About: blatcho

MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today. The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that […]

MIT physicists have taken a key step toward solving the puzzle of what leads electrons to split into fractions of themselves. Their solution sheds light on the conditions that give rise to exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional systems. The new work is an effort to make sense of a discovery that was reported […]

Amy G thought the demands would ease up. Instead, they’ve just changed.

Companies can address environmental challenges for society while delivering immediate economic benefits for themselves.

A leader who’s on track for the C-suite learns how to choose between her career purpose and her potential.

Jump on the early Black Friday sales with these WIRED Gear team-approved mattresses, mattress pads, sheets, and more.

The Biden administration chose to target only companies developing frontier AI models in China. But Trump could take a more sweeping approach.

There are many open questions regarding how the new Trump administration will handle economic policies. Some leaders of the repairability movement aren’t all that worried about it.

Sarah E. Needleman / Wall Street Journal: Roblox rolls out parental controls and gatekeeping features, like letting parents link accounts with a child and banning text chat for under 13s outside games  —  Videogame company has denied the allegations and says the new protections were planned before a short seller’s report

Parmy Olson / Bloomberg: Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt begins an early trial of its digital wallet in Belgium to help deliver social services to 7M citizens, as he worries over AI’s rise  —  The inventor of the World Wide Web is on a laudable mission to give everyone control of their online data.  He’s fighting an […]

New York Times: How Substack is betting on politics content and recruiting stars like Nate Silver, as profits remain elusive; sources: Elon Musk sought to buy it in April 2023  —  The newsletter start-up, which once drew an overture from Elon Musk, is betting on politics content and recruiting stars.

The modular phone concept returns and it’s rather boring.

Diving into virtual reality is easier than ever—but here are a few key things to know.

If you use screens for work and play, your child probably does too. These are the best pairs we’ve bought and tested for our own kids.

Bloomberg: Sources: Trump’s transition team is looking for candidates to lead the US Department of Transportation and develop a federal framework for autonomous vehicles  —  – Policy leaders are being pursued for key Musk priority  — Tesla CEO, named to efficiency role, plans push on robotaxis

Nextgov/FCW: Sources: CISA’s director Jen Easterly and deputy director Nitin Natarajan plan to leave the agency on January 20, 2025, the day Trump will be inaugurated  —  Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly speaks during Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2024 on February 7, 2024.

Tom Carreras / CoinDesk: An interview with El Salvador’s top crypto regulator Juan Carlos Reyes on taking a tech-minded approach to crypto regulation, how his agency works, and more  —  The National Commission of Digital Assets is the agency in charge of regulating crypto in El Salvador, the first nation to accept Bitcoin as legal […]

Dijkstra’s algorithm was long thought to be the most efficient way to find a graph’s best routes. Researchers have now proven that it’s “universally optimal.”

Check out our deals for Nike this month, including up to 60% off with our coupon code.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica: Q&A with Jakob Uszkoreit on his contribution to the Attention Is All You Need paper, Google’s conservatism, ChatGPT’s success, biological computers, and more  —  In 2017, eight machine-learning researchers at Google released a groundbreaking research paper called Attention Is All You Need …

Federal Trade Commission: The US FTC’s DNC Registry data shows the agency received ~1.1M consumer complaints about robocalls in FY 2024, down from ~1.2M in FY 2023 and 3.4M+ in FY 2021  —  FTC releases annual Do Not Call Registry Data Book showing total reports about unwanted calls decreased further in 2024

GovTech: US DHS issues guidance on adopting AI in critical infrastructure, identifying AI-driven attacks, targeted attacks on AI systems, and design flaws as core risks  —  A new series of recommendations from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is designed to enable cloud providers, AI developers …

Yiming Chen ’24, Wilhem Hector, Anushka Nair, and David Oluigbo have been selected as 2025 Rhodes Scholars and will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. In addition to MIT’s two U.S. Rhodes winners, Ouigbo and Nair, two affiliates were awarded international Rhodes Scholarships: Chen for Rhodes’ China constituency and […]

Unravel the tangled world of cords and find the ones you need to charge your gadgets and transfer data.

From headphones and speakers to accessories for their vinyl LPs, these picks will appeal to any audio aficionado.

The JubileeTV is a set-top box and camera for seniors that offers remote tech support, video calls, and medication reminders.

Bloomberg: Netflix says 60M households watched the Paul vs. Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65M concurrent streams  —  – Mike Tyson and Jake Paul faced off in heavily anticipated bout  — Users complained on social media of difficulty watching fight

Ben Quinn / The Guardian: FOIA docs show Palantir has been in talks with the UK’s Ministry of Justice about using its tech to calculate the “reoffending risks” of prisoners  —  Exclusive: Rights group expresses concerns as it emerges US spy tech company has been lobbying UK ministers

Wall Street Journal: Ukraine’s drone suppliers are using US-based Auterion’s tech to ramp up production of automated attack drones that are cheap and can evade electronic jamming  —  Kyiv’s drone suppliers are ramping up production of computer-guided drones that are cheap and can’t be electronically jammed

Emilia Pérez, Woman of the Hour, and Will & Harper are just a few of the movies you should watch on Netflix this month.

The Diplomat, Heartstopper, and Arcane are just a few of the shows you need to watch on Netflix this month.

Five minutes a day on an AI-enabled exercise bike really can keep the doctor away.

Nandagopal Rajan / The Indian Express: An interview with Apple’s Tim Millet and Tom Boger on Apple’s chip strategy, making big changes to the Neural Engine after the 2017 transformer paper, and more  —  ‘No other platform can touch our power performance per watt.  That’s the tangible benefit to users,’ Tom Boger, Vice President of […]

ProPublica: Investigation: Microsoft offered the US government free cybersecurity upgrades in 2021, increasing government reliance on Microsoft due to high switching costs  —  – Raising the Bar: President Joe Biden asked tech companies to “raise the bar on cybersecurity.”

Dominic Patten / Deadline: Many Netflix viewers faced issues while watching the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight and the undercard bouts, including the stream glitching and losing sound  —  From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to […]

Attempts to prevent Australian children from accessing social media are likely to fail, and could do more harm than good

Why wait? Our favorite tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, and other outdoor gear are on sale now.

Two recent studies offer some of the most nuanced evidence yet about the potential benefits and risks of working on your feet.

Want to digitally control your favorite instruments? These tools will help.

Shakeel Hashim / Transformer: New emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI show Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever had serious concerns about Sam Altman as early as 2017  —  New emails released as part of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI reveal that the company’s fondness of drama is hardly new.

Shirin Ghaffary / Bloomberg: One year after Sam Altman was dramatically ousted and reinstated, OpenAI remains dominant as it continues to push ahead on impressive new products  —  The ChatGPT maker is still the company to beat in AI despite going through a turbulent period.  —  One year after Sam Altman’s dramatic …

Ari Levy / CNBC: Palantir stock jumps 9% after announcing a move from the NYSE to the Nasdaq; its stock is up 50%+ since reporting better-than-expected earnings on November 4  —  Palantir shares continued their torrid run on Friday, soaring 11% to a record, after the developer of software for the military announced plans …

Letting AI models communicate with each other in their internal mathematical language, rather than translating back and forth to English, could accelerate their task-solving abilities

At age 22, aerospace engineer Eric Shaw worked on some of the world’s most powerful airplanes, yet learning to fly even the smallest one was out of reach. Just out of college, he could not afford civilian flight school and spent the next two years saving $12,000 to earn his private pilot’s license. Shaw knew […]

To fend off the worst impacts of climate change, “we have to decarbonize, and do it even faster,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Annual Research Conference. “But how the heck do we actually achieve this goal when […]

J-PAL North America recently selected government partners for the 2024-25 Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) Evaluation Incubator cohort. Selected collaborators will receive funding and technical assistance to develop or launch a randomized evaluation for one of their programs. These collaborations represent jurisdictions across the United States and demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for evidence-based […]

Alliances with national governments are no longer enough.

Advanced AI can learn how seasoned experts make decisions and perform tasks that used to require specialized knowledge.

Take advantage of the momentum of the holidays to foster deeper connections that carry into the new year.

Users frustrated with Elon Musk’s handling of X and closeness to president-elect Donald Trump are fleeing to Bluesky—an easier migration than leaving the US.