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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A senior State Department official demanded records of communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort…

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene…

A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right.  The document, originally shared…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone—its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to…

China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone—its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel and the first of its kind that can be refueled while it’s running. It’s an interesting (if decidedly experimental) development out of a country that’s…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs What’s new? AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the…

AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, led the…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The AI Hype Index: AI agent cyberattacks, racing robots, and musical models Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of…

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents are the AI industry’s hypiest new product—intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically…

Right now, despite its ubiquity, AI is seen as anything but a normal technology. There is talk of AI systems that will soon merit the term “superintelligence,” and the former CEO of Google recently suggested we control AI models the way we control uranium and other nuclear weapons materials. Anthropic is dedicating time and money…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside…

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.”  He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump’s announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will…

Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump’s announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will produce a “golden age” of American industry. Trump himself insists, “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” While it’s possible that very targeted tariffs could help protect…

Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter in…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal “We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge…

The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift.   About $8 billion worth of US climate tech…

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest.  The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a…

Recorded on April 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But…

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.  I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…

A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in…

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in…