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Another experimental covid-19 vaccine has shown promising early results

The news: An experimental covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech provoked immune responses in 45 healthy volunteers, according to a preprint paper on medRXiv. The levels of antibodies were up to 2.8 times the level of those found in patients who have recovered. The study randomly assigned 45 people to get either one […]

Are we making spacecraft too autonomous?

Are we making spacecraft too autonomous?

When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space. Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was

A supermassive black hole lit up a collision of two smaller black holes

Astronomers from Caltech have reported that they’ve observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby helped illuminate the other two as they collided. If confirmed, the findings, published in Physical Review Letters, would be the first optical observations ever made

The US now has more covid-19 tests than it knows what to do with

The US now has more covid-19 tests than it knows what to do with

“We have the greatest testing program anywhere in the world,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on June 23. “We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases.” Trump went on to say

A new US bill would ban the police use of facial recognition

The news: US Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agency or official to “acquire, possess, access, or use” biometric surveillance technology in the US. It would also require state and local law

Trump’s freeze on new visas could threaten US dominance in AI

Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigration policies, creating a bottleneck for meeting domestic demand for tech talent. Now

Alumni in the coronavirus conversation

Alumni in the coronavirus conversation

The virus “I am very wary of simplistic projections about the ongoing outbreak based solely off of its current growth patterns” —Maimuna Majumder, SM ’15, PhD ’18, faculty, Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, and research associate, Harvard Medical School (ABC News, March 16)  “Closing schools, bars, and movie theaters are good measures, but not

The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement

There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them.  Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the system, has led to the discovery of dexamethasone as one of the

Trump’s data-hungry, invasive app is a voter surveillance tool of extraordinary power

Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” Parscale’s numbers for the rally—originally scheduled for Juneteenth and still set to occur

The global AI agenda: The Middle East and Africa

The global AI agenda: The Middle East and Africa

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and

Our biggest questions about immunity to covid-19

We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get more pressing. Here’s a look at some of the biggest questions we’re still trying to answer.  How much

Here’s how genes from covid-19 survivors could help you

Here’s how genes from covid-19 survivors could help you

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic.

Facebook just released a database of 100,000 deepfakes to teach AI how to spot them

Deepfakes⁠ have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t. With tools for making deepfakes now widely available and relatively easy to use, many also worry that they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation.

The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police

The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police

In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing face recognition technology to governments. As part of an increased focus on the role that tech companies were playing in enabling the US government’s tracking and deportation of immigrants, it called on

A teenager’s guide to building the world’s best pandemic and protest trackers

The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. The

Twitter wants you to read articles before you retweet them

The news: Twitter is testing a new feature on Android phones that prompts people to read articles before they share them. Someone who goes to retweet a link on Twitter without having clicked through to the story it leads to may be shown a pop-up message saying “Want to read this before retweeting?” It’s currently

How K-pop fans became celebrated online vigilantes

How K-pop fans became celebrated online vigilantes

When the Dallas police called for the public to send them videos of illegal activity during protests a week ago, they didn’t get the evidence of law-breaking demonstrators they expected. Instead, fans of Korean pop music downloaded the police department’s app en masse, rallied each other to flood it with short, fan-produced videos, and gave

Astronomers have found a planet like Earth orbiting a star like the sun

Three thousand light-years from Earth sits Kepler 160, a sun-like star that’s already thought to have three planets in its system. Now researchers think they’ve found a fourth. Planet KOI-456.04, as it’s called, appears similar to Earth in size and orbit, raising new hopes we’ve found perhaps the best candidate yet for a habitable exoplanet

How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance

How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance

In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even

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