About: blatcho

If you mention Leslie Regan’s name to any alum of MIT’s mechanical engineering graduate program, their face will break into a smile. For nearly five decades, Regan’s kind, caring presence was a mainstay for thousands of mechanical engineering students. Now, after 47 years, Regan can reflect back on an impactful journey as she begins her […]

Sulafa Zidani is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program whose work focuses on digital culture: the social, political, and cultural dynamics in which technology operates and the role it plays in transnational power. She is working on her first book, which focuses on multilinguistic memes and centers the creators of these memes. […]

They leverage a vibrant mix of connection and action to advance high performers into leadership.

A model assessing their potential impact suggests manufacturers might flood the market with cheap goods, raise prices, or both.

Understanding consumers’ New Year’s resolutions can help you figure out how to attract them.

Your body generates enough energy to power wearables, medical sensors, and implanted devices—and tech designers are plugging in.

Expert players of the popular vehicular soccer game have been caught out by lesser players using a superhuman bot built on cutting-edge machine learning.

Focusing wasn’t much easier in the time before electricity or on-demand TV. In fact, you probably have a lot in common with these super-distracted monks.

Nate Freeman / Vanity Fair: A look at the art world’s deal-with-the-devil approach to the NFT market, after allegations that FTX bought the $24.4M trove of 107 Bored Apes NFTs at Sotheby’s  —  Auction houses and talent agencies thought the Web3 works were a fast track to billions.  If it weren’t for a global crypto […]

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch: Twitter launches Blue on Android for $11 per month, the same as iOS and $3 more than the web, after launching an annual subscription  —  A day after launching an annual Twitter Blue subscription, the social media company made the paid plan available for purchase for Android users today.

New York Times: Crypto investors say Sam Bankman-Fried frequently promoted and manipulated “Samcoins”, including Solana, Serum, FTT, and Maps, to benefit FTX and Alameda  —  Sam Bankman-Fried found ways to control the prices of digital coins to benefit his companies, FTX and Alameda, according to cryptocurrency investors.

An office chair fitted with sensors detects how you are sitting and uses artificial intelligence to classify it – the long-term aim is to tell you how to improve your posture

Pushing a shovel through snow, planting an umbrella on the beach, wading through a ball pit, and driving over gravel all have one thing in common: They all are exercises in intrusion, with an intruding object exerting some force to move through a soft and granular material. Predicting what it takes to push through sand, […]

There are discounts on vibrators, lube, and other accessories—it’s a great time to stock up for Valentine’s Day.

This Siri speaker comes with upgrades to audio quality and smart home automation—but yes, it’s still expensive.

Animal rights activists have captured the first hidden-camera video from inside a carbon dioxide “stunning chamber” in a US meatpacking plant.

Digiday: Similarweb: Twitter referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12% on average from November 2022 to December 2022; only traffic to NY Post and Fox News grew  —  Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter’s role as a traffic referral source to publishers’ sites is largely declining.

Mark Gurman / Bloomberg: Sources: Apple is working on an iPad-based smart display with smart home controls, video, and FaceTime and on a new Apple TV for H1 2024 with a faster processor  —  Apple Inc. is working on a slate of devices aimed at challenging Amazon.com Inc. and Google in the smart-home market …

Yoolim Lee / Bloomberg: Research: Southeast Asia online food delivery spending rose 5% YoY to $16.3B in 2022, the slowest in at least four years; Grab extended its lead with 54% of GMV  —  Southeast Asia’s food delivery spending grew at the slowest pace in at least four years in 2022, highlighting the challenges faced […]

White cotton can normally only be made fire resistant by adding toxic flame retardants, but a new form could enable us to make inherently non-flammable cotton fabrics

A drone has revealed information on the animals inhabiting a tree’s canopy simply by brushing against branches and collecting loose particles of environmental DNA with its sticky surfaces

Taking what they learned conceptually about artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) this year, students from across the Greater Boston area had the opportunity to apply their new skills to real-world industry projects as part of an experiential learning opportunity offered through Break Through Tech AI at MIT. Hosted by the MIT Schwarzman College of […]

After decades of fundamental scientific and drug discovery research, Alzheimer’s disease has remained inscrutable and incurable, with a bare minimum of therapeutic progress. But in a new review article in Nature Neuroscience, MIT scientists write that by employing the new research capability of single-cell profiling, the field has rapidly achieved long-sought insights with strong potential for both […]

True to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled every year since the 1960s. But this trajectory is predicted to soon plateau because silicon — the backbone of modern transistors — loses its electrical properties once devices made from this material dip below a certain size. Enter 2D materials — delicate, […]

Amid a looming economic downturn, employers can expect another tumultuous year.

Set your team up for success when hiring inevitably picks back up.

Seven strategies to engage, support, and connect.

Virtual landowners have found a way to put their investments to work, but with unintended consequences.

Some ski resorts rely on machines to keep powder on the slopes. But snow guns guzzle water, are energy-intensive, and need cool temperatures to operate.

A shortcut to going public, called a SPAC, helped early-stage tech companies raise money. Now some are suffering slumps.

Erin Woo / The Information: Source: Twitter manager Siddharth Rao told employees that daily revenue was 40% lower than a year earlier and more than 500 top advertisers have paused spending  —  A senior Twitter manager told employees that the company’s daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year ago […]

Bloomberg: After criticism from users, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky denies using customer projects to train the company’s generative AI services  —  Adobe Inc. Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said the company has never trained its generative artificial-intelligence services on customer projects …

Patrick McGee / Financial Times: As Apple shifts from China, experts worry India will struggle with iPhone production due to supply chain issues, labor woes, a lack of automation, and more  —  The tech giant increasingly finds itself beholden to America’s biggest geopolitical rival.  But is diversification even possible?

The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity. “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that […]

The company’s flagship laptops are more powerful than ever, and its tiny desktop computer is now cheaper.

Britishvolt promised investors it would be the cornerstone of the country’s battery industry. Now it faces bankruptcy.

Decades-old visa rules mean that job cuts disadvantage workers, companies, and perhaps the whole country.

Brian Heater / TechCrunch: Canalys: global smartphone shipments fell 17% YoY in Q4 2022, while FY 2022 shipments fell 11% YoY to fewer than 1.2B units, the lowest they’ve been since 2013  —  One of these days I’ll have some positive news to share about the global smartphone market.  Today is not that day.

Noam Scheiber / New York Times: Apple has agreed to hire a third-party firm to conduct an audit of its US labor practices, according to an investor coalition that has pushed for the assessment  —  The tech giant will assess its compliance with its official human rights policy, according to a federal filing.

Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer: Researchers demonstrate how threat actors can abuse GitHub Codespaces’ port forwarding feature to host and distribute malware and malicious scripts  —  Researchers have demonstrated how threat actors can abuse the GitHub Codespaces’ port forwarding’ feature to host and distribute malware and malicious scripts.

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the idea of a decentralised version of the internet that would give more power to ordinary users. Here’s what it would take to make it happen

Many planes have autopilots, but they can only be used in certain circumstances. Now Airbus is testing one that can choose the nearest safe airport, land a plane and even taxi to the terminal if pilots are incapacitated

A tool called GPTZero can identify whether text was produced by a chatbot, which could help teachers tell if students are getting AI to help with their homework

MIT graduate student Karenna Groff ’22 of Weston, Massachusetts, a member of the MIT women’s soccer team, was named the NCAA 2022 Woman of the Year at the NCAA Convention in San Antonio, Texas. The most prestigious honor awarded annually by the NCAA to a female student-athlete, Groff is the second MIT student-athlete to win the […]

The late MIT Professor Angelika Amon, renowned for her groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of how chromosomes are regulated and partitioned during cell division, was also beloved among the MIT community for her kind and supportive mentorship of students. An engaged and valued member of the MIT community, Amon passed away in late 2020 after […]

Christopher T. Walsh, a highly influential professor of chemical biology who was a former MIT faculty member and Department of Chemistry head, died on Jan. 10 at the age of 79. At the time of his death, Walsh was the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School, but […]

Sponsor content from BEARINGPOINT.

Studies have found January to be the least-productive month of the year.

A conversation with HBS’s Amy Edmondson and INSEAD’s Mark Mortensen on thinking beyond stock options, bonuses, and remote work privileges.

Technology, corporate greed, and supply-chain chaos are transforming life behind the wheel of a big rig. I went on the road to find exactly how.