About: blatcho

Researchers in Kotzebue, Alaska, are investigating why their town is increasingly playing host to harmful cyanobacteria.

Yes, you can send texts in blue bubbles—and knock your friends with iPhones off their high horses.

Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab: Google Search changes could significantly decrease publishers’ traffic and affiliate revenue, but the Perspectives section may highlight individual journalists  —  A shift to AI-generated search results will decrease the traffic that Google sends to publishers’ sites, as more people …

Guy Chazan / Financial Times: Germany plans to spend billions to subsidize its chip industry and secure the “oil of the 21st century”, as some believe the move does not make economic sense  —  The Scholz government is spending billions subsidising the country’s semiconductor industry.  Some believe it does not make economic sense

Will Douglas Heaven / MIT Technology Review: The open-source AI boom is precarious because it is built on top of giant models like LLaMA and GPT-3, and could collapse if Meta and OpenAI decide to shut shop  —  Greater access to the code behind generative models is fueling innovation.  But if top companies get spooked, […]

Ring in their special milestone with useful gadgets, outdoor gear, subscriptions, and modern conveniences.

From The Two Popes to Zombieland, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on.

From Queer Eye to The Dragon Prince, these are our picks for the best streaming titles to binge this week.

Echo Wang / Reuters: Sources: e-commerce marketing platform Klaviyo confidentially files for a US IPO; source: the firm seeks to raise $750M+; Klaviyo was valued at ~$9.5B in 2021  —  Data and marketing automation firm Klaviyo Inc confidentially submitted paperwork on Friday with U.S. regulators for an initial public offering …

Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch: Autonomous delivery startup Nuro will lay off 30% of its workforce, or ~340 people, as part of a restructuring; Nuro laid off 20% of its staff in November 2022  —  Autonomous delivery robot startup Nuro will lay off 30%, or about 340 employees, across the company as part of a restructuring […]

Nilesh Christopher / Rest of World: Current and former employees say Foxconn has hired ~10K contract workers in Chennai, India, since November 2022, paying between ~$190 and ~$225 per month  —  Every Saturday, a clutch of engineering colleges in south India turn into venues for walk-in interviews for Apple contract manufacturers.

While Google and other tech giants are rolling out new AI products at speed, the European Union is working on a law to restrict them

Immune checkpoint blockade therapies have been revolutionary in the treatment of some cancer types, emerging as one of the most promising treatments for diseases such as melanoma, colon cancer, and non-small cell lung cancer.   While in some cases checkpoint blockade therapies elicit a strong immune response that clears tumors, checkpoint inhibitors do not work for […]

A computational tool developed by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change pinpoints specific counties within the United States that are particularly vulnerable to economic distress resulting from a transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy sources. By combining county-level data on employment in fossil fuel (oil, natural […]

Four researchers with ties to MIT have been named Schmidt Science Fellows this year. Lillian Chin ’17, SM ’19; Neil Dalvie PD ’22, PhD ’22; Suong Nguyen, and Yirui Zhang SM ’19, PhD ’23 are among the 32 exceptional early-career scientists worldwide chosen to receive the prestigious fellowships. “History provides powerful examples of what happens […]

Don’t get left behind while competitors continue to invest in virtual environments.

Three strategies that will help you save your accounts.

Historically, tech leaders have assumed that the better a human can understand an algorithm, the less accurate it will be. But is there always a tradeoff?

This week, we recap all the news from Google I/O and discuss how the company is reshaping its core business with generative tools.

Andrew Rummer / The Block: Local media: a Montenegro court plans to release Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon from jail after accepting a €400,000 bail, pending a trial  —  – Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon is set to be freed from jail pending trial after a court agreed to a €400,000 ($436,000) bail …

Financial Times: Document: the EU plans a €45M internet cable in the Black Sea to improve connectivity to Georgia and reduce its “dependency” on lines running through Russia  —  Move to improve connectivity to Georgia amid global concerns over spying and sabotage

Reuters: Toyota says the vehicle data of 2.15M users in Japan, or almost all of its cloud service customers, has been public since November 2013 due to a human error  —  Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) said on Friday the vehicle data of 2.15 million users in Japan, or almost the entire customer base …

New findings from a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere could help pave the way for new kinds of devices that efficiently bridge the gap between matter and light. These might include computer chips that eliminate inefficiencies inherent in today’s versions, and qubits, the basic building blocks for quantum computers, that could operate at […]

Most people don’t grasp every reference in the MIT Press publisher logo, or “colophon,” at first glance. The symbol’s vertical lines are straightforward enough, but understanding what they represent requires the mind to fill in some gaps. The lines create a lowercase m-i-t-p. They are made to look like book spines on a shelf. But […]

The Great  and Class of ’09 are just two of the shows you won’t want to miss on this streaming service.

Every year, thousands of pets develop tumors very similar to those found in people. Find drugs that work for canines, and human treatments should follow.

Nintendo’s latest was never going to beat Breath of the Wild at its own game, but that’s not the point. What it brings to the table is more than enough.

Wall Street Journal: Sources: NBCUniversal’s head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is in talks to become the new CEO of Twitter  —  Twitter owner Elon Musk said earlier he had picked a new chief executive, without naming the person  —  NBCUniversal’s head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is in talks to become …

Ryan Dinsdale / IGN: Riot Games names its global president A. Dylan Jadeja as the company’s new CEO starting later in 2023, succeeding Nicolo Laurent, who will stay on as an advisor  —  Succeeding Nicolo Laurent.  —  IGN can reveal that Riot Games global president A. Dylan Jadeja will succeed Nicolo Laurent as the company’s […]

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: Anthropic expands Claude’s context window from 9K to 100K tokens, or ~75K words it can digest and analyze; OpenAI’s GPT-4 has a context window of ~32K tokens  —  Historically and even today, poor memory has been an impediment to the usefulness of text-generating AI.

Solar-powered balloons floating 20 kilometres above ground have recorded inaudible low-frequency signals that have so far not been traced back to any known source

Artificial intelligence systems will do what you ask but not necessarily what you meant. The challenge is to make sure they act in line with human’s complex, nuanced values

The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 members and 23 international members, including five faculty members from MIT. Joshua Angrist, Gang Chen, Catherine Drennan, Dina Katabi, and Gregory Stephanopoulos were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Membership to the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest […]

J-PAL North America is embarking on a year-long planning period to advance racial equity in its work. Throughout this year, J-PAL North America will develop a strategic vision for how to effectively and intentionally prioritize research that addresses racial equity. This includes developing guidance to determine when and how randomized evaluations can advance research related […]

Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine.  A glimpse into a linguistic world,  Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as […]

Conversations with a video artist and innovation researchers about the new technology.

Sponsor content from AXIOS HQ.

Complying with FedRAMP is worth the investment.

Three states are suing to block security rules for water facilities. If they win, it may open the floodgates for challenges to other cyber rules.

The company’s pricey new Pixel Fold probably won’t sell in huge numbers. But Google still wins.

Growing fleets, fancier sensors, and tighter budgets are forcing autonomous vehicle developers to get pickier about what stays on their servers.

Reuters: EU lawmakers agree to ban facial recognition in public, limit predictive policing, and impose transparency on generative AI; EU Commission will finalize details  —  European lawmakers came a step closer to passing new rules regulating artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT …

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Australian edtech startup Go1 acquires Berlin-based Blinkist, which offers 15-minute non-fiction book summaries, and raised $30M from Insight Partners  —  After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian ed-tech startup Go1 is making an acquisition …

Bloomberg: Tech firms are increasingly hiring in South and Central America because remote hires there often accept lower pay than in the US but have similar time zones  —  Pandemic-era labor shortages made it hard for Austin-based Fetch Package Inc. to fill positions in the US.

In the countryside of northern Ghana, there is not much evidence of government in action. There are few paved roads, state buildings, or law enforcement officials. It is easy to think the state lacks the resources to control much of anything in such places.  “In the rural periphery of the developing world, we tend to […]

From new mobile hardware and AI enhancements to search and productivity tools, here are the key takeaways from the May 10 presentation.

From generative wallpapers to chatbot-enabled text messaging, your next Android phone will get a boost from Google’s tools powered by artificial intelligence.

This folding smartphone costs $1,799. It has two screens, five cameras, and a few unique software tricks.

Jennifer Maas / Variety: Disney Q2: Disney+ subscribers were down 2% QoQ to 157.8M, vs. 163.17M est., its second consecutive quarterly drop; ESPN+ rose 2% QoQ to 25.3M, Hulu hit 48.2M  —  On the bright side, the Mouse House also managed to narrow its streaming business losses by $400 million, down 26% year over year.

Tracy Wang / CoinDesk: Filings: the US Internal Revenue Service filed claims worth nearly $44B against FTX companies, including a $20.4B claim against Alameda in partnership taxes  —  The largest of the claims includes a $20.4 billion claim against Alameda Research LLC, which details nearly $20 billion in unpaid partnership taxes.