The online art catalogue that chronicles a stolen African heritage
When British forces raided the African kingdom of Benin in the late 19th century, they took with them thousands of sculptures dating back centuries. Sold to private collectors and museums in the Global North, the artifacts, known as the Benin Bronzes, included ceremonial swords, ritualistic statues, and musical instruments that belonged to the Edo people. Their looting had a profound impact on the community, descendants of which live in and around modern-day Benin City in southern Nigeria. It effectively severed the connection between them and their cultural heritage. Despite longstanding pressure, many institutions, particularly in Germany and the UK, have […]
Quantum computing is taking on its biggest challenge: noise
In the past 20 years, hundreds of companies, including giants like Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have staked a claim in the rush to establish quantum computing. Investors have put in well over $5 billion so far. All this effort has just one purpose: creating the world’s next big thing. Quantum computers use the counterintuitive rules that govern matter at the atomic and subatomic level to process information in ways that are impossible with conventional, or “classical,” computers. Experts suspect that this technology will be able to make an impact in fields as disparate as drug discovery, cryptography, finance, and supply-chain […]
What’s next for AI in 2024
This time last year we did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, we had a go at predicting the future. How did we do? Our four big bets for 2023 were that the next big thing in chatbots would be multimodal (check: the most powerful large language models out there, OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google DeepMind’s Gemini, work with text, images and audio); that policymakers would draw up tough new regulations (check: Biden’s executive order came out in October and the European Union’s AI Act was finally agreed in December); Big Tech would feel pressure from open-source startups […]
The Download: greener cement, and the biggest tech stories of 2023
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 electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But it’s also a climate threat. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills. One solution to this climate catastrophe might be coursing through the pipes at Sublime Systems. The startup is developing an entirely new way to make cement. […]
How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain
Cement hides in plain sight—it’s used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But there’s a climate threat lurking in those ubiquitous gray slabs. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions—more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills. Humans have been making cement, in one form or another, for thousands of years. Ancient Romans used volcanic ash, crushed lime, and seawater to build the aqueducts and iconic structures like the Pantheon. The modern version of hydraulic cement—the sort that hardens when mixed with water and allowed to dry—dates back to […]
The race is on to save coral reefs—by freezing them
As sweltering ocean temperatures make graveyards of coral reefs across the Caribbean and beyond, a team of scientists is scrambling to cool corals down. Way down. To -200 °C. The Coral Biobank Alliance, helmed in part by Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute biologist Mary Hagedorn, aims to cryopreserve or otherwise keep in captivity the roughly 1,000 species of reef-building corals on the planet. Coral reefs, as an ecosystem, are expected to go functionally extinct by 2035. Hagedorn hopes to freeze enough coral sperm, larvae, and adult polyps not just to support current conservation efforts—such as breeding heat-resistant corals—but to reboot reefs […]
The Download: solving the mystery of hunger, and the climate-tech boom
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. We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants. Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still don’t really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural […]
We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change.
You haven’t seen hungry until you’ve seen Brad Lowell’s mice. A few years ago, Lowell—a Harvard University neuroscientist—and a postdoc, Mike Krashes, figured out how to turn up the volume on the drive for food as high as it can go. They did it by stimulating a bundle of neurons in the hypothalamus, an area of the brain thought to play a key role in regulating our basic needs. A video captures what happened next. Initially, the scene is calm as a camera pans slowly along a series of plastic cages, each occupied by a docile, well-fed mouse, reclining on […]
How machine learning might unlock earthquake prediction
In September 2017, about two minutes before a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Mexico City, blaring sirens alerted residents that a quake was coming. Such alerts, which are now available in the United States, Japan, Turkey, Italy, and Romania, among other countries, have changed the way we think about the threat of earthquakes. They no longer have to take us entirely by surprise. Earthquake early warning systems can send alarms through phones or transmit a loud signal to affected regions three to five seconds after a potentially damaging earthquake begins. First, seismometers close to the fault pick up the beginnings of […]
We need a moonshot for computing
In its final weeks, the Obama administration released a report that rippled through the federal science and technology community. Titled Ensuring Long-Term US Leadership in Semiconductors, it warned that as conventional ways of building chips brushed up against the laws of physics, the United States was at risk of losing its edge in the chip industry. Five and a half years later, in 2022, Congress and the White House collaborated to address that possibility by passing the CHIPS and Science Act—a bold venture patterned after the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program, and the Human Genome Project. Over the course of […]