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The Download: mimicking pregnancy’s first moments in a lab, and AI parameters explained

At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into the lining of the uterus then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of... Read more »

What new legal challenges mean for the future of US offshore wind

Previous government reports, including one 2024 report from the Department of Energy and a 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office (an independent government watchdog), have pointed out this issue in the... Read more »

Deploying a hybrid approach to Web3 in the AI era

What was once a futuristic concept is quickly becoming a more concrete reality, even at a time when Web2 still dominates. Six out of ten Fortune 500 companies are exploring blockchain-based solutions,... Read more »

The Download: war in Europe, and the company that wants to cool the planet

Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web,” as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog in the damp forests of Estonia’s eastern... Read more »

LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what’s a parameter?

When a model is trained, each word in its vocabulary is assigned a numerical value that captures the meaning of that word in relation to all the other words, based on how... Read more »

The man who made India digital isn’t done yet

It sounds almost wild-eyed. Yet the finternet project has 30 partners across four continents. Nilekani says it’ll launch next year. A call to service Nilekani was born in Bengaluru, in 1955. His... Read more »

Building materials are getting closer to doubling as batteries

A weight-bearing arch made of electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3) integrates supercapacitor electrodes to power a light.MIT EC³ HUB The researchers achieved this progress by using high-resolution 3D imaging to learn more about... Read more »

Listening to battery failure

“Through some careful scientific work, our team has managed to decode the acoustic emissions,” says Martin Z. Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering and mathematics. They were able to classify them as... Read more »

Under 10% of an earthquake’s energy makes the ground shake

Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over millennia—energy that, once released, we perceive mainly in the form of the ground’s shaking. But a quake also generates a flash of... Read more »

Secrets of the sleep-deprived brain

To explore what might happen to this CSF flow in a sleep-deprived brain, Lewis, who is also a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and her colleagues tested 26... Read more »