About: blatcho

In February 2020, MIT professor David Simchi-Levi predicted the future. In an article in Harvard Business Review, he and his colleague warned that the new coronavirus outbreak would throttle supply chains and shutter tens of thousands of businesses across North America and Europe by mid-March. For Simchi-Levi, who had developed new models of supply chain […]

MIT School of Engineering and Northpond Ventures today announced the launch of the MIT-Northpond Program — Advancing Life Science and Engineering Innovation. The five-year engagement is funded through Northpond Labs, the research and development-focused affiliate of Northpond Ventures. The program aims to generate ideas in the life sciences by connecting Northpond’s experienced venture capital investors with MIT’s […]

Sponsor content from Siemens.

When expanding internationally, don’t assume your existing strategy will transfer seamlessly.

How one start-up overcame the unique challenges involved in serving the U.S. public sector.

Pop music fans know that their faves can’t change the world’s systemic problems—that’s not what they’re asking for.

The economics are clear: Renewables are cheap enough for the country to rapidly decarbonize. Less evident is the political will to pull it off.

In occupied Ukraine, people’s internet is being routed to Russia—and subjected to its powerful censorship and surveillance machine.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Boston-based Zoovu, which offers tools to improve product discovery across apps and websites, raises $169M led by FTV, bringing its total funding to $200M+  —  The competition in ecommerce has become fiercer as the pandemic drives shoppers online.  At the same time, customers have grown to expect better experiences.

James Vincent / The Verge: YouTube launches a corrections feature, letting creators add infocards at a relevant timestamp  —  Instead of having to re-upload a whole video  —  Everyone makes mistakes, but if you mess up a fact or flub a line in a YouTube video it can be hard to correct the error.

Financial Times: Celsius portrays itself as a simple company offering “financial freedom” but risky trades and bets have led to a crisis, halving its assets to $12B in May  —  Celsius Network co-founder Alex Mashinsky was in a defiant mood on Twitter this past weekend.

Later this year, NASA is set to launch a probe the size of a tennis court to the asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where remnants of the early solar system circle the sun. Once inside the asteroid belt, the spacecraft will zero in on Psyche, a large, metal-rich asteroid […]

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies a small and cool M-dwarf star, named HD 260655, and astronomers […]

Arguments over whether Google’s large language model has a soul distract from the real-world problems that plague artificial intelligence.

The bigger problem is what happens when we act as if AIs are conscious, and how that could be used against us.

For centuries, zoological law taught that sexual inequality was inevitable. Then women began studying Darwin for themselves.

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer: Cloudflare says it mitigated a 26M requests per second DDoS attack, the largest HTTPS DDoS attack detected to date, surpassing a 17.2M rps attack in August 2021  —  Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare said today that it mitigated a 26 million request per second distributed denial-of-service …

Ash Parrish / The Verge: Twitch expands its ad incentive program to more partners and promises bigger ad payouts by shifting from a fixed CPM to a percentage-based revenue share model  —  The ad incentive program will also open up to more partnered streamers  —  Twitch is expanding its ad incentive program to include more […]

Kellen Browning / New York Times: A Massachusetts court rules that a proposed ballot measure, backed by Uber and Lyft, to classify gig drivers as independent contractors, violates state law  —  The ruling ends a $17.8 million campaign by companies like Uber and Lyft that would have led to the classification of their drivers as […]

Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950, but now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess

The Center for International Studies (CIS) has long been valued as one of the world’s premier, university-based global research and education centers. A hallmark of the center’s many programs is the opportunity for academics and practitioners to work together on policy-relevant problems. The Robert E. Wilhelm Fellows Program is among the center’s most prestigious fellowships […]

Researchers are pushing to outpace hackers and develop stronger protections that keep data safe from malicious agents who would steal information by eavesdropping on smart devices. Much of the work done to prevent these “side-channel attacks” has focused on the vulnerability of digital processors. For instance, hackers can measure the electric current drawn by a […]

Immersing yourself in possible futures allows you to be creative and open to unexpected possibilities.

A conversation with Just Work CEO Trier Bryant on the “last mile” of promoting equity and inclusion at work.

The current practice of “bundling” care makes it less accessible, affordable, effective, and pleasant.

Retailers bamboozled by the pandemic now find themselves staring at mountains of unwanted stock. Here’s what happened and how it can be fixed.

WIRED’s editor in chief shares thoughts on the ongoing evolutionary battle between humans and SARS-CoV-2, plus more from the next issue.

Forget the tie and surprise Dad this year. From mechanical keyboards to electric scooters, we’ve got the best gifts right here.

Dawn Chmielewski / Reuters: Spotify announces a Safety Advisory Council to provide non-binding third-party input on issues such as hate speech, disinformation, and extremism  —  Spotify Technology SA (SPOT.N) on Monday announced it has formed a Safety Advisory Council to provide third-party input on issues such as hate speech …

Amelia Isaacs / AltFi: Berlin-based Airbank, an all-in-one banking service to manage data and payments that integrates HSBC and others, raised a $20M Series A led by Molten Ventures  —  The fundraise comes a year after the startup’s initial seed round of $3m.  —  Finance management platform for SMEs Airbank has closed a $20m Series […]

Kate Park / TechCrunch: Indonesia-based consumer payment service Flip announces a $55M Series B extension led by Tencent, bringing the round to $103M and its total raised to $120M  —  Flip, an Indonesia-based consumer payment platform, has closed a $55 million Series B extension round led by Tencent with participation from Block …

The company’s future owner, Microsoft, has entered into a labor neutrality agreement, making it easier for workers to unionize.

SpaceX must address dozens of environmental issues before it can upgrade Starbase in Boca Chica. The launch license needed for the Starship program remains pending.

Testing, vaccinating, and contact tracing can control the virus in Europe and North America—unless complacency allows it to take hold.

Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Qualcomm acquires Cellwize, a software service that helps carriers operate their networks more efficiently, reportedly for $350M; Cellwize has raised $56.5M  —  Qualcomm Inc. has acquired Cellwize Wireless Technologies Pte.  Ltd., a startup with a software platform that helps carriers operate their networks more efficiently.

Tage Kene-Okafor / TechCrunch: Nigeria releases a draft Code of Practice to regulate internet companies like Meta and Google, which would require establishing a local legal entity and more  —  Nigeria has announced plans to regulate internet companies like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (all owned by Meta) …

Brody Ford / Bloomberg: Oracle Q4: revenue grew 5.5% YoY to $11.84B, vs $11.7B est., with total cloud revenue up 19% YoY to $2.9B and net income down 21% YoY to $3.2B; stock jumps 10%+  —  Oracle Corp. reported results and gave a forecast suggesting the effort to move its customers to the cloud is […]

A robotic arm with an attached microphone learned to locate objects in a bag based on the sound they make, including a ring of keys and a bag of crisps

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, has claimed that the firm’s LaMDA artificial intelligence is sentient, but the expert consensus is that this is not the case

MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart has announced three Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants to support bold research projects across diverse areas of study including biology, engineering, and the humanities.  The three grants honor the visionary and bold thinking in the winning proposals of the following nine researchers: John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health […]

The MIT Press has announced the relaunch of the Software Studies series, a book series committed to exploring the vast possibilities, histories, relations, and harms that software encompasses. The revamped series will move beyond broad statements about software and integrate a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics, critical race theory, software art, and queer theory. […]

Many different types of bacteria and viruses can cause pneumonia, but there is no easy way to determine which microbe is causing a particular patient’s illness. This uncertainty makes it harder for doctors to choose effective treatments because the antibiotics commonly used to treat bacterial pneumonia won’t help patients with viral pneumonia. In addition, limiting […]

To stand out, look for areas where your competitors aren’t investing.

The development of Covid-19 vaccines illustrates how public-private partnerships can rapidly accelerate progress.

A leader who feels pigeon-holed as a subject matter expert learns how to move to general leadership role.

These little wearables reduce your reliance on a phone while keeping you connected.

The true-crime tale lends itself to the fact-fiction danse macabre.

From Avis-Budget to Hertz, traditional rental companies are struggling to restock their fleets. Now peer-to-peer upstarts are scrambling to fill the gap.

Molly White: A skeptical look at crypto as a foundation for self-sovereign identity and some likely dystopian outcomes, as Buterin, Dorsey, and others explore the idea  —  Anonymity and trustlessness are central to the crypto world.  People don’t have to attach real-world identities to crypto wallets …

Matt Turner / Bloomberg: As crypto tumbles, MicroStrategy, which owns 129K+ bitcoins, drops as much as 23%, while Coinbase, Riot Blockchain, and Marathon Digital each drop 14%+  —  Cryptocurrency-related stocks plunged in premarket trading Monday as Bitcoin tumbled to its lowest level in 18 months amid a deepening selloff …