The Download: Questions over a clean fuel startup, and Chinese lockdown censorship

by Rhiannon Williams - April 25, 20220

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. This $1.5 billion startup promised to deliver clean fuels as cheap as gas. Experts are deeply skeptical Last summer, Rob McGinnis, the founder and chief executive of startup Prometheus Fuels,

This $1.5 billion startup promised to deliver clean fuels as cheap as gas. Experts are deeply skeptical.

by James Temple - April 25, 20220

Last summer, investors gathered in the parking lot of a converted warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Rob McGinnis, the founder and chief executive of Prometheus Fuels, was ready to show off his “Maxwell Core.” The pipe-shaped device is packed with a membrane riddled with carbon nanotubes, forming pores that separate alcohols

Can the blockchain reduce student loan debt?

by Tisya Mavuram - April 25, 20220

Robin Kim graduated from New York University in 2015 with a degree in economics. He borrowed more than $100,000 from the US government and quickly became locked in to high interest rates. He has been trying to pay off his student loans ever since. Eventually, Kim refinanced through a private lender

WeChat wants people to use its video platform. So they did, for digital protests.

by Zeyi Yang - April 24, 20220

On the night of April 22, millions of people in China watched the same video on their phones: a six-minute montage of audio clips from the covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, titled The Voice of April. Its emphasis on the lockdown’s human toll struck a chord, and people shared it widely

Chinese NFT platforms don’t want you to trade NFTs anymore

by Zeyi Yang - April 23, 20220

While NFT traders in the US fret over their tax responsibilities for selling big-ticket digital assets, their peers in China are faced with a very different problem: the Chinese industry is headed to a future where NFTs can’t be traded at all. On April 13, three national financial industry associations in

The Download: Language-preserving AI, and hackers showed it’s frighteningly easy to breach critical infrastructure

by Rhiannon Williams - April 22, 20220

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. A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people In the back room of an old building in New Zealand, one of the most advanced computers for artificial intelligence is

Spilling Silicon Valley’s secrets, one tweet at a time

by Tanya Basu - April 22, 20220

Shortly after midnight on May 4, 2018, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted her first “finding” ever. “Twitter is working on End-to-End Encrypted Secret DM!” she wrote. A young woman of color, then just 23, exposing the plans of a Big Tech firm without any tools apart from her own ability to reverse-engineer

A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people

by Karen Hao - April 22, 20220

In the back room of an old and graying building in the northernmost region of New Zealand, one of the most advanced computers for artificial intelligence is helping to redefine the technology’s future. Te Hiku Media, a nonprofit Māori radio station run by life partners Peter-Lucas Jones and Keoni Mahelona, bought

How engineered microbes could cut aviation emissions

by Casey Crownhart - April 22, 20220

A startup using genetically engineered microbes, light, and carbon dioxide in an attempt to make an alternative to petroleum-based products has caught the attention of United, one of the world’s largest airlines. Aviation accounts for about 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions—nearly 1 gigaton in 2019. That number is growing, and

Flexibility is key when navigating the future of 6G

by MIT Technology Review Insights - April 21, 20220

Mobile providers are accelerating their rollout of the flexible, low-latency, multi-gigabit-per-second communications network known as 5G. The technology promises to deliver not just faster data rates, but a more flexible and programmable network. This will be combined with the high reliability and low latency required to create secure, reliable wireless