About: blatcho

As technology like facial recognition becomes more pervasive, companies need to prioritize privacy and security.

All-Clad’s stick lets you blend things that are far away from a power outlet. That may not be a good reason to buy it.

To keep up with the speed of AI advances, we need to develop systems that use AI to defend public goods, too.

Ice can trap pollutants and accelerate their breakdown, with troubling environmental consequences.

Sam Reynolds / CoinDesk: A US court rules bZx protocol meets the definition of a general partnership and finds token holders of the DAO liable for losses from a $55M hack in 2021  —  Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are beginning to look like general partnerships in the eyes of U.S. courts.

Reuters: The UK CMA launches an in-depth probe, which can take up to six months, of Broadcom’s $69B VMware acquisition, after Broadcom failed to address concerns  —  Britain said it would investigate Broadcom’s (AVGO.O) acquisition of VMware (VMW.N) in depth after the U.S. chipmaker offered …

Delphine Strauss / Financial Times: Goldman Sachs research: generative AI could increase annual global GDP by 7% over a 10-year period and expose 300M full-time jobs to automation globally  —  Technology could boost global GDP by 7% but also risks creating ‘significant disruption’  —  The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence …

When multiple drones are working together in the same airspace, perhaps spraying pesticide over a field of corn, there’s a risk they might crash into each other. To help avoid these costly crashes, MIT researchers presented a system called MADER in 2020. This multiagent trajectory-planner enables a group of drones to formulate optimal, collision-free trajectories. […]

Jeremy C. Owens / MarketWatch: Micron reports Q2 revenue of $3.69B, vs. $3.71B est., down from $7.79B YoY, and a record net loss of $2.31B due to an inventory write-down of $1.43B  —  Chip company writes off more than $1.4 billion in inventory as sales get chopped in half and memory-chip market melts down …

Malathi Nayak / Bloomberg: A US federal judge finds Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation over its Play Store policies  —  Alphabet Inc.’s Google flouted a court order requiring it to save records of employee chats in antitrust litigation …

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Cerebras open sources seven GPT-based LLMs, ranging from 111M to 13B parameters and trained using its Andromeda supercomputer for AI, on GitHub and Hugging Face  —  Artificial intelligence chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. today announced it has trained and now released seven GPT-based large language models …

A method for mixing glass particles into a soft material, folding the mixture like origami, then applying heat to melt it can be used to build beautifully folded glass structures

When Joy Domingo-Kameenui spent two weeks in her native Hawaii as part of MIT class 1.091 (Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences), she was surprised to learn about the number of invasive and endangered species. “I knew about Hawaiian ecology from middle and high school but wasn’t fully aware to the extent of how invasive species and […]

Team Training Workshop (TTW) is the cornerstone event for students in MIT’s Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), bringing students and alumni mentors together over three exciting sessions for an experiential learning experience that feels like summer camp. UPOP is a yearlong academic course for MIT sophomores that aids their professional development and helps them prepare […]

Probabilistic machine learning methods are becoming increasingly powerful tools in data analysis, informing a range of critical decisions across disciplines and applications, from forecasting election results to predicting the impact of microloans on addressing poverty. This class of methods uses sophisticated concepts from probability theory to handle uncertainty in decision-making. But the math is only […]

Questions to ask — and red flags to look out for — in your next interview.

A conversation with Astro Teller on taking big swings and accepting the mess.

Can BMW convince stakeholders that its strategy is good for the environment and the company’s financial performance?

Stop fumbling for cables in the dark. These WIRED-tested stands and pads will take the hassle out of refueling your phone, wireless earbuds, and watch.

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist on the tendency to keep tabs open and the desire to reduce the infinite possibilities of the internet.

Startups and investors are rushing to build networks of charging stations. But it’s still unclear when—or if—battery-powered  big rigs will rule the roads.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: Venti Technologies, which develops autonomous vehicle tech for industrial and logistical hubs, raised a $28.8M Series A led by LG Technology Ventures  —  We are still likely many years away from wide-scale deployment — let alone adoption — of fully autonomous vehicles on our streets …

Lauren Kaori Gurley / Washington Post: CWA files NLRB charges alleging that Apple fired five union organizers in Kansas City in retaliation, the first such charges the union has filed against Apple  —  The workers, who were disciplined and fired for attendance-related issues, believe they were let go because of their union organizing

Zhou Xin / South China Morning Post: Alibaba plans to reorganize its businesses into six independent entities and devolve operational decisions to each unit’s CEO, in its biggest restructuring ever  —  Alibaba Group Holding will overhaul its sprawling operations, as China’s largest technology conglomerate undertakes …

Despite the many advantages of concrete as a modern construction material, including its high strength, low cost, and ease of manufacture, its production currently accounts for approximately 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Recent discoveries by a team at MIT have revealed that introducing new materials into existing concrete manufacturing processes could significantly reduce […]

New research shows that seabirds’ ingestion of the pollutant scars their insides—a new disease called “plasticosis”—and may disturb their microbiomes.

Jeremy Hill / Bloomberg: Filing: a federal judge grants the US government’s request to temporarily halt Voyager’s bankruptcy plan, putting its proposed ~$1B sale to Binance.US on hold  —  A federal judge granted the US government’s request to temporarily halt Voyager Digital Ltd.’s bankruptcy plan …

Binance Blog: Binance CEO CZ says CFTC’s complaint contains “incomplete recitation of facts” and Binance does not agree with “characterization of many of the issues alleged”  —  Today, the CFTC filed an unexpected and disappointing civil complaint, despite our working cooperatively with the CFTC for over two years.

Fiona Alston / Tech.eu: Germany-based OQmented, which is developing laser beam scanning tech for displays in AR/MR glasses, raised a $20M Series A from Sharp Devices Europe and others  —  The German firm’s ultra-compact MEMS-based laser beam scanning projection display systems for AR glasses has come into focus as tech giant Sharp invests

At age 9, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro SM ’20, PhD ’22 was preoccupied with down-to-earth problems, such as devising an alternative to her father’s messy, paper Filofax organizer, and fixing the unreliable electric service plaguing her home of Owerri, Nigeria. Could she have imagined a path-breaking, 17-year career at NASA, followed by a position as the nation’s […]

During its first in-person gathering since 2020, MIT’s Festival of Learning 2023 explored how the learning sciences can inform the Institute on how to best support students. Co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor (OVC), this annual event celebrates teaching and learning innovations with MIT instructors, students, and staff. Bror […]

Instead of just responding to requests, anticipate people’s needs.

Three common fears that hold them back — and how to overcome them.

HBR’s advice columnist offers three research-backed approaches to try.

These powered speakers work well for both TV and vinyl in my modern living room.

The latest online shopping trend: paying to watch someone pack your order.

Startups say Microsoft and its Bing chatbot—not just Google—are stifling competition when it comes to creating better search engines.

Bloomberg: Huawei says it has built tools to design chips as advanced as 14nm, about four generations behind the latest available, to help Chinese firms replace US tech  —  Huawei Technologies Co. has developed software tools capable of designing chips as advanced as 14 nanometers …

Reuters: Sources: Jack Ma returned to China after more than a year; sources: China Premier Li Qiang urged Ma to return since late 2022 to allay private sector fears  —  Alibaba (9988.HK) founder Jack Ma has returned to China, ending a stay overseas of more than a year that industry viewed as reflecting …

Richard Milne / Financial Times: Ammo maker Nammo says its growth is hit by a TikTok data center using all spare electricity, as energy demand from data centers and others grows in the Nordics  —  Norwegian group Nammo blames ‘storage of cat videos’ for threatening its growth as data centre corners spare electricity

You may have seen these images of Pope Francis looking stylish in a puffer jacket on social media, but you might not have realised they were created by the artificial intelligence tool Midjourney

Parents receiving an autism diagnosis for their child can be overwhelmed with emotions and questions. What does the diagnosis mean? How should they support their child? Who should they tell? For the past six years, MIT undergraduate students have worked to help individuals and families navigate those challenges by collaborating with Boston Medical Center’s Autism […]

Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf PhD ’81 made a forthright call for integrity and the expression of a common purpose in politics, while accepting the Institute’s 2023 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) on March 21. Government, Wolf suggested in his acceptance lecture, is a form […]

The field of public health has transformed medicine, yet failed the most vulnerable. This trajectory can be avoided.

ProPublica: A look at OBNbrandon, a prolific scammer in a booming community focused on banning influencers’ Instagram accounts and demanding payment for reactivation  —  Just after midnight on Sept. 13, Kristian “Murda” Murphy was watching TV at home in Boca Raton, Florida, when his phone began buzzing.

New York Times: Filing: some Twitter source code was leaked by a user called “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub, which took it down to comply with a DMCA notice sent on Friday  —  The leak adds to the challenges facing the Elon Musk-owned company, which is trying to unmask the person responsible and any other people who […]

MacKenzie Sigalos / CNBC: A profile of Atlanta-based Yellow Card, Africa’s largest centralized crypto exchange, which has done ~$1.75B in transactions since 2019 and raised $57M  —  – Yellow Card is the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange in Africa.  — For its nearly 1.4 million users across the continent …

A material made from two forms of cellulose, which is found in wood, reflects heat and can be made in a variety of colours

This fat-tire electric bike is more refined than before and still an affordable (if heavy) way to get around town.

The neocortex is the seat of human intellect. New data suggests that mammals created it with new types of cells only after their evolutionary split from reptiles.