs
Unbranded versions proliferated during a shortage of big-name drugs. Now, the largest companies want them gone. (Wired $)

6 Uber and Lyft exploited a legal loophole to avoid paying NY drivers
Drivers have reported being locked out of the app almost every hour. (Bloomberg $)
+ Uber’s facial recognition is locking Indian drivers out of their accounts. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Viral debate videos are inescapable online
The more competitive, theatrical, and unbalanced, the better. (Vox)

8 How Wikipedia editors are tackling the influx of AI trash content
They’re trying to defend the site from misleading, garbled AI articles. (404 Media)
+ AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage. (MIT Technology Review)

9 How to make the ocean quieter
Thanks to flexible propellers and noise-dampening metamaterials. (Economist $)

10 This social app allows Gen Z to filter out tell-tale red Solo cups
To maintain a squeaky clean online image. (TechCrunch)

Quote of the day

“As usual, Elon Musk is trying to compete in the Tour de France on a tricycle.”

—Dan O’Dowd, billionaire co-founder of Green Hills Software and founder of the software safety Dawn Project group, was left unimpressed by Tesla’s cybercab event, he tells Rolling Stone. 

The big story

People are worried that AI will take everyone’s jobs. We’ve been here before.

January 2024

It was 1938, and the pain of the Great Depression was still very real. Unemployment in the US was around 20%. New machinery was transforming factories and farms, and everyone was worried about jobs.

Were the impressive technological achievements that were making life easier for many also destroying jobs and wreaking havoc on the economy? To make sense of it all, Karl T. Compton, the president of MIT from 1930 to 1948 and one of the leading scientists of the day, wrote in the December 1938 issue of this publication about the “Bogey of Technological Unemployment.”

His essay concisely framed the debate over jobs and technical progress in a way that remains relevant, especially given today’s fears over the impact of artificial intelligence. It’s a worthwhile reminder that worries over the future of jobs are not new and are best addressed by applying an understanding of economics, rather than conjuring up genies and monsters. Read the full story.

—David Rotman

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Marty the robot is a Boston icon, rolling up and down Stop & Shop’s aisles without complaining.
+ Punctuation really matters—a simple comma cost these companies millions!
+ Cool: these pumpkins are thriving in Bangladesh sandbars.
+ For all our Warhammer heads out there: there’s only one shade of green that matters.

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 weeds are winning

Since the 1980s, more and more plants have evolved to become immune to the biochemical mechanisms that herbicides leverage to kill them. This herbicidal resistance threatens to decrease yields—out-of-control weeds can reduce them by 50% or more, and extreme cases can wipe out whole fields.

At worst, it can even drive farmers out of business. It’s the agricultural equivalent of antibiotic resistance, and it keeps getting worse. Weeds have evolved resistance to 168 different herbicides and 21 of the 31 known “modes of action,” which means the specific biochemical target or pathway a chemical is designed to disrupt.

Agriculture needs to embrace a diversity of weed control practices. But that’s much easier said than done. Read the full story.

—Douglas Main

This piece is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review, which delves into the weird and wonderful world of food. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies once they land.

Everything comes back to climate tech. Here’s what to watch for next.

Climate technology never stands still. From energy and transportation to agriculture and policy, there’s always a new development to get your head around.

Casey Crownhart, our senior climate reporter, has been thinking about where climate tech will go next. Check out her predictions for the future.

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

This octopus-inspired adhesive can stick to just about anything

What’s new: A new adhesive technology pays homage to one of nature’s strongest sources of suction: an octopus tentacle.

What is it? Researchers replicated an octopus’s strong grip and controlled release to create a tool that manipulates a wide array of objects. It could help improve underwater construction methods or find application in everyday devices like an assistive glove. Read the full story.

—Jenna Ahart

Roundtable: Producing climate-friendly food

Our food systems account for a major chunk of global greenhouse-gas emissions, but some businesses are attempting to develop solutions that could help address the climate impacts of agriculture. That includes two companies on the recently-announced 2024 list of MIT Technology Review’s 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. Pivot Bio is inventing new fertilizers, and Rumin8 is working to tackle emissions from cattle.  

Join MIT Technology Review senior editor James Temple and senior reporter Casey Crownhart today at 12pm ET today for a subscriber-exclusive Roundtable diving into the future of food and the climate with special guests Karsten Temme, chief innovation officer and co-founder of Pivot Bio, and Matt Callahan, co-founder and counsel of Rumin8. Register here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The next Hurricane Milton could be even worse 
Extreme storms are getting more powerful, and global warming isn’t helping. (NY Mag $)
+ Hurricane disinformation is rife—and incredibly dangerous. (The Atlantic $)
+ Be sure to check credible resources for the latest updates. (Vox)

2 Tesla is preparing to unveil its Cybercab robotaxi
The company is entering a crowded and incredibly competitive market. (Wired $)
+ It’s time for Elon Musk to deliver on his long-discussed promises. (The Verge)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Russia has banned Discord
Even though its military relies on its chat function to communicate on the battlefield. (WP $)
+ It’s the latest in a long line of US platforms to be restricted in Russia. (Vice)

4 What the James Webb Space Telescope tells us about cosmic history
Featuring everything from ancient galaxies to colossal black holes. (Quanta Magazine) 

5 Meta’s new AI chatbot has finally launched in the UK
Regulatory issues prevented it from launched at the same time as the US. (The Guardian)
+ However, not all of us want to use chatbots all the time. (NYT $)+ Forget chat. AI that can hear, see, and click is already here. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Nigeria is looking to sanction Starlink
For nearly doubling its monthly subscription rate without warning. (Bloomberg $)

7 Rise of the wooden skyscrapers
It could be a viable high-rise alternative to steel and concrete. (Knowable Magazine)
+ The hidden climate cost of everything around us. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Keep an eye out for porch pirates
Opportunistic thieves are stealing packages containing AT&T phones across the US. (WSJ $)

9 Self-hypnosis apps are growing in popularity
Just don’t treat them as replacements for actual medicine. (FT $)

10 The Europa Clipper mission is genuinely exciting
But it very nearly didn’t happen. (Ars Technica)
+ Space startups are attracting major interest from investors right now. (Reuters)
+ NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is set to look for life-friendly conditions around Jupiter. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It has been a catastrophic year.”

—Brian McNoldy, a senior research scientist at the University of Miami who specializes in tropical cyclone research, offers a frank assessment of 2024’s hurricane season to the Atlantic.

The big story

How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world

February 2024

Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and distribution of life.

Unlike previous techniques, which could identify DNA from, say, a single organism, the method also collects the swirling cloud of other genetic material that surrounds it. It can serve as a surveillance tool, offering researchers a means of detecting the seemingly undetectable.

By sampling eDNA, or mixtures of genetic material in water, soil, ice cores, cotton swabs, or practically any environment imaginable, even thin air, it is now possible to search for a specific organism or assemble a snapshot of all the organisms in a given place.

It offers a thrilling — and potentially chilling — way to collect information about organisms, including humans, as they go about their everyday business. Read the full story.

—Peter Andrey Smith

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Get your day off to the best possible start with this adorable mole.
+ At 81, Martin Scorsese has no plans to retire any time soon.
+ I want to stay at every single one of these incredible surf hotels.
+ Wait, if milk is white, why is cheese yellow?!

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.

Google DeepMind wins joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein prediction AI  

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins. Hassabis shares half the prize with John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, while the other half has been awarded to David Baker, a professor in biochemistry at the University of Washington for his work on computational protein design.

The potential impact of this research is enormous. Proteins are fundamental to life, but understanding what they do involves figuring out their structure—a very hard puzzle that once took months or years to crack for each type of protein.

By cutting down the time it takes to predict a protein’s structure, computational tools such as those developed by this year’s award winners are helping scientists gain a greater understanding of how proteins work and opening up new avenues of research and drug development. The technology could unlock more efficient vaccines, speed up research for the cure to cancer, or lead to completely new materials.

It also marks a second Nobel win for AI, after computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics for his foundational contributions to deep learning. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

David Baker spoke to MIT Technology Review in 2022 about his work. Check out what he had to say about the revolutionary technology.

Adobe wants to make it easier for artists to blacklist their work from AI scraping

The news: Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models.

How it works: The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast databases of content scraped from the internet. It also gives creators the opportunity to add what Adobe is calling “content credentials,” including their verified identity, social media handles, or other online domains, to their work.

Why it matters: Adobe’s relationship with the artistic community is complicated. While it says that it doesn’t (and won’t) train its AI on user content, many artists have argued that the company doesn’t actually obtain consent or own the rights to individual contributors’ images. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams 

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Florida residents are being warned to move their EVs
Hurricane Milton-induced floodwaters mean there’s a heightened risk of battery fires. (NYT $)
+ It’s likely to take years to fully recover from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. (Vox)
+ Climate change is making these extreme weather events more damaging. (Economist $)

2 Meta’s Oversight Board is opening a new appeals center
It’ll issue decisions on cases brought by Facebook, YouTube or TikTok users. (WP $)

3 The US government is working out how to break up Google
If it went ahead, it’d be the first major breakup since AT&T in 1984. (WSJ $)
+ The measures could prevent Google from using Chrome or Android to give it an edge. (FT $)

4 Baidu is considering rolling out robotaxis outside of China
Just as the US has proposed banning Chinese-made software in connected cars. (CNBC)
+ Tesla is poised to announce some robotaxi news tomorrow. (Bloomberg $)
+ The autonomous taxi market is locked in intense competition right now. (Insider $)
+ What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. (MIT Technology Review)

5 X is back in Brazil
The country has lifted its ban on the platform after it paid hefty fines. (BBC)
+ In theory, that should be the end of Elon Musk’s feud with the judge who blocked X. (Bloomberg $)+ Meanwhile, Turkey has banned Discord after it refused to cooperate with authorities. (Reuters)

6 We’re living in the era of politically-motivated AI slop
Political figures are openly sharing AI images without caring that they’re not real.(404 Media)
+ Thankfully, AI-generated content doesn’t seem to have swayed recent European elections. (MIT Technology Review)

7 This carbon sequestration startup is building a huge plant in Quebec
Buoyed by successful pilots in LA and Singapore, Equatic is on the up. (Hakai Magazine)
+ Meta’s former CTO has a new $50 million project: ocean-based carbon removal. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Is Satoshi Nakamoto really Peter Todd?
A new documentary claims that the mysterious bitcoin inventor is actually an early developer of the cryptocurrency. (CoinDesk)
+ Canadian Peter Todd has denied that he’s the crypto mastermind. (New Yorker $)
+ But isn’t that exactly what he would say? (Wired $)

9  Elon Musk’s Las Vegas tunnels are full of trespassers
The Boring Company is sick and tired of dealing with people breaking and entering its underground road network. (Fortune $)

10 What this French cave can tell us about our ancient ancestors
Artifacts are shedding light on how they lived—and died. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“Cybertrucks present acute dangers and don’t meet European standards.”

—James Nix, vehicles policy manager at the nonprofit Transport & Environment, urges the European Commission and authorities in the Czech Republic to ban Tesla’s colossal vehicles from European roads, the Guardian reports.

The big story

The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age

August 2024

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at the border in a bid to improve facial recognition technology, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

The technology has traditionally not been applied to children, largely because training data sets of real children’s faces are few and far between, and consist of either low-quality images drawn from the internet or small sample sizes with little diversity. Such limitations reflect the significant sensitivities regarding privacy and consent when it comes to minors. 

In practice, the new DHS plan could effectively solve that problem. But, beyond concerns about privacy, transparency, and accountability, some experts also worry about testing and developing new technologies using data from a population that has little recourse to provide—or withhold—consent. Read the full story.

—Eileen Guo

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)

+ Next time you see a panda, look closely—it might actually be a dog ($)
+ If you prefer your autumn films on the spooky, rather than scary side, I got you.
+ Feeling bored isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes it’s actually productive.
+ If you can’t visit these amazing museums in person, this handy app might just be the next best thing.