Category: Uncategorized

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, […]

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

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

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

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 […]

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 …

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.

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

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

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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

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

Seven strategies to engage, support, and connect.

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

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.

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

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 …

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 […]

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 […]

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 […]

Sponsor content from BEARINGPOINT.

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 […]

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

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

Peter Kafka / Vox: Q&A with ex-Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory professor Alex Stamos on overestimating mis- and disinformation’s impact, Brazil, Gamergate, and more  —  “Resist trying to make things better”: A conversation with internet security expert Alex Stamos.

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.

Reuters: Crypto prices are recovering in January so far: bitcoin is up 26%, including 22% in the past week, to over $20,000, ether is up 29%, and meme coins are rising  —  Bitcoin is on the charge in 2023, dragging the crypto market off the floor and electrifying bonk, a new meme coin.

Security researchers who find a flaw in software normally privately inform the developers of it in the hope of prompting a fix, but now a mathematical trick can let them apply public pressure without releasing dangerous details of the bug

Patrick McGee / Financial Times: How Apple built a supply chain in China over two decades, spending billions and embedding staff in factories, creating a dependence before US tensions escalated  —  The company spent two decades and billions of dollars building a supply chain of unprecedented sophistication.  Now, a reckoning is coming

Need an ultrafast drive for video editing or a rugged option to back up your photos in the field? We’ve got a solution for every situation.

Dylan Patel / SemiAnalysis: An overview of the ML software development industry over the past decade: a decline of Nvidia’s CUDA monopoly, PyTorch overtaking Google’s TensorFlow, and more  —  Over the last decade, the landscape of machine learning software development has undergone significant changes.

One year later, researchers are marveling at the power of the Hunga Tonga explosion—and wondering how to monitor hundreds of other undersea volcanoes.

Video editing gets a lot faster when you’ve got a wheel.

Sapna Maheshwari / New York Times: Some US universities, including Alabama’s Auburn University and the University of Oklahoma, are banning TikTok on their Wi-Fi networks, annoying some students  —  The school’s prohibition brings a geopolitical fight front and center for TikTok’s biggest fans: young Americans.

William Mauldin / Wall Street Journal: Russian attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid are straining its mobile network, leading to a global hunt for equipment like batteries to keep the system online  —  Telecom operators and internet providers scour suppliers for better batteries, generators  —  Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s electrical grid …

Three strategies, based on interviews with 37 senior leaders.

Habits, tools, and tactics that will help you deliver results.