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The Download: China’s influencer crackdown, and covid’s origins

No one had foreseen just how fast three of China’s most powerful influencers would fall. On June 3, Austin Li, a 30-year-old live-streamer with over 60 million followers, abruptly cut off a... Read more »

How China’s biggest online influencers fell from their thrones

And the events have changed the overall dynamics between influencers and brands. For one thing, the deep discounts that customers used to get through big-time influencers aren’t likely to remain if brands... Read more »

Watch a robotic shoulder practice twisting and stretching human cells

“Using robots for tissue engineering creates much more realistic biomechanical stimulations, which I see as a breakthrough,” says Dana Damian, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, who was not involved in... Read more »

The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere

Cruise control Either way, should we count on this new wave of firms to chase down the front-runners? Unsurprisingly, Mo ElShenawy, executive vice president of engineering at Cruise, isn’t convinced. “The state-of-the-art... Read more »

The Download: Locking up carbon with corn, and the path to greener steel

In recent weeks, a crew of staffers from a company called Charm Industrial have been working on the edge of Kansas corn fields, moving rolled bales of stalks, leaves, husks, and tassels... Read more »

Estimating impact and defining a future-ready cybersecurity strategy with brand risk calculator

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Watch Bill Mew, digital ethics campaigner and CEO of CrisisTeam.co.uk talk to Vishal Salvi, SVP & CISO at... Read more »

A robotic shoulder could make it easier to grow usable human tissue

But growing usable human tendon cells—which need to stretch and twist—has proved trickier. Over the past two decades, scientists have encouraged engineered tendon cells and tissue to grow and mature by repeatedly... Read more »

Inside Charm Industrial’s big bet on corn stalks for carbon removal

Reinhardt says that Charm will only take half the agriculture material on any given field, and he notes that putting the resulting biochar and ash into the fields will improve soil health.... Read more »

How Charm Industrial hopes to use crops to cut steel emissions

The iron and steel industry produces about 4 billion tons of carbon emissions each year, accounting for around 10% of all energy-related climate pollution, according to a 2020 report by the International... Read more »

The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images

It’s no secret that large models, such as DALL-E 2 and Imagen, trained on vast numbers of documents and images taken from the web, absorb the worst aspects of that data as... Read more »