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Climate action is gaining momentum. So are the disasters.

The US finally stepped up as a leader in climate action, enacting a trio of major laws that could add up to the largest federal investment ever into climate and clean-energy technologies.... Read more »

Meta is desperately trying to make the metaverse happen

So its current strategy seems to be to release a string of updates to see what might get people interested—a “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” approach, if you... Read more »

The complicated danger of surveillance states

Chin: Yeah, within the same year, the police were using that technology to track suspects, and they basically openly said: “Well, we changed our minds.” Lin: And there was a public pushback... Read more »

The mothers of Mexico’s missing use social media to search for mass graves

Mexico has long struggled with a history of kidnapping. As of October 5, there were 105,984 people officially listed as disappeared in Mexico. More than a third have vanished in the past... Read more »

The Download: harmful AI, and a deadlier monkeypox variant

+ What does GPT-3 “know” about me? Large language models are trained on troves of personal data hoovered from the internet. But how much does it actually know about us? Read the... Read more »

VIDEO: Chasing Technology

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Who’s going to save us from bad AI?

About damn time. That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House’s science and technology advisory... Read more »

The Download: robotic bees, and China’s surveillance state

Something was wrong, but Thomas Schmickl couldn’t put his finger on it. It was 2007, and the Austrian biologist was spending part of the year at East Tennessee State University. During his... Read more »

How robotic honeybees and hives could help the species fight back

Schmickl, who now leads the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz in Austria, wasn’t wrong. Studies in various parts of the world have since found that insect populations are declining... Read more »

The Chinese surveillance state proves that the idea of privacy is more “malleable” than you’d expect

“They probably saved millions of lives by using those technologies,” he says, “and the result is that sold [the necessity of] state surveillance to a lot of Chinese people.” Does “good” surveillance... Read more »