In a tournament of the first world war strategy game Diplomacy, two AIs built by Facebook’s parent company Meta outplayed humans

NASA hit a bullseye in late September with DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which flew a spacecraft straight at the heart of a nearby asteroid. The one-way kamikaze mission smashed into the stadium-sized space rock and successfully reset the asteroid’s orbit. DART was the first test of a planetary defense strategy, demonstrating that scientists […]

Two new 4K Apple TVs and a Pencil trick were also unveiled.

Three warehouses have voted on joining the Amazon Labor Union, but organizers prevailed in only one—and the retail giant’s heavily funded opposition continues.

A case heading to SCOTUS claims platforms should be held responsible for their algorithmic recommendations. A history of the statute suggests otherwise.

Sander Lutz / Decrypt: Bluesky previews its Authenticated Transport Protocol, formerly ADX, for large distributed social applications and says a Bluesky social app is “coming soon”  —  The group, formed within Twitter, is building a decentralized protocol that limits corporate and governmental influence on social media platforms.

Florence Ion / Gizmodo: Google adds tablet-friendly features to Chrome on Android, like a visual tab grid, a drag-and-drop mode, and a side-by-side design; tab groups are coming later  —  The update brings abilities like tabs and a drag-and-drop mode, but it’s for Android tablets only.  —  Alerts

Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch: Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu says the company is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering” and plans to open a new gaming studio in Southern California  —  At TechCrunch Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games.

The Ad Hoc Committee on Leveraging Best Practices from Remote Teaching for On-Campus Education has released a report that captures how instructors are weaving lessons learned from remote teaching into in-person classes. Despite the challenges imposed by teaching and learning remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, the report says, “there were seeds planted then that, we […]

Humans are highly sensitive to the bodily movement of other people. Our ability to comprehend body language is crucial to our social thriving, providing information on emotion and behavioral predictions through subtle cues. When and how do we develop the ability to recognize human movement and distinguish it from other forms of movement? Newborns only […]

On October 17, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members to join their esteemed ranks. MIT faculty members Laura L. Kiessling ’83 and Mark Bear were among the new members, along with MIT alumni Krishna Shenoy SM ’92, PhD ’95 and David Tuveson ’87. Martin Burke, a former student in […]

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How leaders can leverage the power of hope — while avoiding its pitfalls.

Managers often fail to recognize the problem until it’s too late.

This new iCloud feature makes it super easy to access smartphone pics and videos on your computer—no cords necessary.

The 2020 Apple smartphone is still a great pick. Kit it out with MagSafe-tested protection, chargers, and other extras.

Ahead of US midterms, activists are fighting falsehoods circulating in Chinese-language communities that they fear will distort the vote or suppress turnout.

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch: UK’s CMA gives a final order to Meta to sell Giphy, after a judge ordered the CMA to reassess the case in July  —  Bye-bye: Meta has again been ordered by the UK’s competition watchdog to sell animated GIF platform, Giphy.  And this time it’s final.  —  The decision follows a […]

Jon Porter / The Verge: Carl Pei’s Nothing will hike the price of its Ear (1) wireless earbuds from $99 to $149 on October 26, citing “an increase in costs”  —  Nothing is hiking the price of its debut Ear 1 earbuds from $99 to $149, the company’s CEO Carl Pei has announced.

Tim Hardwick / MacRumors: Apple restores Russia’s largest social network VKontakte, Mail.ru, and other apps from VK, three weeks after removing them citing UK sanctions  —  Apple has restored Russian apps for social network VKontakte and webmail provider Mail.ru to the App Store, three weeks after removing …

When he matriculated in 2019 as a graduate student, Raúl Mojica Soto-Albors was no stranger to MIT. He’d spent time here on multiple occasions as an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, including eight months in 2018 as a displaced student after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Those experiences — including participating in […]

There’s a fight brewing over how Hollywood stars can protect their identities. But it’s not just actors who should be paying attention.

The social app with a reputation for being somewhat oblique has dropped several new features that make it easier for newbies to have a good experience.

Your best friend can receive timely medical help without ever leaving home, and this guide to our favorite televets can help.

Janko Roettgers / Protocol: Netflix rolls out a feature globally to let users transfer all their personalized viewing data to a new account, ahead of a crackdown on account sharing in 2023  —  Netflix is making it easier for people to disentangle their personal viewing data: The streaming service is rolling …

Avery Menegus / Engadget: Internal doc: Amazon has a high attrition rate across all levels, costing $8B annually, and workers choose to leave twice as often as layoffs and firings occur  —  Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate, well above industry averages.  According to a tranche of documents marked …

AnnaMaria Andriotis / Wall Street Journal: Sources: the FTC is investigating whether Visa and Mastercard’s security tokens restrict debit-card routing competition on online payments  —  The Federal Trade Commission is examining whether the companies’ security tokens prevent online debit-card payments from going over other networks

Artificial intelligence model predictions from historical data on how AI research would develop over five years matched reality with more than 99 per cent accuracy – soon they will be asked what comes next

In the past several years, hydrogen energy has increasingly become a more central aspect of the clean energy transition. Hydrogen can produce clean, on-demand energy that could complement variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. That being said, pathways for deploying hydrogen at scale have yet to be fully explored. In particular, […]

In the 1990s, if you suggested that the corner three-pointer was the best shot in basketball, you might have been laughed out of the gym. The game was still dominated largely by a fleet of seven-foot centers, most of whom couldn’t shoot from more than a few feet out from the basket. Even the game’s […]

Four students from the MIT club Engineers Without Borders (EWB) spent part of their summer in Tanzania to begin assessment work for a health and sanitation project that will benefit the entire village, and an irrigated garden for the Mkutani Primary School. The club has been working with the Boston Professional Chapter of Engineers Without […]

Three women describe the lessons they’ve learned and the realities they weren’t prepared for.

Six actions to take when your team is under-resourced but overly in-demand.

Corporate cooperation will be critical in the fight against climate change — but the law might get in the way.

Coco Feng / South China Morning Post: Alipay has quietly started testing money transfers through WeChat in September, available for a small number of users with a maximum of ~$278 per transfer  —  The wall separating China’s two leading mobile payment systems may have started to crack after Ant Group’s Alipay rolled out a trial […]

Reuters: Sources detail how Changpeng Zhao and other execs sought to “insulate” Binance from scrutiny by authorities in the US and UK, including by setting up Binance.US  —  A plan to “insulate” itself from the SEC. A backdated document.  An exodus of compliance staff.

Thomas Seal / Bloomberg: Vodafone and France’s Altice announce a ~$7B joint venture to build fiber optic lines to up to 7M homes in Germany; the deal is expected to close in H1 2023  —  Vodafone Group Plc will roll out fiber to the home in Germany in a deal with Altice Europe NV to […]

The biggest name in action cams is back with a taller sensor optimized for a world of vertical video.

Whether you’re into esports or casual fragging, these are the greatest gaming mice we’ve tested.

Meta: Meta says it found an externally-created Meta Workplace account that was used to spoof an internal Instagram system used as “evidence” for The Wire’s reporting  —  This is an ongoing investigation and we will update as it unfolds.  At this time, we can confirm that the video shared …

Joanna Glasner / Crunchbase News: Analysis: 14 self-driving vehicle tech companies that went public in the past two years have seen an 80%+ average decline in their post-IPO stock price  —  A few years ago, public market investors sometimes lamented the lack of opportunities to directly invest in future-shaping technologies like autonomous driving.

Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch: Elon Musk, SpaceX, and government partners should stop finger-pointing, commit to transparency, and figure out a long-term funding plan for Starlink in Ukraine  —  What appeared earlier this year to be a selfless act of technotopianism, the widespread deployment of Starlink terminals in Ukraine …

Supermassive black holes are engines of galactic evolution, but new observations of our galaxy and its central hole don’t quite match expectations.

Google wants to make your digital life—in its ecosystem, anyway—passwordless and more secure.

Harley-Davidson’s second all-electric motorcycle seduced WIRED’s editor in chief—but sadly can’t go the distance.

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: UK-based Zen Educate, a marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best available teachers, raised a $21M Series A extension to fuel US expansion  —  Zen Educate, an online marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best available teachers, has raised £19.3 million …

Chris Vallance / BBC: Study: AI hiring tools don’t reduce bias or improve diversity; they can’t be trained to only identify job-related characteristics and strip out gender and race  —  Artificially intelligent hiring tools do not reduce bias or improve diversity, researchers say in a study.

Meir Orbach / CTech: Alphawave IP acquires Banias Labs, an Israel-based optical digital signal processing chip developer for data centers, for $240M  —  The Israeli startup, co-founded by veteran entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, develops coherent optical DSP semiconductor technology for data centers

Susan Su thought she was discovering a new café. She was in Beijing for the second half of her gap year, working with a biomedical engineering group at Tsinghua University. But the lab was relatively new, and she was filling her time by exploring the city. She soon realized she had instead stumbled into the […]

Plus: iPhones are calling the cops from roller coasters, Polestar has a new electric SUV, and Meta makes another big bet on VR.