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How AI taught Cassie the two-legged robot to run and jump

If you’ve watched Boston Dynamics’ slick videos of robots running, jumping and doing parkour, you might have the impression robots have learned to be amazingly agile. In fact, these robots are still coded by hand, and would struggle to deal with new obstacles they haven’t encountered before. However, a new method of teaching robots to move could help to deal with new scenarios, through...

Harvard has halted its long-planned atmospheric geoengineering experiment

Harvard researchers have ceased a long-running effort to conduct a small geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere, following repeated delays and public criticism. In a university statement released on March 18, Frank Keutsch, the principal investigator on the project, said he is “no longer pursuing the experiment.” The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that the world...


FRIDAY 15. MARCH 2024


This self-driving startup is using generative AI to predict traffic

Self-driving company Waabi is using a generative AI model to help predict the movement of vehicles, it announced today. The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly merging onto a highway at high speed, it predicts how the surrounding...

Africa’s push to regulate AI starts now        

In the Zanzibar archipelago of Tanzania, rural farmers are using an AI-assisted app called Nuru that works in their native language of Swahili to detect a devastating cassava disease before it spreads. In South Africa, computer scientists have built machine learning models to analyze the impact of racial segregation in housing. And in Nairobi, Kenya, AI classifies images from thousands of...

Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. As dengue cases continue to rise in Brazil, the country is facing a massive public health crisis. The viral disease, spread by mosquitoes, has sickened more than a million Brazilians in 2024 alone,...


THURSDAY 14. MARCH 2024


Why methane emissions are still a mystery

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you follow papers in climate and energy for long enough, you’re bound to recognize some patterns.  There are a few things I’ll basically always see when I’m sifting through the latest climate and energy research: one study finding that...

Decarbonizing production of energy is a quick win 

Debate around the pace and nature of decarbonization continues to dominate the global news agenda, from the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change warning that the EU must double annual emissions cuts, to forecasts that it could cost more than $1 trillion to decarbonize the global shipping industry. Despite differing opinions on the right path to net zero, all agree that every sector...


WEDNESDAY 13. MARCH 2024


Methane leaks in the US are worse than we thought

Methane emissions in the US are worse than scientists previously estimated, a new study has found. The study, published today in Nature, represents one of the most comprehensive surveys yet of methane emissions from US oil- and gas-producing regions. Using measurements taken from planes, the researchers found that emissions from many of the targeted areas were significantly higher than...

An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step towards more useful AI

Fly, goat, fly! A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before such as Goat Simulator 3, a fun action game with exaggerated physics. Researchers were able to get it to follow text commands to play seven different games and move around in three different 3D research environments. It’s a step towards more generalized AI that can transfer...


TUESDAY 12. MARCH 2024


The Download: hacking VR headsets, and contrails to cool the planet

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 VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into…

Building a data-driven health-care ecosystem

The application of AI to health-care data has promise to align the U.S. health-care system to quality care and positive health outcomes. But AI for health care hasn’t reached its full capacity.  One reason is the inconsistent quality and integrity of the data that AI depends on. The industry—hospitals, providers, insurers, and administrators—uses diverse systems. The resulting data can be...

Why we need better defenses against VR cyberattacks

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I remember the first time I tried on a VR headset. It was the first Oculus Rift, and I nearly fainted after experiencing an intense but visually clumsy VR roller-coaster. But that was a decade ago, and the experience has gotten a lot smoother and more...

How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet

A handful of studies have concluded that making minor adjustments to the routes of a small fraction of airplane flights could meaningfully reduce global warming. Now a new paper finds that these changes could be pretty cheap to pull off as well. The common climate concern when it comes to airlines is that planes produce a lot of carbon dioxide emissions as they burn fuel. But jets also release...


MONDAY 11. MARCH 2024


LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention

Since their inception, it’s been clear that large language models like ChatGPT absorb racist views from the millions of pages of the internet they are trained on. Developers have responded by trying to make them less toxic. But new research suggests that those efforts, especially as models get larger, are only curbing racist views that are overt, while letting more covert stereotypes grow...

VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack

In the Christoper Nolan movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character uses technology to enter his targets’ dreams to steal information and insert false details into their subconscious.  A new “inception attack” in virtual reality works in a similar way. Researchers at the University of Chicago exploited a security vulnerability in Meta’s Quest VR system that allows hackers to...

An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans

In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its robotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by a lack of data necessary to train robots in how to move and reason using artificial intelligence.  Now three of OpenAI’s early research scientists say the startup they spun off in 2017, called Covariant, has solved that problem and unveiled a system that combines the reasoning...


FRIDAY 8. MARCH 2024


The SEC’s new climate rules were a missed opportunity to accelerate corporate action

This week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a set of long-awaited climate rules, requiring most publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate risks building up on their balance sheets.  Unfortunately, the federal agency watered down the regulations amid intense lobbying from business interests, undermining their ultimate...