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The Download: hydropower’s rocky path ahead, and how to reverse falling birth rates

Hydropower is one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity. But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major way, with generation dropping by a record amount.... Read more »

How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections

Back in Concord, Adida appeared to be persuasive to the public at large — or at least those invested enough to attend the event. Of the 201 attendees who filled out a... Read more »

A plan to bring down drug prices could threaten America’s technology boom

All told, the law sparked a national innovation renaissance that continues to this day. In 2002, the Economist dubbed it “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America... Read more »

The many uses of mini-organs

An ultrasound, for example, might reveal that a fetus’s kidneys are smaller than they should be, but absent a glaring genetic defect, doctors can’t say why they’re small or figure out a... Read more »

The Download: organoid uses, and open source voting machines

How open source voting machines could boost trust in US elections While vendors pitched their latest voting machines in Concord, New Hampshire, this past August, election officials asked every kind of question:... Read more »

I used generative AI to turn my story into a comic—and you can too

The narrator sits on the floor and eats breakfast with the cats. LORE MACHINE / WILL DOUGLAS HEAVEN After more than a year in development, Lore Machine is now available to the public... Read more »

The Download: rise of the robots, and what organoids can teach us

—This is an excerpt from a new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus  Robots are an incredible way to enhance and... Read more »

 Nobody knows how AI works

Recently we’ve seen some AI failures on a far bigger scale. In the latest (hilarious) gaffe, Google’s Gemini refused to generate images of white people, especially white men. Instead, users were able... Read more »

The robots are coming. And that’s a good thing.

What if we could throw our sight, hearing, touch, and even sense of smell to distant locales and experience these places in a more visceral way? So we wondered what would happen... Read more »

Roundtables: Future of Families: How reproductive technology can reverse population decline

Future of Families: How reproductive technology can reverse population decline Speakers: Antonio Regalado, Sr Editor of biomedicine and special guest Martín Varsavsky, Founder of Prelude Fertility Birth rates have been plummeting in... Read more »