About: blatcho

Therapy doesn’t work without understanding, and the “extremely online” deserve to have their experiences taken seriously.

WatchOS 9’s new running-focused features might make the Apple Watch the most comprehensive fitness tracker you can buy.

This week, we run down all of the announcements from the developer conference, which two of us got to witness in the flesh. Kinda.

Sheena Vasani / The Verge: Browser maker Vivaldi releases a built-in email client, Mail 1.0, with Vivaldi Calendar and RSS integrations  —  It’s available to use starting today  —  Vivaldi has launched its own free built-in email client, Mail 1.0, with Vivaldi’s Calendar and Feed Reader integrated.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Shield AI, which makes software and hardware for military drones and other autonomous aircraft, raises a $90M Series E and $75M in debt at a $2.3B valuation  —  Technology built with defense in mind is getting some significant and serious traction at the moment, spurred by world events …

Cade Metz / New York Times: Experts say the lack of publicly available data makes it difficult to verify claims by Tesla and others about the safety of their autonomous driving tech  —  Automakers and technology companies say they are making driving safer, but verifying these claims is difficult.

Malicious agents can use machine learning to launch powerful attacks that steal information in ways that are tough to prevent and often even more difficult to study. Attackers can capture data that “leaks” between software programs running on the same computer. They then use machine-learning algorithms to decode those signals, which enables them to obtain […]

FDA advisers overwhelmingly endorsed the vaccine, which Novavax hopes will sway holdouts to finally get their shots.

Using a custom encryption scheme within music notation, Merryl Goldberg and three other US musicians slipped information to Soviet performers and activists known as the Phantom Orchestra.

Internet giant Baidu has built an empire around search and artificial intelligence. Can it build a smarter car?

Thomas Brewster / Forbes: Unsealed docs show how the US ordered travel firms Sabre and Travelport to spy on a Russian hacker for two years, giving the Secret Service weekly reports  —  A Forbes legal challenge forces the unsealing of documents that reveal for the first time the scope of secretive surveillance orders …

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch: The Block: weekly NFT sales declined by just over 70% from a high of nearly 1M units in the third week of 2022 to 250K+ at the end of May 2022  —  The consumer trading boom has deflated, pushing unicorns and recently public companies alike into defensive modes.

Alex Heath / The Verge: Meta’s head of infrastructure David Mortenson steps down; engineering and infrastructure VP Santosh Janardhan, his direct report, will take over later in June  —  The change comes days after the announced departure of Sheryl Sandberg  —  Another executive change is hitting Meta …

Serah Reikka is an award-winning actor with more than 79,000 Instagram followers. She is a semi-autonomous artificial intelligence

The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the nation’s oldest academic honor society, held its MIT induction ceremony on Thursday, May 26, admitting 82 graduating seniors into the MIT chapter, Xi of Massachusetts. Phi Beta Kappa (PBK), founded in 1776 at the College of William and Mary, honors the nation’s most outstanding undergraduate students for excellence in […]

Seven MIT community members have been honored with 2022 American Astronomical Society (AAS) prizes and awards.  Those awarded include two assistant professors of physics, Erin Kara and Kiyoshi Masui, as well as alumni Camille Carlisle SM ’10, Charles Keith Gendreau PhD ’95, Laura Lopez ’04, Richard Mushotzky ’68, and Donald York ’66. Newton Lacy Pierce Prize […]

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 11th year in a row MIT has received this distinction. The full 2022 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be […]

On the beautiful beaches of the Canary Islands, scientists discovered a noxious new pollutant: tar mixed with tiny bits of plastic.

We spend so much of our time online without knowing where we are—or how fragmented we’ve become. Locating ourselves can help us leave our bubble.

The national abortion debate has focused on its legal and political dimensions. But that ignores the physiology of pregnancy.

Ron Miller / TechCrunch: Salesforce announces NFT Cloud, a service for buying and selling NFTs, available in a closed preview  —  Who knows whether it’s FOMO or actual customer demand for such a thing, but Salesforce announced today that it’s launching a pilot of NFT Cloud, a new platform for buying and selling these crypto […]

Brandy Betz / CoinDesk: Stock advisor Delphia, which offers an algorithm-based service via its app, raises a $60M Series A led by Multicoin Capital and plans its Delphia Data token  —  Investors will earn Delphia Data Tokens for sharing personal shopping and social media data with the advisor.

Ian Allison / CoinDesk: Source: Citadel Securities is building a “cryptocurrency trading ecosystem” in partnership with Virtu, Sequoia, Paradigm, and others  —  The effort also includes Citadel Securities’ recent venture capital (VC) backers, Sequoia and Paradigm, with more trading firms to come, according to a source familiar with the plans.

Lithium-ion batteries often lose their charge at sub-zero temperatures but a design incorporating bumps into one of the main components makes them work much better

When Mark Drela first set foot in Cambridge to study aerospace engineering at MIT in 1978, he was no stranger to wind tunnels. Just two years before, he constructed a 1-foot-by-1-foot wind tunnel for the Westinghouse Science Talent Search that earned him a visit to the White House as a finalist. But nothing could have […]

Research finds that even well-intentioned men who push back against overt sexism are still likely to engage in behavior that reinforces gender stereotypes.

European lawmakers have mandated that mobile devices (looking at you, Apple) must charge using the same standard connector cable.

Apple’s iOS 16 and macOS Ventura will introduce passwordless login for apps and websites. It’s only the beginning.

MongoDB claims its new “Queryable Encryption” lets users search their databases while sensitive data stays encrypted. Oh, and its cryptography is open source.

Jacquelyn Melinek / TechCrunch: Calaxy, which runs a marketplace for creators to mint and sell their social tokens, raises $26M in funding co-led by Animoca Brands and the HBAR Foundation  —  The success of websites like Cameo have shown that people want personalized interactions with celebrities and web3 companies …

Amrita Khalid / Engadget: IBM says it will wind down its business in Russia and lay off its workforce there, after suspending operations in the country in March  —  IBM will begin an “orderly” wind-down of its operations in Russia, according to a memo from CEO Arvind Krishna that was released publicly today.

Sheila Dang / Reuters: Internal meeting: Twitter aims to grow its mDAUs by 13M this quarter, the highest goal the company has ever set, and is currently on track with 8.5M users  —  Twitter (TWTR.N) is gearing up for its most ambitious quarter of user growth, leaders of the social media company’s consumer products …

Collin M. Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor in Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, has been named co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and associate director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), effective June 1. IMES is HST’s home at MIT. Stultz is […]

Alongside climate change, air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health. Tiny particles known as particulate matter or PM2.5 (named for their diameter of just 2.5 micrometers or less) are a particularly hazardous type of pollutant. These particles are produced from a variety of sources, including wildfires and the burning of […]

Sponsor content from Smartsheet.

Competitive advantages don’t last as long as they used to.

A conversation with Columbia Law School professor Kathryn Judge on the power of intermediaries like Amazon or Walmart.

Whether you’re hybrid or at the home office full-time, here’s what you can do to focus your energy, connect meaningfully, and use flexibility to your advantage.

From mechanical keyboards to the best home composter, we compiled the best Father’s Day gift guide … without a single tie or wallet on the list.

Let’s just say Amazon can send superheroes where Marvel can’t. We talked to the showrunner about how that scene from the third season opener came to be.

Jeff Kauflin / Forbes: A profile of Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments services provider valued at $2.2B in November, which had $75M+ in revenue in 2021, up over 4x YoY  —  A pair of twentysomethings from Uganda and Ghana thought there was a fortune to be made bringing transnational financial services to Africa’s 1.2 […]

Jon Porter / The Verge: EU lawmakers reach an agreement on legislation that will mandate USB-C on smartphones and other electronic devices, starting in autumn 2024, to reduce e-waste  —  A major blow to Apple’s Lightning port  —  European Union lawmakers have reached an agreement on legislation that will force …

Lukasz Olejnik / Wired: How Ukrainian civilians are helping the army using apps, blurring the lines between civilians and soldiers, raising questions of international humanitarian law  —  In Ukraine, civilians are valiantly assisting the army via apps—and challenging a tenet of international law in the process.

International trade exacerbates domestic income inequality, at least in some circumstances, according to an empirical study that two MIT economists helped co-author. The research, focusing on Ecuador as a case study, digs into individual-level income data while examining in close detail the connections between Ecuador’s economy and international trade. The study finds that trade generates […]

Researchers have pioneered a technique that can dramatically accelerate certain types of computer programs automatically, while ensuring program results remain accurate. Their system boosts the speeds of programs that run in the Unix shell, a ubiquitous programming environment created 50 years ago that is still widely used today. Their method parallelizes these programs, which means […]

The lock screen gets an all-new look in the iPhone’s upcoming update.

Apple has given a guided tour of macOS 13, which is nicknamed Ventura. Here’s what you’ll see on your Mac later this year.

The company has backed down on its proposal to address school shootings, but the damage was already done.

David Pilling / Financial Times: MFS Africa, a digital payments network in Africa, acquires Oklahoma-based Global Technology Partners, which makes prepaid and mobile payments software, for $34M  —  Deal by MFS Africa is further evolution of continent’s rapidly growing fintech scene  —  MFS Africa, a digital payments company …

Juli Clover / MacRumors: Apple introduces a Rapid Security Response feature in iOS 16 designed to deploy security fixes more easily and quickly without needing a full iOS version update  —  Apple in iOS 16 is introducing a new Rapid Security Response feature that’s designed to make it easier and quicker for the company to […]