About: blatcho

Experiments often yield unexpected results. In research and in life, MIT Associate Professor Cem Tasan has learned to embrace that uncertainty. “Very often we start with an idea or a hypothesis, and to test that idea we design experiments, and when we run the experiments, we see something totally different,” says Tasan, the newly tenured […]

We tried blow-dryers, brushes, and a machine that sucks up your locks like a vacuum. These are our top tools to dry your ‘do.

The perfect kitchen companion, these versatile blenders can whip up breakfast, dinner party dips, and everything in between.

Plus: Amazon Prime might roll out an ad-based tier, AI-powered ads land on LinkedIn, and there’s even more talk about face computers.

Platformer: Sources: Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bills as its contract ends on June 30, and is now planning to move off the platform altogether  —  Musk won’t pay his Google Cloud bill — and the company’s trust and safety systems are hanging in the balance

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: In a test, researchers find that 90%+ of 1,008 jokes generated by GPT-3.5 were not new but rather the same 25 jokes likely learned during the model’s training  —  When tested, “Over 90% of 1,008 generated jokes were the same 25 jokes.”  —  On Wednesday, two German researchers …

Bloomberg: As major US banks abandon crypto companies during an expanding crackdown, a look at the emergence of smaller regional US lenders and Swiss, Asian, and UK firms  —  Two months after the collapse of Silvergate Capital Corp. and Signature Bank, a new banking landscape for crypto companies …

Do you struggle to nod off or stay asleep through the night? These WIRED-tested tools can help.

Scientists are uncovering previously unknown species preserved in museum and botanical garden collections, only to find that they no longer exist in the wild.

Make the most of your future weekends with these discounted gadgets.

Bloomberg: A comparison between US data and 5,100 Stable Diffusion-generated images related to job title and crime finds the tool amplifies gender and racial stereotypes  —  Heather Hiles, chair of Black Girls Code  —  At Canva, whose visual communication platform has 125 million active users …

Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica: A look at Realtek’s lawsuit accusing MediaTek of paying a company a “bounty” to file meritless US patent lawsuits to drive Realtek out of the TV chip market  —  Lawsuit: Patent trolls created “harmful illusion” of unstable TV-chip market.  —  [Update, 8:10 pm ET …

Wall Street Journal: An interview with Gary Gensler after the SEC’s Binance and Coinbase lawsuits, which have existential stakes for the companies and could define Gensler’s legacy  —  Agency chair focuses enforcement power on exchanges after earlier failures to subdue industry  —  WASHINGTON—Gary Gensler had seen enough.

An analysis of over 800 hours of footage from busy pedestrian areas in Japan found that pairs of people that share stronger social bonds are less likely to physically bump into other people walking

From The Trial of the Chicago 7 to The Boys in the Band, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.

From Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story to Black Knight, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Deals to let GM and Ford EV owners use Tesla charging points show the EV maker turning its giant Supercharger network into a competitive advantage.

Emma Roth / The Verge: Microsoft adds voice mode to Bing Chat on desktop, letting users ask questions using their voice in English, Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin  —  Microsoft is bringing Bing’s voice mode to Edge on desktop.  With this latest update, you can now ask Bing’s chatbot questions using your voice …

Karissa Bell / Engadget: In an AMA about Reddit’s API changes, the company’s CEO said Reddit can’t “subsidize commercial entities”, criticized the Apollo developer’s behavior, and more  —  “We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive,” he said.  —  Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has finally spoken publicly …

Rosie Perper / CoinDesk: Kraken launches Kraken NFT, a marketplace with 250+ NFT collections across the Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon blockchains, after a beta started in November 2022  —  Now out of its public beta test, the platform has expanded to include over 250 NFT collections.

Robotic dogs do better than humans at identifying nests of invasive fire ants. The robots could be useful in helping eradicate an invasive species that packs a venomous sting

A new MIT Bootcamp brought 48 experienced and emerging innovators from six continents to campus as they learned how to scale their ventures. The Venture Advancement Program, which ended on May 12, was organized by MIT Open Learning and delivered a mix of lectures, workshops, and mentoring sessions from leading MIT academics and startup veterans. […]

Three Spanish MIT postdocs, Luis Antonio Benítez, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, and Fernando Romero López, were chosen by the Department of Physics as the first cohort of Mauricio and Carlota Botton Foundation Fellows. This year’s recipients are provided with a one-year stipend and a research fund to pursue their research interests; they will visit the Botton Foundation […]

The MIT biology community recently welcomed eight postdocs — Catalyst Fellows — to campus as part of the inaugural Catalyst Symposium.  Catalysts speed up reactions, and the symposium aims to accelerate progress in inclusive diversity — not just at MIT, but at top research institutions across the country, according to Professor Amy Keating, head of the Department […]

Sponsor content from Zoho.

Start by understanding what the technology can do, then explore how it can be used to solve problems.

Reframe your company’s past in a way that creates advantages for the present.

It thrusts, it vibrates, and it does it all in a ton of positions. But it has a price tag to match.

The company’s quest to unseat Garmin continues with a new fullscreen cycling mode and other navigation features.

When it opened at Universal Studios Hollywood in 1996, it was the single most expensive thrill ride of all time. A look back at whether it was all worth it.

Natasha Singer / New York Times: The Khan Lab School trials Khanmigo, an AI chatbot developed by Khan Academy to simulate one-on-one tutoring, one of the first such experiments in the US  —  Proponents see the tools as a way to automatically customize academic support.  They could also make children test subjects for A.I. experiments.

Jon Porter / The Verge: Spotify is testing a new feature called Your Offline Mix, which will automatically save a mix of users’ recently played songs for offline listening  —  / The playlist is described in the app as ‘a mix of recently played songs for when the vibe is high but your connection is […]

Brian Krebs / Krebs on Security: Barracuda asked its Email Security Gateway customers on June 6 to replace infected appliances immediately, after patching a zero-day vulnerability on May 20  —  It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission …

When MIT’s mini cheetah perfectly executed a backflip on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the audience screamed and applauded wildly. If this machine — which also pranced around the stage like a show dog and stretched in several different directions — could perform such a difficult maneuver, one that is impossible for most humans, […]

Water surging from the broken Ukrainian dam is killing animals, destroying habitats, and unleashing pollution. The effects may be irreversible.

The Clearing  and The Bear are just two of the shows you won’t want to miss on this streaming service.

Silicon Valley’s preeminent venture capitalist tries to craft the ur-narrative for generative AI, and in doing so lays bare its contradictions.

Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE: Blackpoint Cyber, which offers managed cybersecurity detection and response services, raised a $190M Series C led by Bain Capital with participation from Accel  —  Blackpoint Cyber, a startup that provides managed cybersecurity services using an internally developed software platform, has raised $190 million in fresh funding.

Ryan Weeks / The Block: Hong Kong-based Taiko Labs, which is focused on scaling Ethereum, raised a $10M seed led by Sequoia China and a $12M pre-Series A led by Generative Ventures  —  – Taiko Labs raised two rounds led by Sequoia China and Generative Ventures, respectively.  — The startup is building a Type 1 […]

Emily Chang / Bloomberg: Evan Williams says he was “sad” when Elon Musk bought Twitter after thinking the idea was “interesting and fun” and Musk hasn’t “dialed it in quite right yet”  —  Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who watched Elon Musk’s advances on the company in 2022 with great interest …

The much hyped social media app Bluesky is meant to be doing things differently, but can its approach to content moderation really build a new social sphere, asks Annalee Newitz

Rise of the robotic avatar: Meet the chess-playing robot, security androids and fusion reactor robotics at the cutting edge of avatar technology

Chemical “upcycling,” or converting plastics into higher-value products, to the left. Materials that repair damage and restore themselves to the right. Straight ahead: fibers that can be woven into fabrics and used as microphones or loudspeakers. Such was the varied innovation that crowded MIT’s Morss Hall on Polymer Day 2023. Sixty-four teams from schools throughout […]

Suzanne Freeman and Mariel Garcia-Montes are the recipients of this year’s Jeanne Guillemin Prize at the Center for International Studies (CIS). The prize provides financial support to women studying international affairs, a field that has long been dominated by men. Jeanne Guillemin, a veteran colleague at CIS, endowed the fund shortly before her death in 2019. […]

There has been a remarkable surge in the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence to address a wide range of problems and challenges. While their adoption, particularly with the rise of AI, is reshaping nearly every industry sector, discipline, and area of research, such innovations often expose unexpected consequences that involve new norms, new expectations, […]

Companies need to think about how employees will cooperate with AI systems — and how they will compete against them, too.

To fight cybercriminals, governments and companies need a clear and centralized view of where and how they operate.

Less effort can actually lead to more success.

Whether you use ChatGPT, Bard, or Bing, your favorite AI chatbots can help your application stand out from the crowd.

Actuators inspired by cucumber plants could make robots move more naturally in response to their environments, or be used for devices in inhospitable places.