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Brain implants helped create a digital avatar of a stroke survivor’s face

Speech using these interfaces isn’t seamless. It’s still slower than normal speaking, and while an error rate of 23% or 24% is far better than previous results, it’s still not great. In... Read more »

How new batteries could help your EV charge faster

To increase a battery’s total capacity, these anodes can be made with thicker layers of material, meaning there will be lots of space for ions to slot into. However, in batteries with... Read more »

The Download: introducing the Ethics issue

2 Meta released an AI model that can translate a ton of languagesThese sorts of tools are improving at a dizzying pace. (TechCrunch)+ Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for... Read more »

The fascinating evolution of typing Chinese characters

In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down... Read more »

How culture drives foul play on the internet, and how new “upcode” can protect us

Shapiro’s book arrives just in time for the last gasp of the latest crypto wave, as major players find themselves trapped in the nets of human institutions. In early June, the US... Read more »

The beautiful complexity of the US radio spectrum

The US government lays claim to a large chunk of spectrum for military use, communications, and transportation. FM radio operates between 88 and 108.0 MHz, and AM radio operates between 540 and... Read more »

A cell that does it all

From “The Troubled Hunt for the Ultimate Cell” (1998), by Antonio Regalado: “If awards were given for the most intriguing, controversial, underfunded and hush-hush of scientific pursuits, the search for the human... Read more »

Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

A holistic approach: Gilbert works in the county’s Office of Resilience, which has people designated to work on sea-level rise, carbon mitigation, and waste reduction. “Together,” she says, “we make sure we... Read more »

Why I became a TechTrekker

My senior spring in high school, I decided to defer my MIT enrollment by a year. I had always planned to take a gap year, but after receiving the silver tube in... Read more »

Long before Hillel, Jews found a home at MIT

Why didn’t Harvard fight for Samuelson? Possibly because he was Jewish. In 1940, Harvard was more than a decade into its program of intentionally suppressing the number of Jewish students and faculty... Read more »