Subscribe to our Newsletter

The Download: offshore rocket launches, and how DOGE plans to use AI

The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk is leading an unsolicited bid to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billionThis is an escalation... Read more »

The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off

“Some states are very strict on the nationality and transparency of ownership, and other states less strict,” says Alla Pozdnakova, a professor of law at the University of Oslo’s Scandinavian Institute for... Read more »

Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex.

The stated goal of DOGE’s actions, per a statement from a White House spokesperson to the New York Times on Thursday, is “slashing waste, fraud, and abuse.” As I point out in... Read more »

The Download: DOGE’s influences, and rescuing federal data from deletion

1 The Trump administration is slashing billions in biomedical research funding The change, effective immediately, is sending shockwaves through academia. Expect lawsuits. (STAT $)+ Scientists are also increasingly alarmed about the fact that federal health... Read more »

These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda

“We’re getting noticed,” said Seto Baghdoyan, director of forensic audits and investigative services at the GAO, in an interview with MIT Technology Review. The documents don’t offer a crystal ball into Musk’s... Read more »

Inside the race to archive the US government’s websites

This kind of work is crucial because the US government holds invaluable international and national data relating to climate. “These are irreplaceable repositories of important climate information,” says Lauren Kurtz, executive director... Read more »

The Download: DOGE’s tech-enabled destruction, and Meta’s brain AI for typing

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 DOGE staffers are feeding sensitive federal data to AI systemsIt’s just one of many alarming security lapses at... Read more »

From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

It’s incredibly hard to protect a system from someone—the evil housekeeper from DOGE—who has made their way inside and wants to wreck it. This administration is on the record as wanting to... Read more »

How the tiny microbes in your mouth could be putting your health at risk

“We’re working on trying to create functional replacement teeth,” Pamela Yelick of Tufts University, one of the researchers behind the work, told me. The idea is to develop an alternative to titanium... Read more »

Meta has an AI for brain typing, but it’s stuck in the lab

Norman likens the device to “an MRI machine tipped on its side and suspended above the user’s head.” What’s more, says King, the second a subject moves their head the signal is... Read more »