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The Download: Twitter’s toxicity, and what China’s protestors want

By Scott Wiener, a California state senator who represents San Francisco and northern San Mateo County. A mere day after Elon Musk reactivated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter account, she tweeted that... Read more »

How chemists are tackling the plastics problem

Rorrer says the researchers are also considering what materials they should use. Cobalt is more common and less expensive than some other catalysts they’ve tried, like ruthenium and platinum, but they are... Read more »

What Shanghai protesters want and fear

You may have seen that nearly three years after the pandemic started, protests have erupted across the country. In Beijing, Shanghai, Urumqi, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, and more cities and towns, hundreds of... Read more »

Elon Musk has created a toxic mess for the LGBTQ+ community. I would know.

Musk is now promising—based on a Twitter “poll” that was reportedly mobbed with extremist 4chan users—to reactivate any suspended account that didn’t violate the law or generate egregious spam. That could be... Read more »

Human creators stand to benefit as AI rewrites the rules of content creation

A game-changer for content creation Among the AI-related technologies to have emerged in the past several years is generative AI—deep-learning algorithms that allow computers to generate original content, such as text, images,... Read more »

The Download: the West’s AI myth, and Musk v Apple

While the US and the EU may differ on how to regulate tech, their lawmakers seem to agree on one thing: the West needs to ban AI-powered social scoring. As they understand... Read more »

The AI myth Western lawmakers get wrong

The EU is currently negotiating a new law called the AI Act, which will ban member states, and maybe even private companies, from implementing such a system. The trouble is, it’s “essentially banning... Read more »

The Download: cybersecurity’s next act, and mass protests in China

In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an estimated $150 billion worldwide this year without being... Read more »

What’s next in cybersecurity

One of the reasons cyber hasn’t played a bigger role in the war, according to Carhart, is because “in the whole conflict, we saw Russia being underprepared for things and not having... Read more »

The Download: AI conquers Minecraft, and babies after death

+ Scientists have found a way to mature eggs from transgender men in the lab. It could offer them new ways to start a family—without the need for distressing IVF procedures. Read... Read more »