Category: Uncategorized

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 […]

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 […]

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

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

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

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 …

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.

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

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.

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 …

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

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 […]

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 …

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

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

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.

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 […]

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

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 […]

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

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

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

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 …

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

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

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

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 …

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

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 …

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 […]

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.

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

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.

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

Chloe Xiang / VICE: A look at the community of users who “jailbreak” GPT models to generate unfiltered content and see themselves as fighting back against OpenAI’s closed policies  —  “The problem is when GPT-X is released and we are unable to discern its values since they are being decided behind the closed doors of […]

Wall Street Journal: Experts say some US suppliers plan to sidestep export controls by selling tech to the unlisted subsidiaries of Inspur and other Chinese firms on the Entity List  —  Suppliers can sell to unlisted subsidiaries of companies on Commerce Department list, officials say

Sure, anyone can use OpenAI’s chatbot. But with smart engineering, you can get way more interesting results.

High in the treetops of a Chinese rainforest, Ming Guo began to explore the influence of a single cell. A student in China’s Tsinghua University, Guo was studying the mechanical properties of plant cells. As part of his master’s thesis he took on an intriguing question: Does a cell’s physical integrity — its size, shape, […]

Joe Brock / Reuters: Sources: concerned about Chinese spying, the US helped SubCom win its $600M bid for an Asia-Europe subsea cable project through incentives and investor pressure  —  Subsea cables, which carry the world’s data, are now central to the U.S.-China tech war.  Washington, fearful of Beijing’s spies …

From charging adapters to external monitors, we’ve gathered the essential peripherals for your Apple laptop.

New tools like Adventure Game Studio are responsible for a thriving indie scene for the genre.

Anna Tong / Reuters: Replika restores erotic roleplay for users who signed up before February 1, after complaints from some who considered themselves “married” to chatbot companions  —  AI chatbot company Replika is restoring erotic roleplay for some users, Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda said late on Friday.

Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer: Microsoft releases Windows 10 Snip & Sketch and Windows 11 Snipping Tool updates to fix the “Acropalypse” bug that could expose info edited out in some images  —  Microsoft released an emergency security update for the Windows 10 and Windows 11 Snipping tool to fix the Acropalypse privacy vulnerability.

Plus new Framework laptops, and Europe drafts a law that would force companies to repair their products for up to 10 years.

Stratechery: Q&A with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI’s iPhone moment, the DGX Cloud service, the US’ export controls, Nvidia’s position in the stack in an LLM world, and more  —  I first spoke with Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang after last March’s GTC conference, and again after last fall’s GTC …

As climate change makes storms warmer and wetter, the state’s flood control system is struggling to keep up.

Irregular Ideas: LLMs will demolish barriers for software creation and unleash the next great technology cycle, marking a kind of Gutenberg moment for the software industry  —  There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT.