Why recycling alone can’t power climate tech
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The potential to use old, discarded products to make something new sounds a little bit like magic. I absolutely understand the draw, and in some cases, recycling is going to be a crucial tool for climate technology. I’ve written about recycling for basically any climate technology you can think of, including solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. (I’ve also covered efforts to recycle plastic waste.) For my most recent story, I was researching the materials used for […]
This robot can tidy a room without any help
Robots are good at certain tasks. They’re great at picking up and moving objects, for example, and they’re even getting better at cooking. But while robots may easily complete tasks like these in a laboratory, getting them to work in an unfamiliar environment where there’s little data available is a real challenge. Now, a new system called OK-Robot could train robots to pick up and move objects in settings they haven’t encountered before. It’s an approach that might be able to plug the gap between rapidly improving AI models and actual robot capabilities, as it doesn’t require any additional costly, […]
The Download: shipping China’s EVs, and new greener magnets
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 the world’s biggest EV maker is getting into shipping Earlier this month, a massive ship picked up over 5,000 electric cars from two ports in northern and southern China. Five days later, it passed through Singapore, and it is now headed for India. However, its final destination is in Europe, where most of the cars will be sold. The ship’s name is BYD Explorer No.1. As the first of a massive fleet that BYD is building, it […]
Why BYD is breaking into shipping
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. For people who have been watching BYD for a long time, it won’t be surprising that the company has just ventured into a new field. The Chinese electric-vehicle maker has been particularly good at expanding into different, related businesses. Not only can it make high-performing and safe batteries for cars, but it also does almost everything in house, from designing car chips to mining lithium and other materials. The fact that it has subsidiaries in every step […]
How new magnets could accelerate climate action
The motor in your vacuum cleaner and the one in your electric vehicle likely have at least one thing in common: they both rely on powerful permanent magnets to function. And the materials for those magnets could soon be in short supply. Permanent magnets can maintain a magnetic field on their own without an electric charge. They’re commonly used in motors to generate a magnetic field that creates a rotational force when interacting with an electric current. The permanent magnets used in high-end motors today are built using a class of materials called rare earth metals. Demand for these materials […]
Why the world’s biggest EV maker is getting into shipping
Earlier this month, a massive ship picked up over 5,000 electric cars from two ports in northern and southern China. Five days later, it passed through Singapore, and it is now headed for India. However, its final destination is in Europe, where most of the cars will be sold. The ship’s name is BYD Explorer No.1. As the first of a massive fleet that BYD is building, it reflects the Chinese company’s ambition to establish a seafaring business that supports its new role in the global car trade. BYD, founded by a Chinese metallurgy researcher named Wang Chuanfu in 1995, […]
The Download: how to combat deepfake porn, and Neuralink’s first implant
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. Three ways we can fight deepfake porn Last week, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, went viral online. Millions of people viewed nonconsensual deepfake porn of Swift on the social media platform X, which has since taken the drastic step of blocking all searches for Taylor Swift to try to get the problem under control. This is not a new phenomenon: deepfakes have been around for years. However, the rise of […]
Dear Taylor Swift, we’re sorry about those explicit deepfakes
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Hi, Taylor. I can only imagine how you must be feeling after sexually explicit deepfake videos of you went viral on X. Disgusted. Distressed, perhaps. Humiliated, even. I’m really sorry this is happening to you. Nobody deserves to have their image exploited like that. But if you aren’t already, I’m asking you to be furious. Furious that this is happening to you and so many other women and marginalized people around the world. Furious that our current […]
Actionable insights enable smarter business buying
For decades, procurement was seen as a back-office function focused on cost-cutting and supplier management. But that view is changing as supply chain disruptions and fluctuating consumer behavior ripple across the economy. Savvy leaders now understand procurement’s potential to deliver unprecedented levels of efficiency, insights, and strategic capability across the business. However, tapping into procurement’s potential for generating value requires mastering the diverse needs of today’s global and hybrid businesses, navigating an increasingly complex supplier ecosystem, and wrangling the vast volumes of data generated by a rapidly digitalizing supply chain. Advanced procurement tools and technologies can support all three. Purchasing […]
Three ways we can fight deepfake porn
Last week, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest pop stars, went viral online. Millions of people viewed nonconsensual deepfake porn of Swift on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. X has since taken the drastic step of blocking all searches for Taylor Swift to try to get the problem under control. This is not a new phenomenon: deepfakes have been around for years. However, the rise of generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfake pornography and sexually harass people using AI-generated images and videos. Of all types of […]