Subscribe to our Newsletter

This startup’s AI is smart enough to drive different types of vehicles

Jay Gierak at Ghost, which is based in Mountain View, California, is impressed by Wayve’s demonstrations and agrees with the company’s overall viewpoint. “The robotics approach is not the right way to... Read more »

Russia’s battle to convince people to join its war is being waged on Telegram

Just minutes after Putin announced conscription, the administrators of the anti-Kremlin Rospartizan group announced its own “mobilization,” gearing up its supporters to bomb military enlistment officers and the Ministry of Defense with... Read more »

How we’ll transplant tiny organ-like blobs of cells into people

We are arguably a long way off from transplanting miniature brain blobs into people (although some have tried putting them in rodents). But we are getting closer to implanting other organoids—potentially those... Read more »

The Download: YouTube’s deadly crafts, and DeepMind’s new chatbot

Ann Reardon is probably the last person whose content you’d expect to be banned from YouTube. A former Australian youth worker and a mother of three, she’s been teaching millions of loyal... Read more »

The YouTube baker fighting back against deadly “craft hacks”

A warning in the description of every 5-Minute Crafts upload reads: “The following video might feature activity performed by our actors within controlled [sic] environment—please use judgment, care, and precaution if you... Read more »

DeepMind’s new chatbot uses Google searches plus humans to give better answers

The difference between this approach and its predecessors is that DeepMind hopes to use “dialogue in the long term for safety,” says Geoffrey Irving, a safety researcher at DeepMind.  “That means we... Read more »

The Download: authoritarian tech, and tower-building drones

Despite President Biden’s assurances at Wednesday’s United Nations meeting that the US is not seeking a new cold war, one is brewing between the world’s autocracies and democracies—and technology is fueling it.... Read more »

The world is moving closer to a new cold war fought with authoritarian tech

Beyond the SCO, Venezuela’s autocratic regime announced in 2017 a smart identification card for its citizens that aggregated employment, voting, and medical information with the help of the Chinese telecom company ZTE.... Read more »

Patients immersed in virtual reality during surgery may need less anesthetic

The VR group requested significantly lower levels of the sedative propofol—in this case used to numb the pain in the hand— than the non-VR group. They received 125.3 milligrams per hour, in... Read more »

Watch this team of drones 3D print a tower

To demonstrate the drones’ capabilities, the researchers got them to use foam and a special lightweight form of cement to build structures with heights ranging from 0.18 meters to 2.05 meters. They... Read more »