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The Download: saving Louisiana from sinking, and the promise of thermal batteries

“If you were wondering what they’re using to train GPT-5, well, now you know.” —John Levine, creator of a site designed to trap web crawling bots, explains his site has received millions... Read more »

How thermal batteries are heating up energy storage

Thermal energy storage could connect cheap but intermittent renewable electricity with heat-hungry industrial processes. These systems can transform electricity into heat and then, like typical batteries, store the energy and dispatch it... Read more »

How to stop a state from sinking

VIRGINIA HANUSIK But some government officials and state engineers are hoping there is an alternative: elevation. The $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Louisiana Project is betting that raising residences by an average of... Read more »

The Download: a history of brainwashing, and America’s chipmaking ambitions

Zooming in further, there’s one particular type of insulating material placed between the chip and the structure beneath it; this material, called dielectric film, is produced in sheets as thin as white... Read more »

The effort to make a breakthrough cancer therapy cheaper

It’s an attractive model. Demand for CAR-T often outstrips supply, leading to long wait times. “There is a growing tension around the limited access that we’re seeing for cell and gene therapies... Read more »

A brief, weird history of brainwashing

Over the following years, in the wake of the Korean War, “brainwashing” grew into a catchall explanation for any kind of radical or nonconformist behavior in the United States. Social scientists and... Read more »

This US startup makes a crucial chip material and is taking on a Japanese giant

Thintronics is promising a product purpose-built for the computing demands of the AI era—a suite of new materials that the company claims have higher insulating properties and, if adopted, could mean data... Read more »

Scaling individual impact: Insights from an AI engineering leader

Doing this well requires building a diverse network across the organization. Building and nurturing relationships in different functional areas is crucial to IC success, giving you the context to spot impactful problems... Read more »

The Download: AI is making robots more helpful, and the problem with cleaning up pollution

November 2023 Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It’s not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within a hulking fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours,... Read more »

The inadvertent geoengineering experiment that the world is now shutting off

Because of the cutoff date, the study did not capture a more recent contributor to these trends. Starting in 2020, under new regulations from the International Maritime Organization, commercial shipping vessels have... Read more »