Category: Uncategorized

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

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 …

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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.

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

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

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 …

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. […]

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 […]

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

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

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, […]

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.

This week, we learn what it’s like to wear and use Apple’s Vision Pro headset. Also, we round up the rest of the news from WWDC.

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

Matt Levine / Bloomberg: A look at what the SEC and crypto industry learned from the SEC’s ICO enforcement actions in 2017, why the SEC is targeting only select tokens, and more  —  SEC v. crypto exchanges  —  The US Securities and Exchange Commission began cracking down on crypto in 2017.

Ewen MacAskill / The Guardian: On the 10th anniversary of his revelations, Edward Snowden says he has “no regrets” and “2013 seems like child’s play” versus current surveillance capabilities  —  But whistleblower says 2013 surveillance ‘child’s play’ compared to technology today

Yoko Kubota / Wall Street Journal: The Cyberspace Administration of China plans tighter controls on AirDrop and similar tools, after their use by protestors in China and Hong Kong in recent years  —  Services enabling instant mass communication without internet access face scrutiny after they were used by protesters

Brain organoids could be more effective than silicon-based AIs at certain tasks. But as they grow more complex, when should we step in to protect their welfare, asks Michael Le Page

Aviation’s huge carbon footprint could shrink significantly with electrification. To date, however, only small all-electric planes have gotten off the ground. Their electric motors generate hundreds of kilowatts of power. To electrify larger, heavier jets, such as commercial airliners, megawatt-scale motors are required. These would be propelled by hybrid or turbo-electric propulsion systems where an […]

Protestors acting against repressive regimes face a particular problem: The tools they use to organize demonstrations can also be deployed to repress their actions. For instance, when citizens communicate on the internet to plan a protest, a ruling regime can access that information and be ready to break up the demonstration. Then what? What happens […]

AlphaDev has made small but significant improvements to decades-old C++ algorithms. Its builders say that’s just the start.

Toxic workplace allegations, an uncertain Microsoft acquisition, labor disputes—Activision Blizzard has had a bleak few years.

Ash Parrish / The Verge: Twitch walks back new branded content guidelines it released on June 6 and calls them “bad” for streamers and the company, after swift backlash from creators  —  / ‘These guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch, and we are removing them immediately.’

Mike Wheatley / SiliconANGLE: Digibee, a low-code service that helps enterprises build integration workflows, raised a $60M Series B led by Goldman Sachs, taking its total funding to $90M+  —  Low-code enterprise integration platform provider Digibee Inc. said today it has closed on a $60 million round of funding.

These are some of our favorite stands, cases, keyboards, and Pencils, no matter which Apple tablet you have.

Sorting algorithms are basic functions used constantly by computers around the world, so an improved one created by an artificial intelligence could make millions of programs run faster

Samrhitha Arunasalam / Reuters: GameStop fires CEO Matt Furlong two years after hiring him and appoints chairman and majority shareholder Ryan Cohen as its executive chairman; GME drops 15%+  —  June 7 (Reuters) – GameStop (GME.N) fired CEO Matt Furlong two years after hiring him and appointed billionaire Ryan Cohen as executive chairman …

With about 200 family members, alumni, faculty, staff, and fellow students looking on, the MIT Latinx Graduate Students Association (LGSA), Latino Cultural Center (LCC), and Latino Alumni of MIT (LAMIT) held the inaugural MIT Latinx Graduation on May 31 at the MIT Media Lab. The celebration acknowledges and honors the achievements of Latinx students graduating from MIT […]

When MIT.nano opened in 2018 in Building 12, now the Lisa T. Su Building, it became the new home at MIT for suites of nanoscale characterization and fabrication equipment, including those previously housed in Building 39. And when a core team of people moved along with these tools and instruments, MIT.nano also became the repository […]

Threats to lifelong mental health can arise for young children from sources including poverty, abuse or neglect at home, and racism, inequity, and pollution outside their doors, but the hopeful message that a range of experts brought to MIT on May 11 was that amid these many risks, approaches to provide effective protections and remedies […]

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