Category: Uncategorized

You can now use select Alexa speakers to expand the Wi-Fi coverage of your routers. Let us walk you through how.

Students and professors can’t decide whether the AI chatbot is a research tool—or a cheating engine.

Demetri Sevastopulo / Financial Times: Sources: the US Department of Commerce told some companies it would no longer grant licenses to export US technology to Huawei, as it moves toward a total ban  —  White House moving closer to imposing total ban on sale of American tech to Chinese company  —  The Biden administration …

Josh Eidelson / Bloomberg: The US NLRB says comments by Apple executives and policies imposed on employees violate workers’ rights, after a 2021 complaint by former employee Ashley Gjøvik  —  Comments by Apple Inc. executives and policies imposed on employees have been deemed illegal by US National Labor Relations …

The polyethylene microplastic pollution commonly found in wastewater can be extracted to create electrodes for lithium-ion batteries

With some careful twisting and stacking, MIT physicists have revealed a new and exotic property in “magic-angle” graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for neuromorphic devices — electronics designed to operate in a way […]

Imagine that you are teaching a technical subject to children in a small village. They are eager to learn, but you face a problem: There are few resources to educate them in their mother tongue. This is a common experience in India, where the quality of textbooks written in many local languages pales in comparison […]

Every day, billions of red blood cells pass through the spleen, an organ that is responsible for filtering out old or damaged blood cells. This task is made more difficult when the blood cells are misshapen, as they are in patients with sickle cell disease, which affects millions of people throughout the world. Sickled blood […]

How to be thoughtful without overthinking.

To shore up security, you need to encourage practices your employees will actually use.

Four recommendations to ensure your investment strategy drives real business value.

The cash-strapped company recently auctioned off USB dongles but has left some corporate computers in the custody of laid-off staff.

Scientists kept the rodents’ immune T cells active four times longer than mice can live—with huge implications for cancer, vaccination, and aging research.

More than two years ago, criminals crippled the systems of London’s Hackney Council. It’s still fighting to recover.

Naomi Nix / Washington Post: After layoffs, Meta, which used remote work during the pandemic to advance its diversity goals, now faces an uphill battle to continue making progress with DEI  —  Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta’s paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted …

John D. McKinnon / Wall Street Journal: The US’ Berman amendments, passed during the Cold War to protect the free flow of content between the US and hostile countries, may complicate a TikTok ban  —  Decades-old measures protect free flow of content internationally, even with hostile nations  —  How TikTok Could Become a U.S. Company

New York Times: South Korea’s K-pop industry is embracing the metaverse, expanding on commonplace virtual counterparts for artists, including by creating the virtual band Mave  —  In the world’s testing ground for tech, K-pop singers are being spun up out of pixels and doing battle in a virtual universe.

Across the U.S., about three-quarters of people enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans — a form of private insurance following the rules of Medicare — receive free gym memberships. Why is this? The answer, research has shown, is that it improves insurers’ client base: The promise of free workout time does not lure existing customers from […]

Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution. That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter in […]

Schneider Electric’s app-controlled electricity management hardware gives you more control over your power consumption. Are the utilities savings worth it?

Tread lightly on our planet with toys and accessories made from repurposed plastic, and many other Earth-friendly picks.

Whether you need a travel-friendly slate or something affordable for the kids, we tested every model to find the right one for everybody.

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch: Analysis: US Black Web3 founders raised $60M in 2022, up from $16M in 2021; total money raised by US Web3 startups in 2022 fell to $11.9B from $16.5B in 2021  —  Startups in the space are more bullish than ever  —  Much hope remains after the crypto winter almost froze the […]

Chris Metinko / Crunchbase News: Analysis: Florida startups raised $9.7B in 601 deals in 2022 vs. $7.8B in 652 deals in 2021; VC funding fell 40%+ in 2022 in California, Massachusetts, and NY  —  Last year could not top the banner year venture capital saw in 2021 — at least in most geographies.

TechCrunch: Court records since 2011 show how police in some US states used digital data, like text messages, search history, and emails, in abortion-related prosecutions  —  In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body.

Garmin’s latest wearable for runners and triathletes adds a new Morning Report to track your daily fitness.

Cory Doctorow / Pluralistic: How the “enshittification” cycle, in which platforms first are good to users and business customers before abusing them, has infected TikTok, Amazon, and others  —  Today’s links  — Tiktok’s enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan / New Scientist: Researchers detail how ProGen, an LLM trained on 280M proteins, designed proteins with anti-microbial properties that were tested in real life and shown to work  —  An AI was tasked with creating proteins with anti-microbial properties.  Researchers then created a subset of the proteins and found some did the job

Sander Lutz / Decrypt: The White House publishes a roadmap for mitigating risks posed by cryptocurrencies and urges Congress to hasten efforts to create a crypto regulatory framework  —  Four senior Biden officials penned a note Friday urging lawmakers to hasten their efforts to create a regulatory framework for crypto.

From LCDs to fancy OLED models, these are our favorite televisions at every price point.

Julia Angwin / The Markup: Q&A with Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan on why he calls ChatGPT a “bullshit generator”, his worries over its boom, developing his AI taxonomy, and more  —  Hello, friends,  —  If you have been reading all the hype about the latest artificial intelligence chatbot …

Plus: Hive ransomware gang gets knocked offline, FBI confirms North Korea stole $100 million, and more.

Plus: Microsoft stops selling Windows 10, Substack gets a supersecret Finsta mode, and TikTok tweaks its DMs.

Kat Bailey / IGN: Q&A with Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer on Xbox having no major 2022 releases, 2023 momentum, layoffs, the Activision deal amid the FTC lawsuit, and more  —  Xbox’s CEO talks about the recent Developer Direct, 2022 struggles, layoffs, and what 2023 could hold.

Bloomberg: As the GOP assumes US House leadership, the antitrust subcommittee shifts its focus from bipartisan efforts to curb Big Tech’s power to free speech issues  —  The new GOP House majority is turning away from last year’s bipartisan efforts to rein in the dominance of the largest tech companies with a change in leadership […]

Hospitals have begun using machine learning to help analyze and collect images, and the medical applications are endless.

The show’s got cred and lots of viewers, yet it’s still in the social media crosshairs. Blame the character’s legacy.

Tim Harford / Financial Times: What poet, playboy, and prophet of investment bubbles Charles Mackay, plagiarizing in 1841 on the Dutch tulip bubble, can tell us about crypto’s rise and fall  —  One winter morning in early 1637, a sailor presented himself at the counting-house of a wealthy Dutch merchant and was offered a hearty […]

Moneycontrol: ShareChat employees and investors shed light on the company’s leadership crisis and say revenue has not kept pace with cash burn and the ~$5B 2022 valuation  —  The company’s top and middle management are hollowing out, revenue has not kept pace with cash burn and Sharechat’s top-tier valuation …

Now is the time to grab a big screen for the Super Bowl.

Mark Keierleber / The 74: Gaggle, which offers a tool for monitoring online student communication, says it will no longer flag LGBTQ keywords in assignments after discrimination concerns  —  Company will no longer flag students who use words like “gay” and “lesbian” online, citing greater acceptance of queer kids in schools

It used to be someone who stepped into the fray. Now, it can be anyone.

Fans have spent years trying to comprehend his books, and many still don’t have answers.

Lydia Beyoud / Bloomberg: Source: the SEC is investigating Elon Musk’s role in shaping Tesla’s self-driving car claims, as part of a probe into the company’s statements about Autopilot  —  US regulators are investigating Elon Musk’s role in shaping Tesla Inc.’s self-driving car claims, the latest effort by watchdogs …

Ben Jiang / South China Morning Post: Counterpoint: China’s smartphone sales fell 14% YoY in 2022 to reach their lowest level in a decade; iPhone sales fell 3% as it became the country’s No. 2 brand  —  Apple topped smartphone sales in China in the fourth quarter of 2022, enabling the US tech giant to […]

From The Underground Railroad to Rings of Power, these are our picks for what you should be watching on the streamer.

Bloomberg: Sources: the Biden administration has secured an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of some advanced chipmaking machinery to China  —  President Joe Biden’s administration secured an agreement with the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of some advanced chipmaking machinery …

Before being awarded the Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science in her native Turkey, Bilge Yildiz was nervous. But it wasn’t standing in front of an audience of hundreds that stressed the Breene M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). It wasn’t […]

Student presentations tackled themes of identity, nation-building, racism, multiculturalism, and more, as reflected in the rich traditions of Brazilian music at “The Beat of Brazil” last month at the Lewis Music Library. The presentations were by students of Portuguese enrolled in class 21G.821 (The Beat of Brazil: Portuguese Language Through Brazilian Society), taught by Nilma […]

Health care has always been ripe for innovation. Whether it’s increasing safety in operating rooms, developing systems to reduce patient wait times, or improving drug delivery, there are endless opportunities to improve the efficacy and efficiency of health care. The Covid-19 pandemic made the need for these solutions all the more pressing. “There were a […]