Hello and welcome to the first-ever edition of The Spark! Thanks so much for joining me for this weekly climate newsletter, where we’ll explore tech that could help combat the climate crisis. I’m so glad you’re here! This week, we’re kicking things off with a special travel edition of the newsletter. So buckle up, because we’re headed to the mountains just outside Reno, Nevada to...

Despite what you may have heard, the teens are not stealing their family’s fine dinnerware, tossing it in a blender, and snorting the resulting dust for the “porcelain challenge.” That’s just what Sebastian Durfee, a 23-year-old actor and TikTok creator, hoped you might believe when he spread the word on social media of the latest dangerous teen challenge.  Never mind that it was...

DeepMind has used its board-game playing AI AlphaZero to discover a faster way to solve a fundamental math problem in computer science, beating a record that has stood for more than 50 years. The problem, matrix multiplication, is a crucial type of calculation at the heart of many different applications, from displaying images on a screen to simulating complex physics. It is also fundamental...

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. How the covid pop-up window is wreaking havoc on daily life in China In 2020, China rolled out a contact tracing program that assigns a QR code to everyone in the country. It…

Welcome back! Hope you are not stuck in highway traffic if you are enjoying the National Day holiday in China.  Though maybe it’s still better than staying at home—after all, travel feels like such a luxury in China today. While the rest of the world drops its remaining covid-related travel restrictions, even a short trip in China is plagued by flight cancellations, mandatory...

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 White House just unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights The news: US President Biden has today unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights, which outlines five protections Americans should have in…

The White House wants Americans to know: The age of AI accountability is coming.  US President Biden has today unveiled a new AI Bill of Rights, which outlines five protections Americans should have in the AI age.  While Biden has in the past called for stronger protections for privacy and for tech companies to stop collecting data, the US — home to some of the world’s biggest...

To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm!  Is anyone else feeling dizzy? Just when the AI community was wrapping its head around the astounding progress of text-to-image systems, we’re already moving on to the next frontier: text-to-video.  Late last week, Meta unveiled Make-A-Video, an AI that generates five-second videos from...

Until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines were a key part of Europe’s energy infrastructure. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the Nord Stream lines supplied 18% of all Europe’s gas imports. Half of Russia’s gas imports to Europe came through Nord Stream 1—a record high. (Nord Stream 2, which has been completed, has not yet come online after Germany withheld...