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<title>This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/16/1092484/rapid-dna-analysis-ande-mass-disaster-victim-identification-maui/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Erika Hayasaki]]></dc:creator>
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<description><![CDATA[Seven days No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But as Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind:…]]></description>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Seven days</h3>
No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But as Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind: What if his family members had perished in the blaze? What if all of them were gone?
Hours passed; then days. All Raven knew at that point was this: there had been a wildfire on August 8, 2023, in Lahaina, where his multigenerational, tight-knit family lived. But from where he was currently based in Northern California, Raven was in the dark. Had his family evacuated? Were they hurt? He watched from afar as horrifying video clips of Front Street burning circulated online.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="1871" height="1165" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RH3G6B.jpg?w=1871" alt="" class="wp-image-1092544" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RH3G6B.jpg 1871w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RH3G6B.jpg?resize=300,187 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RH3G6B.jpg?resize=768,478 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RH3G6B.jpg?resize=1536,956 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1871px) 100vw, 1871px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Much of the area around Lahaina’s Pioneer Mill Smokestack was totally destroyed by wildfire.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">ALAMY</div>
</figure>
</div>
The list of missing residents meanwhile climbed into the hundreds.
Raven remembers how frightened he felt: “I thought I had lost them.”
Raven had spent his youth in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, cream-colored home on Kopili Street that had long housed not just his immediate family but also around 10 to 12 renters, since home prices were so high on Maui. When he and his brother, Raphael Jr., were kids, their dad put up a basketball hoop outside where they’d shoot hoops with neighbors. Raphael Jr.’s high school sweetheart, Christine Mariano, later moved in, and when the couple had a son in 2021, they raised him there too.
From the initial news reports and posts, it seemed as if the fire had destroyed the Imperials’ entire neighborhood near the Pioneer Mill Smokestack—a <a href="https://www.lahainarestoration.org/smokestack.html#:~:text=replaced%20the%20trains.-,Pioneer%20Mill%20Co.,for%20fishermen%20out%20at%20sea.">225-foot-high structure</a> left over from the days of Maui’s sugar plantations, which Raven’s grandfather had worked on as an immigrant from the Philippines in the mid-1900s.
Then, finally, on August 11, a call to Raven’s brother went through. He’d managed to get a cell signal while standing on the beach.
“Is everyone okay?” Raven asked.
“We’re just trying to find Dad,” Raphael Jr. told his brother.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" width="1984" height="1323" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-102.jpg?w=1984" alt="Raven Imperial sitting in the grass" class="wp-image-1092551" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-102.jpg 1984w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-102.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-102.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-102.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1984px) 100vw, 1984px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">From his current home in Northern California, Raven Imperial spent days not knowing what had happened to his family in Maui.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">WINNI WINTERMEYER</div>
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</div>
In the three days following the fire, the rest of the family members had slowly found their way back to each other. Raven would learn that most of his immediate family had been separated for 72 hours: Raphael Jr. had been marooned in Kaanapali, 4 miles north of Lahaina; Christine had been stuck in Wailuku, more than 20 miles away; both young parents had been separated from their son, who escaped with Christine’s parents. Raven’s mother, Evelyn, had also been in Kaanapali, though not where Raphael Jr. had been.
But no one was in contact with Rafael Sr. Evelyn had left their home around noon on the day of the fire and headed to work. That was the last time she had seen him. The last time they had spoken was when she called him just after 3 p.m. and asked: “Are you working?” He replied “No,” before the phone abruptly cut off.
“Everybody was found,” Raven says. “Except for my father.”
Within the week, Raven boarded a plane and flew back to Maui. He would keep looking for him, he told himself, for as long as it took.
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
That same week, Kim Gin was also on a plane to Maui. It would take half a day to get there from Alabama, where she had moved after retiring from the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in California a year earlier. But Gin, now an independent consultant on death investigations, knew she had something to offer the response teams in Lahaina. Of all the forensic investigators in the country, she was one of the few who had experience in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire on the vast scale of Maui’s. She was also one of the rare investigators well versed in employing rapid DNA analysis—an emerging but increasingly vital scientific tool used to identify victims in unfolding mass-casualty events.
Gin started her career in Sacramento in 2001 and was working as the coroner 17 years later when Butte County, California, close to 90 miles north, erupted in flames. She had worked fire investigations before, but nothing like the Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres—an area larger than the city of Chicago. The tiny town of Paradise, the epicenter of the blaze, didn’t have the capacity to handle the rising death toll. Gin’s office had a refrigerated box truck and a 52-foot semitrailer, as well as a morgue that could handle a couple of hundred bodies.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" width="2400" height="3000" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?w=1600" alt="Kim Gin" class="wp-image-1092542" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg 2400w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?resize=240,300 240w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?resize=768,960 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?resize=1600,2000 1600w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?resize=1229,1536 1229w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5552.jpg?resize=1638,2048 1638w" sizes="(max-width: 2400px) 100vw, 2400px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Kim Gin, the former Sacramento County coroner, had worked fire investigations in her career, but nothing prepared her for the 2018 Camp Fire. </figcaption><div class="image-credit">BRYAN TARNOWSKI</div>
</figure>
</div>
“Even though I knew it was a fire, I expected more identifications by fingerprints or dental [records]. But that was just me being naïve,” she says. She quickly realized that putting names to the dead, many burned beyond recognition, would rely heavily on DNA.
“The problem then became how long it takes to do the traditional DNA [analysis],” Gin explains, speaking to a significant and long-standing challenge in the field—and the reason DNA identification has long been something of a last resort following large-scale disasters.
While more conventional identification methods—think fingerprints, dental information, or matching something like a knee replacement to medical records—can be a long, tedious process, they don’t take nearly as long as traditional DNA testing.
Historically, the process of making genetic identifications would often stretch on for months, even years. In fires and other situations that result in badly degraded bone or tissue, it can become even more challenging and time consuming to process DNA, which traditionally involves reading the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome and comparing samples found in the field against samples from a family member. Meanwhile, investigators frequently need equipment from the US Department of Justice or the county crime lab to test the samples, so backlogs often pile up.
<div class="wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-layout-1 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex">
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2461" height="1641" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg?w=2461" alt="" class="wp-image-1092541" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg 2461w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5287.jpg?resize=2048,1366 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2461px) 100vw, 2461px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"> A supply kit with swabs, gloves, and other items needed to take a DNA sample in the field.</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div class="wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="3000" height="2000" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg?w=3000" alt="" class="wp-image-1092540" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5265.jpg?resize=2048,1365 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">A demo chip for ANDE’s rapid DNA box.</figcaption></figure>
</div>
</div>

This creates a wait that can be horrendous for family members. Death certificates, federal assistance, insurance money—“all that hinges on that ID,” Gin says. Not to mention the emotional toll of not knowing if their loved ones are alive or dead.
But over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed. The grim work following a disaster remains—surveying rubble and ash, distinguishing a piece of plastic from a tiny fragment of bone—but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace swifter than ever before.
The key innovation driving this progress has been rapid DNA analysis, a methodology that focuses on just over two dozen regions of the genome. The 2018 Camp Fire was the first time the technology was used in a large, live disaster setting, and the first time it was used as the primary way to identify victims. The technology—deployed in small high-tech field devices developed by companies like industry leader ANDE, or in a lab with other rapid DNA techniques developed by Thermo Fisher—is increasingly being used by the US military on the battlefield, and by the FBI and local police departments after sexual assaults and in instances where confirming an ID is challenging, like cases of missing or murdered Indigenous people or migrants. Yet arguably the most effective way to use rapid DNA is in incidents of mass death. In the Camp Fire, 22 victims were identified using traditional methods, while rapid DNA analysis helped with 62 of the remaining 63 victims; it has also been used in recent years following hurricanes and floods, and in the war in Ukraine.
<figure class="wp-block-pullquote alignleft has-text-align-left"><blockquote>“These families are going to have to wait a long period of time to get identification. How do we make this go faster?”</blockquote></figure>
Tiffany Roy, a forensic DNA expert with consulting company ForensicAid, says she’d be concerned about the technology being deployed in a crime scene, where quality evidence is limited and can be quickly “exhausted” by well-meaning investigators who are “not trained DNA analysts.” But, on the whole, Roy and other experts see rapid DNA as a major net positive for the field. “It is definitely a game-changer,” adds Sarah Kerrigan, a professor of forensic science at Sam Houston State University and the director of its Institute for Forensic Research, Training, and Innovation.
But back in those early days after the Camp Fire, all Gin knew was that <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/11/16/668552010/more-than-600-people-now-missing-in-californias-deadliest-fire">nearly 1,000 people</a> had been listed as missing, and she was tasked with helping to identify the dead. “Oh my goodness,” she remembers thinking. “These families are going to have to wait a long period of time to get identification. How do we make this go faster?”
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Ten days</h3>
One flier pleading for information about “Uncle Raffy,” as people in the community knew Rafael Sr., was posted on a brick-red stairwell outside Paradise Supermart, a Filipino store and restaurant in Kahului, 25 miles away from the destruction. In it, just below the words “MISSING Lahaina Victim,” the 63-year-old grandfather smiled with closed lips, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, his right hand curled in the shaka sign, thumb and pinky pointing out.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="wp-block-image alignright size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1072" height="1410" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123219.jpg?w=1072" alt="Raphael Imperial Sr" class="wp-image-1092549" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123219.jpg 1072w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123219.jpg?resize=228,300 228w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123219.jpg?resize=768,1010 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1072px) 100vw, 1072px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Raven remembers how hard his dad Rafael worked. His three jobs took him all over town and earned him the nickname “Mr. Aloha.” </figcaption><div class="image-credit">COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL</div>
</figure>
</div>
“Everybody knew him from restaurant businesses,” Raven says. “He was all over Lahaina, very friendly to everybody.” Raven remembers how hard his dad worked, juggling three jobs: as a draft tech for Anheuser-Busch, setting up services and delivering beer all across town; as a security officer at Allied Universal security services; and as a parking booth attendant at the Sheraton Maui. He connected with so many people that coworkers, friends, and other locals gave him another nickname: “Mr. Aloha.”
Raven also remembers how his dad had always loved karaoke, where he would sing “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra. “That’s the only song that he would sing,” Raven says. “Like, on repeat.” 
Since their home had burned down, the Imperials ran their search out of a rental unit in Kihei, which was owned by a local woman one of them knew through her job. The woman had opened her rental to three families in all. It quickly grew crowded with side-by-side beds and piles of donations.
Each day, Evelyn waited for her husband to call.
She managed to catch up with one of their former tenants, who recalled asking Rafael Sr. to leave the house on the day of the fires. But she did not know if he actually did. Evelyn spoke to other neighbors who also remembered seeing Rafael Sr. that day; they told her that they had seen him go back into the house. But they too did not know what happened to him after.
A friend of Raven’s who got into the largely restricted burn zone told him he’d spotted Rafael Sr.’s Toyota Tacoma on the street, not far from their house. He sent a photo: the pickup was burned out, but a passenger-side door was open. The family wondered: Could he have escaped?
Evelyn called the Red Cross. She called the police. Nothing. They waited and hoped.
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
Back in Paradise in 2018, as Gin worried about the scores of waiting families, she learned there might in fact be a better way to get a positive ID—and a much quicker one. A company called ANDE Rapid DNA had already volunteered its services to the Butte County sheriff and promised that its technology could process DNA and get a match in less than two hours.
“I’ll try anything at this point,” Gin remembers telling the sheriff. “Let’s see this magic box and what it’s going to do.”
In truth, Gin did not think it would work, and certainly not in two hours. When the device arrived, it was “not something huge and fantastical,” she recalls thinking. A little bigger than a microwave, it looked “like an ordinary box that beeps, and you put stuff in, and out comes a result.”
The “stuff,” more specifically, was a cheek or bloodstain swab, or a piece of muscle, or a fragment of bone that had been crushed and demineralized. Instead of reading 3 billion base pairs in this sample, Selden’s machine examined just 27 genome regions characterized by particular repeating sequences. It would be nearly impossible for two unrelated people to have the same repeating sequence in those regions. But a parent and child, or siblings, would match, meaning you could compare DNA found in human remains with DNA samples taken from potential victims’ family members. Making it even more efficient for a coroner like Gin, the machine could run up to five tests at a time and could be operated by anyone with just a little basic training.
ANDE’s chief scientific officer, Richard Selden, a pediatrician who has a PhD in genetics from Harvard, didn’t come up with the idea to focus on a smaller, more manageable number of base pairs to speed up DNA analysis. But it did become something of an obsession for him after he watched the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-1990s and began to grasp just how long it took for DNA samples to get processed in crime cases. By this point, the FBI had already set up a system for identifying DNA by looking at just 13 regions of the genome; it would later add seven more. Researchers in other countries had also identified other sets of regions to analyze. Drawing on these various methodologies, Selden homed in on the 27 specific areas of DNA he thought would be most effective to examine, and he launched ANDE in 2004.
But he had to build a device to do the analysis. Selden wanted it to be small, portable, and easily used by anyone in the field. In a conventional lab, he says, “from the moment you take that cheek swab to the moment that you have the answer, there are hundreds of laboratory steps.” Traditionally, a human is holding test tubes and iPads and sorting through or processing paperwork. Selden compares it all to using a “conventional typewriter.” He effectively created the more efficient laptop version of DNA analysis by figuring out how to speed up that same process.
No longer would a human have to “open up this bottle and put [the sample] in a pipette and figure out how much, then move it into a tube here.” It is all automated, and the process is confined to a single device.
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2634" height="1751" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg?w=2634" alt="gloved hands load a chip cartridge into the ANDE machine" class="wp-image-1092546" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg 2634w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg?resize=300,199 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg?resize=768,511 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg?resize=1536,1021 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/1543526263-andeloadingchip.jpg?resize=2048,1361 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2634px) 100vw, 2634px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The rapid DNA analysis boxes from ANDE can be used in the field by anyone with just a bit of training. </figcaption><div class="image-credit">ANDE</div>
</figure>
</div>
Once a sample is placed in the box, the DNA binds to a filter in water and the rest of the sample is washed away. Air pressure propels the purified DNA to a reconstitution chamber and then flattens it into a sheet less than a millimeter thick, which is subjected to about 6,000 volts of electricity. It’s “kind of an obstacle course for the DNA,” he explains. 
The machine then interprets the donor’s genome and and provides an allele table with a graph showing the peaks for each region and their sizes. This data is then compared with samples from potential relatives, and the machine reports when it has a match.
Rapid DNA analysis as a technology first received approval for use by the US military in 2014, and in the FBI two years later. Then the Rapid DNA Act of 2017 enabled all US law enforcement agencies to use the technology on site and in real time as an alternative to sending samples off to labs and waiting for results.
Though by the time of the Camp Fire the following year, most coroners and local police officers still had no familiarity or experience with it. Neither did Gin. So she decided to put the “magic box” through a test: she gave Selden, who had arrived at the scene to help with the technology, a DNA sample from a victim whose identity she’d already confirmed via fingerprint. The box took about 90 minutes to come back with a result. And to Gin’s surprise, it was the same identification she had already made. Just to make sure, she ran several more samples through the box, also from victims she had already identified. Again, results were returned swiftly, and they confirmed hers.
“I was a believer,” she says.
The next year, Gin helped investigators use rapid DNA technology in the 2019 Conception disaster, when a dive boat caught fire off the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara. “We ID’d 34 victims in 10 days,” Gin says. “Completely done.” Gin now works independently to assist other investigators in mass-fatality events and helps them learn to use the ANDE system.
Its speed made the box a groundbreaking innovation. Death investigations, Gin learned long ago, are not as much about the dead as about giving peace of mind, justice, and closure to the living.
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Fourteen days</h3>
Many of the people who were initially on the Lahaina missing persons list turned up in the days following the fire. Tearful reunions ensued.
Two weeks after the fire, the Imperials hoped they’d have the same outcome as they loaded into a truck to check out some exciting news: someone had reported seeing Rafael Sr. at a local church. He’d been eating and had burns on his hands and looked disoriented. The caller said the sighting had occurred three days after the fire. Could he still be in the vicinity?
When the family arrived, they couldn’t confirm the lead.
“We were getting a lot of calls,” Raven says. “There were a lot of rumors saying that they found him.”
None of them panned out. They kept looking.
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The scenes following large-scale, destructive events like the fires in Paradise and Lahaina can be sprawling and dangerous, with victims sometimes dispersed across a large swath of land if many people died trying to escape. Teams need to meticulously and tediously search mountains of mixed, melted, or burned debris just to find a bit of human remains that might otherwise be mistaken for a piece of plastic or drywall. Compounding the challenge is the comingling of remains—from people who died huddled together, or in the same location, or alongside pets or other animals.
This is when the work of forensic anthropologists is essential: they have the skills to differentiate between human and animal bones and to find the critical samples that are needed by DNA specialists, fire and arson investigators, forensic pathologists and dentists, and other experts. Rapid DNA analysis “works best in tandem with forensic anthropologists, particularly in wildfires,” Gin explains.
“The first step is determining, is it a bone?” says Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine on Oahu. Then, is it a human bone? And if so, which one?
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<figure class="wp-block-image alignright size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1188" height="1686" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AP051113016599-crop.jpg?w=1188" alt="Rober Mann in a lab coat with a human skeleton on the table in front of him" class="wp-image-1092547" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AP051113016599-crop.jpg 1188w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AP051113016599-crop.jpg?resize=211,300 211w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AP051113016599-crop.jpg?resize=768,1090 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/AP051113016599-crop.jpg?resize=1082,1536 1082w" sizes="(max-width: 1188px) 100vw, 1188px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Forensic anthropologist Robert Mann has spent his career identifying human remains.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">AP PHOTO/LUCY PEMONI</div>
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Mann has served on teams that have helped identify the remains of victims after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, among other mass-casualty events. He remembers how in one investigation he received an object believed to be a human bone; it turned out to be a plastic replica. In another case, he was looking through the wreckage of a car accident and spotted what appeared to be a human rib fragment. Upon closer examination, he identified it as a piece of rubber weather stripping from the rear window. “We examine every bone and tooth, no matter how small, fragmented, or burned it might be,” he says. “It’s a time-consuming but critical process because we can’t afford to make a mistake or overlook anything that might help us establish the identity of a person.”
For Mann, the Maui disaster felt particularly immediate. It was right near his home. He was deployed to Lahaina about a week after the fire, as one of more than a dozen forensic anthropologists on scene from universities in places including Oregon, California, and Hawaii.
While some anthropologists searched the recovery zone—looking through what was left of homes, cars, buildings, and streets, and preserving fragmented and burned bone, body parts, and teeth—Mann was stationed in the morgue, where samples were sent for processing.
It used to be much harder to find samples that scientists believed could provide DNA for analysis, but that’s also changed recently as researchers have learned more about what kind of DNA can survive disasters. Two kinds are used in forensic identity testing: nuclear DNA (found within the nuclei of eukaryotic cells) and mitochondrial DNA (found in the mitochondria, organelles located outside the nucleus). Both, it turns out, have survived plane crashes, wars, floods, volcanic eruptions, and fires.
Theories have also been evolving over the past few decades about how to preserve and recover DNA specifically after intense heat exposure. One 2018 <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29080916/">study</a> found that a majority of the samples actually survived high heat. Researchers are also learning more about how bone characteristics change depending on the degree. “Different temperatures and how long a body or bone has been exposed to high temperatures affect the likelihood that it will or will not yield usable DNA,” Mann says.
Typically, forensic anthropologists help select which bone or tooth to use for DNA testing, says Mann. Until recently, he explains, scientists believed “you cannot get usable DNA out of burned bone.” But thanks to these new developments, researchers are realizing that with some bone that has been charred, “they’re able to get usable, good DNA out of it,” Mann says. “And that’s new.” Indeed, Selden explains that “in a typical bad fire, what I would expect is 80% to 90% of the samples are going to have enough intact DNA” to get a result from rapid analysis. The rest, he says, may require deeper sequencing.
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="3000" height="1706" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg?w=3000" alt="" class="wp-image-1092558" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg?resize=300,171 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg?resize=768,437 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg?resize=1536,873 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2RHXK1D.jpg?resize=2048,1165 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">The aftermath of large-scale, destructive events like the fire in Lahaina can be sprawling and dangerous. Teams need to meticulously search through mountains of mixed, melted, or burned debris to find a bit of human remains. </figcaption><div class="image-credit">GLENN FAWCETT VIA ALAMY</div>
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Anthropologists can often tell “simply by looking” if a sample will be good enough to help create an ID. If it’s been burned and blackened, “it might be a good candidate for DNA testing,” Mann says. But if it’s calcined (white and “china-like”), he says, the DNA has probably been destroyed.
On Maui, Mann adds, rapid DNA analysis made the entire process more efficient, with tests coming back in just two hours. “That means while you’re doing the examination of this individual right here on the table, you may be able to get results back on who this person is,” he says. From inside the lab, he watched the science unfold as the number of missing on Maui quickly began to go down.
Within three days, 42 people’s remains were recovered inside Maui homes or buildings and another 39 outside, along with 15 inside vehicles and one in the water. The first confirmed identification of a victim on the island occurred four days after the fire—this one via fingerprint. The ANDE rapid DNA team arrived two days after the fire and deployed four boxes to analyze multiple samples of DNA simultaneously. The first rapid DNA identification happened within that first week.
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Sixteen days</h3>
More than two weeks after the fire, the list of missing and unaccounted-for individuals was dwindling, but it still had <a href="https://www.mauicounty.gov/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=12763">388 people</a> on it. Rafael Sr. was one of them.
Raven and Raphael Jr. raced to another location: Cupies café in Kahului, more than 20 miles from Lahaina. Someone had reported seeing him there.
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<figure class="wp-block-image alignright size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="448" height="518" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/thumbnail_IMG_6364.jpg?w=448" alt="Poster taped to wall that reads,"MISSING Lahaina Victim. Rafael Imperial 'Raffy'" with the contact number redacted" class="wp-image-1092553" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/thumbnail_IMG_6364.jpg 448w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/thumbnail_IMG_6364.jpg?resize=259,300 259w" sizes="(max-width: 448px) 100vw, 448px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Rafael’s family hung posters around the island, desperately hoping for reliable information. (Phone number redacted by MIT Technology Review.)</figcaption><div class="image-credit">ERIKA HAYASAKI</div>
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The tip was another false lead. 
As family and friends continued to search, they stopped by support hubs that had sprouted up around the island, receiving information about Red Cross and FEMA assistance or donation programs as volunteers distributed meals and clothes. These hubs also sometimes offered DNA testing.
Raven still had a “50-50” feeling that his dad might be out there somewhere. But he was beginning to lose some of that hope.
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Gin was stationed at one of the support hubs, which offered food, shelter, clothes, and support. “You could also go in and give biological samples,” she says. “We actually moved one of the rapid DNA instruments into the family assistance center, and we were running the family samples there.” Eliminating the need to transport samples from a site to a testing center further cut down any lag time.
Selden had once believed that the biggest hurdle for his technology would be building the actual device, which took about eight years to design and another four years to perfect. But at least in Lahaina, it was something else: persuading distraught and traumatized family members to offer samples for the test.
Nationally, there are serious privacy concerns when it comes to rapid DNA technology. Organizations like the ACLU warn that as police departments and governments begin deploying it more often, there must be more oversight, monitoring, and training in place to ensure that it is always used responsibly, even if that adds some time and expense. But the space is still largely unregulated, and the ACLU fears it could give rise to <a href="https://www.innocenceproject.org/rogue-dna-databases-operate-outside-of-the-law/">rogue DNA databases</a> “with far fewer quality, privacy, and security controls than federal databases.”
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Family support centers popped up around Maui to offer clothing, food, and other assistance, and sometimes to take DNA samples to help find missing family members. 
In a place like Hawaii, these fears are even more palpable. The islands have a long history of US colonialism, military dominance, and exploitation of the Native population and of the large immigrant working-class population employed in the tourism industry.
Native Hawaiians in particular have a fraught relationship with DNA testing. Under a US law signed in 1921, thousands have a right to live on 200,000 designated acres of land trust, almost for free. It was a kind of reparations measure put in place to assist Native Hawaiians whose land had been stolen. Back in 1893, a small group of American sugar plantation owners and descendants of Christian missionaries, backed by US Marines, held Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani in her palace at gunpoint and forced her to sign over 1.8 million acres to the US, which ultimately seized the islands in 1898.
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<figure class="wp-block-image alignright size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1970" height="2626" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?w=1500" alt="Queen Liliuokalani in a formal seated portrait" class="wp-image-1092550" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg 1970w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?resize=768,1024 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?resize=1500,2000 1500w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?resize=1152,1536 1152w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Liliuokalani_in_1917.jpg?resize=1536,2048 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1970px) 100vw, 1970px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani was forced to sign over 1.8 million acres to the US.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS</div>
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To lay their claim to the designated land and property, individuals first must prove via DNA tests how much Hawaiian blood they have. But many residents who have submitted their DNA and qualified for the land have died on waiting lists before ever receiving it. Today, Native Hawaiians are struggling to stay on the islands amid skyrocketing housing prices, while others have been forced to move away.
Meanwhile, after the fires, Filipino families faced particularly stark barriers to getting information about financial support, government assistance, housing, and DNA testing. Filipinos make up about 25% of Hawaii’s population and 40% of its workers in the tourism industry. They also make up 46% of undocumented residents in Hawaii—more than any other group. Some encountered language barriers, since they primarily spoke Tagalog or Ilocano. Some worried that people would try to take over their burned land and develop it for themselves. For many, being asked for DNA samples only added to the confusion and suspicion.
Selden says he hears the overall concerns about DNA testing: “If you ask people about DNA in general, they think of Brave New World and [fear] the information is going to be used to somehow harm or control people.” But just like regular DNA analysis, he explains, rapid DNA analysis “has no information on the person’s appearance, their ethnicity, their health, their behavior either in the past, present, or future.” He describes it as a more accurate fingerprint.
Gin tried to help the Lahaina family members understand that their DNA “isn’t going to go anywhere else.” She told them their sample would ultimately be destroyed, something programmed to occur inside ANDE’s machine. (Selden says the boxes were designed to do this for privacy purposes.) But sometimes, Gin realizes, these promises are not enough.
“You still have a large population of people that, in my experience, don’t want to give up their DNA to a government entity,” she says. “They just don’t.”
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="3000" height="1802" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg?w=3000" alt="Kim Gin" class="wp-image-1092543" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg?resize=300,180 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg?resize=768,461 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg?resize=1536,923 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/BTT5870.jpg?resize=2048,1230 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Gin understands that family members are often nervous to give their DNA samples. She promises the process of rapid DNA analysis respects their privacy, but knows sometimes promises aren’t enough.</figcaption><div class="image-credit">BRYAN TARNOWSKI</div>
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The immediate aftermath of a disaster, when people are suffering from shock, PTSD, and displacement, is the worst possible moment to try to educate them about DNA tests and explain the technology and privacy policies. “A lot of them don’t have anything,” Gin says. “They’re just wondering where they’re going to lay their heads down, and how they’re going to get food and shelter and transportation.”
Unfortunately, Lahaina’s survivors won’t be the last people in this position. Particularly given the world’s current climate trajectory, the risk of deadly events in just about every neighborhood and community will rise. And figuring out who survived and who didn’t will be increasingly difficult. Mann recalls his work on the Indian Ocean tsunami, when over 227,000 people died. “The bodies would float off, and they ended up 100 miles away,” he says. Investigators were at times left with remains that had been consumed by sea creatures or degraded by water and weather. He remembers how they struggled to determine: “Who is the person?”
Mann has spent his own career identifying people including “missing soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, from all past wars,” as well as people who have died recently. That closure is meaningful for family members, some of them decades, or even lifetimes, removed.
In the end, distrust and conspiracy theories did in fact hinder DNA-identification efforts on Maui, according to a police department report. 
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">33 days</h3>
By the time Raven went to a family resource center to submit a swab, some four weeks had gone by. He remembers the quick rub inside his cheek.
Some of his family had already offered their own samples before Raven provided his. For them, waiting wasn’t an issue of mistrusting the testing as much as experiencing confusion and chaos in the weeks after the fire. They believed Uncle Raffy was still alive, and they still held hope of finding him. Offering DNA was a final step in their search.
“I did it for my mom,” Raven says. She still wanted to believe he was alive, but Raven says: “I just had this feeling.” His father, he told himself, must be gone.
Just a day after he gave his sample—on September 11, more than a month after the fire—he was at the temporary house in Kihei when he got the call: “It was,” Raven says, “an automatic match.”
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1984" height="1323" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-442.jpg?w=1984" alt="Raven Imperial standing in the shade of trees wearing a "Lahaina Strong; Out of the ashes" shirt" class="wp-image-1092552" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-442.jpg 1984w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-442.jpg?resize=300,200 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-442.jpg?resize=768,512 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/RavenImperial-442.jpg?resize=1536,1024 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1984px) 100vw, 1984px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Raven gave a cheek swab about a month after the disappearance of his father. It didn’t take long for him to get a phone call: “It was an automatic match.” </figcaption><div class="image-credit">WINNI WINTERMEYER</div>
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The investigators let the family know the address where the remains of Rafael Sr. had been found, several blocks away from their home. They put it into Google Maps and realized it was where some family friends lived. The mother and son of that family had been listed as missing too. Rafael Sr., it seemed, had been with or near them in the end.
By October, investigators in Lahaina had obtained and analyzed 215 DNA samples from family members of the missing. By December, DNA analysis had confirmed the identities of 63 of the most recent count of 101 victims. Seventeen more had been identified by fingerprint, 14 via dental records, and two through medical devices, along with three who died in the hospital. While some of the most damaged remains would still be undergoing DNA testing months after the fires, it’s a drastic improvement over the identification processes for 9/11 victims, for instance—today, over 20 years later, some are still being identified by DNA.
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<figure class="wp-block-image alignleft size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="307" height="395" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123224.jpg?w=307" alt="Raphael Imperial Sr" class="wp-image-1092559" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123224.jpg 307w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/IMG_20240513_123224.jpg?resize=233,300 233w" sizes="(max-width: 307px) 100vw, 307px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Raven remembers how much his father loved karaoke. His favorite song was “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra. </figcaption><div class="image-credit">COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL</div>
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Rafael Sr. was born on October 22, 1959, in Naga City, the Philippines. The family held his funeral on his birthday last year. His relatives flew in from Michigan, the Philippines, and California.
Raven says in those weeks of waiting—after all the false tips, the searches, the prayers, the glimmers of hope—deep down the family had already known he was gone. But for Evelyn, Raphael Jr., and the rest of their family, DNA tests were necessary—and, ultimately, a relief, Raven says. “They just needed that closure.”
Erika Hayasaki is an independent journalist based in Southern California.
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<post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">1092484</post-id> </item>
<item>
<title>Last summer was the hottest in 2,000 years. Here’s how we know.</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/16/1092507/tree-rings-climate-data/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Casey Crownhart]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Climate change and energy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[The Spark]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092507</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’m ready for summer, but if this year is anything like last year, it’s going to be a doozy. In fact, the summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest…]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/climate-energy-the-spark/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">sign up here</a>.
I’m ready for summer, but if this year is anything like last year, it’s going to be a doozy. In fact, the summer of 2023 in the Northern Hemisphere was the hottest in over 2,000 years, according to a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07512-y" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">new study</a> released this week. 
If you’ve been following the headlines, you probably already know that last year was a hot one. But I was gobsmacked by this paper’s title when it came across my desk. The warmest in 2,000 years—how do we even know that?
There weren’t exactly thermometers around in the year 1, so scientists have to get creative when it comes to comparing our climate today with that of centuries, or even millennia, ago. Here’s how our world stacks up against the climate of the past, how we know, and why it matters for our future. 
Today, there are thousands and thousands of weather stations around the globe, tracking the temperature from <a href="https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/news/badwater-weather-station.htm" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Death Valley</a> to <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/society/everest-weather-data/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Mount Everest</a>. So there’s plenty of data to show that 2023 was, in a word, a scorcher. 
Daily global ocean temperatures were the <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/03/19/weather-ocean-temperatures-record-warmth" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">warmest ever recorded</a> for over a year straight. Levels of sea ice <a href="https://www.climate.gov/news-features/event-tracker/2023-antarctic-sea-ice-winter-maximum-lowest-record-wide-margin" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">hit new lows.</a> And of course, the year saw the <a href="https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202313" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">highest global average temperatures</a> since record-keeping began in 1850.
But scientists decided to look even further back into the past for a year that could compare to our current temperatures. To do so, they turned to trees, which can act as low-tech weather stations.
The concentric <a href="https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/how-can-tree-rings-teach-us-about-climate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">rings inside a tree</a> are evidence of the plant’s yearly growth cycles. Lighter colors correspond to quick growth over the spring and summer, while the darker rings correspond to the fall and winter. Count the pairs of light and dark rings, and you can tell how many years a tree has lived. 
Trees tend to grow faster during warm, wet years and slower during colder ones. So scientists can not only count the rings but measure their thickness, and use that as a gauge for how warm any particular year was. They also look at factors like density and track different chemical signatures found inside the wood. You don’t even need to cut down a tree to get its help with climatic studies—you can just drill out a small cylinder from the tree’s center, called a core, and study the patterns.
The oldest living trees allow us to peek a few centuries into the past. Beyond that, it’s a matter of cross-referencing the patterns on dead trees with living ones, extending the record back in time like putting a puzzle together. 
It’s taken several decades of work and hundreds of scientists to develop the records that researchers used for this new paper, said Max Torbenson, one of the authors of the study, on a press call. There are over 10,000 trees from nine regions across the Northern Hemisphere represented, allowing the researchers to draw conclusions about individual years over the past two millennia. The year 246 CE once held the crown for the warmest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in the last 2,000 years. But 25 of the last 28 years have beat that record, Torbenson says, and 2023’s summer tops them all.
These conclusions are limited to the Northern Hemisphere, since there are only a few tree ring records from the Southern Hemisphere, says Jan Esper, lead author of the new study. And using tree rings doesn’t work very well for the tropics because seasons look different there, he adds. Since there’s no winter, there’s usually not as reliable an alternating pattern in <a href="https://lamont.columbia.edu/news/what-tropical-trees-can-teach-us-about-environment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">tropical tree rings</a>, though some trees do have annual rings that track the wet and dry periods of the year.
Paleoclimatologists, who study ancient climates, can use other methods to get a general idea of what the climate looked like even earlier—tens of thousands to millions of years ago. 
The biggest difference between the new study using tree rings and methods of looking back further into the past is the precision. Scientists can, with reasonable certainty, use tree rings to draw conclusions about individual years in the Northern Hemisphere (536 CE was the coldest, for instance, likely because of volcanic activity). Any information from further back than the past couple of thousand years will be more of a general trend than a specific data point representing a single year. But those records can still be very useful.
The <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inside-the-race-to-find-earths-oldest-ice/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">oldest glaciers on the planet</a> are at least a million years old, and scientists can drill down into the ice for samples. By examining the ratio of gases like oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen inside these ice cores, researchers can figure out the temperature of the time corresponding to the layers in the glacier. The oldest continuous ice-core record, which was collected in Antarctica, goes back about 800,000 years.
Researchers can use fossils to look even further back into Earth’s temperature record. For one <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-hasnt-warmed-this-fast-in-tens-of-millions-of-years/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2020 study,</a> researchers drilled into the seabed and looked at the sediment and tiny preserved shells of ancient organisms. From the chemical signatures in those samples, they found that the temperatures we might be on track to record may be hotter than anything the planet has experienced on a global scale in tens of millions of years.
It’s a bit sobering to know that we’re changing the planet in such a dramatic way. 
The good news is, we know what we need to do to turn things around: cut emissions of planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane. The longer we wait, the more expensive and difficult it will be to stop warming and reverse it, as Esper said on the press call: “We should do as much as possible, as soon as possible.” 
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Now read the rest of The Spark</h1>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Related reading</h3>
Last year broke all sorts of climate records, from emissions to ocean temperatures. For more on the data, check out <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/21/1085795/2023-climate-records-data/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">this story from December</a>.
How hot is too hot for the human body? I tackled <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/10/1028172/climate-change-human-body-extreme-heat-survival/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">that very question in a 2021 story</a>. 
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<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="3000" height="1688" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png?w=3000" alt="Two engineers in lab coats monitor the thermal battery powering a conveyor belt of bottles" class="wp-image-1091020" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png 3000w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png?resize=300,169 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png?resize=768,432 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png?resize=1536,864 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/THERMAL_BATTERY_colo_01.png?resize=2048,1152 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 3000px) 100vw, 3000px" /><div class="image-credit">SIMON LANDREIN</div>
</figure>
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<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Another thing</h3>
Readers chose thermal batteries as the <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/15/1091042/thermal-batteries-heat-energy-storage/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">11th Breakthrough Technology of 2024</a>. If you want to hear more about what thermal batteries are, how they work, and why this all matters, join us for the latest in our Roundtables series of online events, where I’ll be getting into the nitty-gritty details and answering some audience questions.
This event is exclusively for subscribers, so <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/subscribe?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">subscribe</a> if you haven’t already, and then <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/roundtables/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">register here</a> to join us tomorrow, May 16, at noon Eastern time. Hope to see you there!
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Keeping up with climate  </h3>
Scientists just recorded the largest ever annual leap in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The concentration of the planet-warming gas in March 2024 was 4.7 parts per million higher than it was a year before. (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-record" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Guardian</a>)
Tesla has reportedly begun rehiring some of the workers who were laid off from its charging team in recent weeks. (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-13/tesla-rehires-some-supercharger-workers-weeks-after-musk-s-culling?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxNTYyMjU0MiwiZXhwIjoxNzE2MjI3MzQyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTREVRQjJUMEFGQjQwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIzNDVFQTA0MjNBMUQ0NTI2QjY1QkNBNUZDRUJGQThGNiJ9.2RNvF37kKk0-xvIIdZ-YnoQY2ND7fdX3l67QJ5XqjBk&sref=E9Urfma4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Bloomberg</a>)
→ To catch up on what’s going on at Tesla, and what it means for the future of EV charging and climate tech more broadly, check out the newsletter from last week if you missed it. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092202/why-ev-charging-needs-more-than-tesla/?utm_source=the_spark&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_spark.unpaid.engagement&utm_content=*%7Cdate:m-d-y%7C*" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">MIT Technology Review</a>)
A new rule could spur thousands of miles of new power lines, making it easier to add renewables to the grid in the US. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will require grid operators to plan 20 years ahead, considering things like the speed of wind and solar installations. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/climate/electric-grid-overhaul-ferc.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">New York Times</a>)
Where does carbon dioxide go after it’s been vacuumed out of the atmosphere? Here are 10 options. (<a href="https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/ten-ways-to-use-carbon-dioxide" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Latitude Media</a>)
Ocean temperatures have been extremely high, shattering records over the past year. All that heat could help fuel a particularly busy upcoming hurricane season. (<a href="https://www.eenews.net/articles/historic-ocean-heat-wave-heralds-dangerous-hurricane-season/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">E&E News</a>)
New tariffs in the US will tack on additional costs to a wide range of Chinese imports, including batteries and solar cells. The tariff on EVs will take a particularly drastic jump, going from 27.5% to 102.5%. (<a href="https://apnews.com/article/biden-china-tariffs-electric-vehicles-evs-solar-2024ba735c47e04a50898a88425c5e2c" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Associated Press</a>)
A reporter took a trip to the Beijing Auto Show and drove dozens of EVs. His conclusion? Chinese EVs are advancing much faster than Western automakers can keep up with. (<a href="https://insideevs.com/features/719015/china-is-ahead-of-west/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">InsideEVs</a>)
Harnessing solar power via satellites in space and beaming it down to Earth is a tempting dream. But the reality, as you might expect, is probably not so rosy. (<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/space-based-solar-power-2667878868" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">IEEE Spectrum</a>)
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<title>A wave of retractions is shaking physics</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092535/a-wave-of-retractions-is-shaking-physics/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Sophia Chen]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 19:03:07 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Humans and technology]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092535</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results.  Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal…]]></description>
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Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results. 
Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal editors, and emissaries from the National Science Foundation gathered at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss the best way forward.“To be honest, we’ve let it go a little too long,” says physicist Sergey Frolov of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the conference organizers. 
The attendees gathered in the wake of retractions from two prominent research teams. One team, led by physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester, claimed that it had invented the world’s first room temperature superconductor in a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05742-0">2023 paper in Nature</a>. After independent researchers reviewed the work, a subsequent investigation from Dias’s university found that he had <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00976-y">fabricated and falsified</a> his data. Nature retracted the paper in November 2023. Last year, Physical Review Letters <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.079902">retracted</a> a 2021 publication on unusual properties in manganese sulfide that Dias co-authored.
The other high-profile research team consisted of researchers affiliated with Microsoft working to build a quantum computer. In 2021, Nature retracted the team’s<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26142"> 2018 paper</a> that claimed the creation of a pattern of electrons known as a Majorana particle, a long-sought breakthrough in quantum computing. Independent investigations of that research found that the researchers had cherry-picked their data, thus invalidating their findings. Another less-publicized research team pursuing Majorana particles fell to a similar fate, with Science retracting <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aag2792">a 2017 article</a> claiming indirect evidence of the particles in 2022.
In today’s scientific enterprise, scientists perform research and submit the work to editors. The editors assign anonymous referees to review the work, and if the paper passes review, the work becomes part of the accepted scientific record. When researchers do publish bad results, it’s not clear who should be held accountable—the referees who approved the work for publication, the journal editors who published it, or the researchers themselves. “Right now everyone’s kind of throwing the hot potato around,” says materials scientist Rachel Kurchin of Carnegie Mellon University, who attended the Pittsburgh meeting.
Much of the three-day meeting, named the <a href="https://www.pqi.org/international-conference-reproducibility-condensed-matter-physics">International Conference on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics</a> (a field that encompasses research into various states of matter and why they exhibit certain properties), focused on the basic scientific principle that an experiment and its analysis must yield the same results when repeated. “If you think of research as a product that is paid for by the taxpayer, then reproducibility is the quality assurance department,” Frolov told MIT Technology Review. Reproducibility offers scientists a check on their work, and without it, researchers might waste time and money on fruitless projects based on unreliable prior results, he says.
In addition to presentations and panel discussions, there was a workshop during which participants split into groups and drafted ideas for guidelines that researchers, journals, and funding agencies could follow to prioritize reproducibility in science. The tone of the proceedings stayed civil and even lighthearted at times. Physicist Vincent Mourik of Forschungszentrum Jülich, a German research institution, showed a photo of a toddler eating spaghetti to illustrate his experience investigating another team’s now-retracted experiment. Occasionally the discussion almost sounded like a couples counseling session, with NSF program director Tomasz Durakiewicz asking a panel of journal editors and a researcher to reflect on their “intimate bond based on trust.”
But researchers did not shy from directly criticizing Nature, Science, and the Physical Review family of journals, all of which sent editors to attend the conference. During a panel, physicist Henry Legg of the University of Basel in Switzerland called out the journal Physical Review B for publishing a paper <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.245423">on a quantum computing device</a> by Microsoft researchers that, for intellectual-property reasons, omitted information required for reproducibility. “It does seem like a step backwards,” Legg said. (Sitting in the audience, Physical Review B editor Victor Vakaryuk said that the paper’s authors had agreed to release “the remaining device parameters” by the end of the year.)
Journals also tend to “focus on story,” said Legg, which can lead editors to be biased toward experimental results that match theoretical predictions. Jessica Thomas, the executive editor of the American Physical Society, which publishes the Physical Review journals, pushed back on Legg’s assertion. “I don’t think that when editors read papers, they’re thinking about a press release or [telling] an amazing story,” Thomas told MIT Technology Review. “I think they’re looking for really good science.” Describing science through narrative is a necessary part of communication, she says. “We feel a responsibility that science serves humanity, and if humanity can’t understand what’s in our journals, then we have a problem.”
Frolov, whose independent review with Mourik of the Microsoft work spurred its retraction, said he and Mourik have had to repeatedly e-mail the Microsoft researchers and other involved parties to insist on data. “You have to learn how to be an asshole,” he told MIT Technology Review. “It shouldn’t be this hard.” 
At the meeting, editors pointed out that mistakes, misconduct, and retractions have always been a part of science in practice. “I don’t think that things are worse now than they have been in the past,” says Karl Ziemelis, an editor at Nature.
Ziemelis also emphasized that “retractions are not always bad.” While some retractions occur because of research misconduct, “some retractions are of a much more innocent variety—the authors having made or being informed of an honest mistake, and upon reflection, feel they can no longer stand behind the claims of the paper,” he said while speaking on a panel. Indeed, physicist James Hamlin of the University of Florida, one of the presenters and an independent reviewer of Dias’s work, discussed how he had <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.269902">willingly retracted</a> a 2009 experiment published in Physical Review Letters in 2021 after another researcher’s skepticism prompted him to reanalyze the data.
What’s new is that “the ease of sharing data has enabled scrutiny to a larger extent than existed before,” says Jelena Stajic, an editor at Science. Journals and researchers need a “more standardized approach to how papers should be written and what needs to be shared in peer review and publication,” she says.
Focusing on the scandals “can be distracting” from systemic problems in reproducibility, says attendee Frank Marsiglio, a physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada. Researchers aren’t required to make unprocessed data readily available for outside scrutiny. When Marsiglio has revisited his own published work from a few years ago, sometimes he’s had trouble recalling how his former self drew those conclusions because he didn’t leave enough documentation. “How is somebody who didn’t write the paper going to be able to understand it?” he says.
Problems can arise when researchers get too excited about their own ideas. “What gets the most attention are cases of fraud or data manipulation, like someone copying and pasting data or editing it by hand,” says conference organizer Brian Skinner, a physicist at Ohio State University. “But I think the much more subtle issue is there are cool ideas that the community wants to confirm, and then we find ways to confirm those things.”
But some researchers may publish bad data for a more straightforward reason. The academic culture, popularly described as “publish or perish,” creates an intense pressure on researchers to deliver results. “It’s not a mystery or pathology why somebody who’s under pressure in their work might misstate things to their supervisor,” said Eugenie Reich, a lawyer who represents scientific whistleblowers, during her talk.
Notably, the conference lacked perspectives from researchers based outside the US, Canada, and Europe, and from researchers at companies. In recent years, academics have flocked to companies such as Google, Microsoft, and smaller startups to do quantum computing research, and they have published their work in Nature, Science, and the Physical Review journals. Frolov says he reached out to researchers from a couple of companies, but “that didn’t work out just because of timing,” he says. He aims to include researchers from that arena in future conversations.
After discussing the problems in the field, conference participants proposed feasible solutions for sharing data to improve reproducibility. They discussed how to persuade the community to view data sharing positively, rather than seeing the demand for it as a sign of distrust. They also brought up the practical challenges of asking graduate students to do even more work by preparing their data for outside scrutiny when it may already take them over five years to complete their degree. Meeting participants aim to publicly release a paper with their suggestions. “I think trust in science will ultimately go up if we establish a robust culture of shareable, reproducible, replicable results,” says Frolov.
Sophia Chen is a science writer based in Columbus, Ohio. She has written for the society that publishes the Physical Review journals, and for the news section of Nature. 
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<title>OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092516/openai-and-google-are-launching-supercharged-ai-assistants-heres-how-you-can-try-them-out/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[James O'Donnell]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 18:18:45 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Artificial intelligence]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[artificial intelligence]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092516</guid>
<description><![CDATA[This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly.  OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. 
OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration showed it reading bedtime stories and helping to solve math problems, all in a voice that sounded eerily like Joaquin Phoenix’s AI girlfriend in the movie Her (a trait <a href="https://twitter.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666">not lost</a> on CEO Sam Altman). 
On Tuesday, Google announced its own new tools, including a conversational assistant called Gemini Live, which can do many of the same things. It also revealed that it’s building a sort of “do-everything” AI agent, which is currently in development but will not be released until later this year.
Soon you’ll be able to explore for yourself to gauge whether you’ll turn to these tools in your daily routine as much as their makers hope, or whether they’re more like a sci-fi party trick that eventually loses its charm. Here’s what you should know about how to access these new tools, what you might use them for, and how much it will cost. 
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">OpenAI’s GPT-4o</h3>
What it’s capable of: The model can talk with you in real time, with a response delay of about 320 milliseconds, which OpenAI says is on par with natural human conversation. You can ask the model to interpret anything you point your smartphone camera at, and it can provide assistance with tasks like coding or translating text. It can also summarize information, and generate images, fonts, and 3D renderings. 
How to access it: OpenAI says it will start rolling out GPT-4o’s text and vision features in the <a href="https://chat.openai.com/">web interface</a> as well as the GPT app, but has not set a date. The company says it will add the voice functions in the coming weeks, although it’s yet to set an exact date for this either. Developers can access the text and vision features in the API now, but voice mode will launch only to a “small group” of developers initially.
How much it costs: Use of GPT-4o will be free, but OpenAI will set caps on how much you can use the model before you need to upgrade to a paid plan. Those who join one of OpenAI’s paid plans, which start at $20 per month, will have five times more capacity on GPT-4o. 
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Google’s Gemini Live </h3>
What is Gemini Live? This is the Google product most comparable to GPT-4o—a version of the company’s AI model that you can speak with in real time. Google says that you’ll also be able to use the tool to communicate via live video “later this year.” The company promises it will be a useful conversational assistant for things like preparing for a job interview or rehearsing a speech.
How to access it: Gemini Live launches in “the coming months” via Google’s premium AI plan, Gemini Advanced. 
How much it costs: Gemini Advanced offers a two-month free trial period and costs $20 per month thereafter. 
But wait, what’s Project Astra? Astra is a project to build a do-everything AI agent, which was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXVvvRhiGjI">demoed</a> at Google’s I/O conference but will not be released until later this year.
People will be able to use Astra through their smartphones and possibly desktop computers, but the company is exploring other options too, such as embedding it into smart glasses or other devices, Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review.
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Which is better?</h3>
It’s hard to tell without having hands on the full versions of these models ourselves. Google showed off Project Astra through a polished video, whereas OpenAI opted to debut GPT-4o via a seemingly more authentic live demonstration, but in both cases, the models were asked to do things the designers likely already practiced. The real test will come when they’re debuted to millions of users with unique demands.  
That said, if you compare OpenAI’s published <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MirzFk_DSiI">videos</a> with Google’s, the two leading tools look very similar, at least in their ease of use. To generalize, GPT-4o seems to be slightly ahead on audio, demonstrating realistic voices, conversational flow, and even singing, whereas Project Astra shows off more advanced visual capabilities, like being able to “remember” where you left your glasses. OpenAI’s decision to roll out the new features more quickly might mean its product will get more use at first than Google’s, which won’t be fully available until later this year. It’s too soon to tell which model “hallucinates” false information less often or creates more useful responses.
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Are they safe?</h3>
Both OpenAI and Google say their models are well tested: OpenAI says GPT-4o was evaluated by more than 70 experts in fields like misinformation and social psychology, and Google has said that Gemini “has the most comprehensive safety evaluations of any Google AI model to date, including for bias and toxicity.” 
But these companies are building a future where AI models search, vet, and evaluate the world’s information for us to serve up a concise answer to our questions. Even more so than with simpler chatbots, it’s wise to remain skeptical about what they tell you.
Additional reporting by Melissa Heikkilä.
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<title>Optimizing the supply chain with a data lakehouse</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092430/optimizing-the-supply-chain-with-a-data-lakehouse/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[MIT Technology Review Insights]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 15:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Computing]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[sponsored]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092430</guid>
<description><![CDATA[When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems. Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees,…]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
When a commercial ship travels from the port of Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia to Tokyo Bay, it’s not only carrying cargo; it’s also transporting millions of data points across a wide array of partners and complex technology systems. 
<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignright size-large"><a href="https://ter.li/Optimizing-the-supply-chain-with-a-data-lakehouse"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2480" height="3189" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?w=1555" alt="" class="wp-image-1092453" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png 2480w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?resize=233,300 233w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?resize=768,988 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?resize=1555,2000 1555w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?resize=1195,1536 1195w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_Cover_Full.png?resize=1593,2048 1593w" sizes="(max-width: 2480px) 100vw, 2480px" /></a></figure></div>
Consider, for example, Maersk. The global shipping container and logistics company has more than 100,000 employees, offices in 120 countries, and operates about 800 container ships that can each hold 18,000 tractor-trailer containers. From manufacture to delivery, the items within these containers carry hundreds or thousands of data points, highlighting the amount of supply chain data organizations manage on a daily basis.
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<div class="wp-block-button"><a class="wp-block-button__link has-white-color has-text-color has-background has-link-color wp-element-button" href="https://ter.li/Optimizing-the-supply-chain-with-a-data-lakehouse" style="border-radius:0px;background-color:#272ea6" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">DOWNLOAD THE REPORT</a></div>
</div>
Until recently, access to the bulk of an organizations’ supply chain data has been limited to specialists, distributed across myriad data systems. Constrained by traditional data warehouse limitations, maintaining the data requires considerable engineering effort; heavy oversight, and substantial financial commitment. Today, a huge amount of data—generated by an increasingly digital supply chain—languishes in data lakes without ever being made available to the business.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://ter.li/Optimizing-the-supply-chain-with-a-data-lakehouse" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2480" height="1216" src="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1092503" srcset="https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png 2480w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png?resize=300,147 300w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png?resize=768,377 768w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png?resize=1536,753 1536w, https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/MITTR_Dremio_MSearQuote_Web.png?resize=2048,1004 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 2480px) 100vw, 2480px" /></a></figure>
A 2023 Boston Consulting Group survey notes that 56% of managers say although investment in modernizing data architectures continues, managing data operating costs remains a major pain point. The consultancy also expects data deluge issues are likely to worsen as the volume of data generated grows at a rate of 21% from 2021 to 2024, to 149 zettabytes globally.
“Data is everywhere,” says Mark Sear, director of AI, data, and integration at Maersk. “Just consider the life of a product and what goes into transporting a computer mouse from China to the United Kingdom. You have to work out how you get it from the factory to the port, the port to the next port, the port to the warehouse, and the warehouse to the consumer. There are vast amounts of data points throughout that journey.”
Sear says organizations that manage to integrate these rich sets of data are poised to reap valuable business benefits. “Every single data point is an opportunity for improvement—to improve profitability, knowledge, our ability to price correctly, our ability to staff correctly, and to satisfy the customer,” he says.
Organizations like Maersk are increasingly turning to a data lakehouse architecture. By combining the cost-effective scale of a data lake with the capability and performance of a data warehouse, a data lakehouse promises to help companies unify disparate supply chain data and provide a larger group of users with access to data, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Building analytics on top of the lakehouse not only allows this new architectural approach to advance supply chain efficiency with better performance and governance, but it can also support easy and immediate data analysis and help reduce operational costs.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
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<title>The Download: Google’s new AI agent, and our tech pessimism bias</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092493/the-download-googles-new-ai-agent-and-our-tech-pessimism-bias/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rhiannon Williams]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 12:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[The Download]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092493</guid>
<description><![CDATA[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. Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type…]]></description>
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This is today’s edition of <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/briefing-the-download/?_ga=2.179569122.736533416.1649661040-405833893.1649413289">The Download</a>, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent
What’s happening: Google is set to launch a new system called Astra later this year. It promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. 
What’s an agent? The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is rebranding its assistants as more advanced “agents,” which it says could show reasoning, planning, and memory skills and are able to take multiple steps to execute tasks. 
The big picture: Tech companies are in the middle of a fierce competition over AI supremacy, and  AI agents are the latest effort from Big Tech firms to show they are pushing the frontier of development. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/14/1092407/googles-astra-is-its-first-ai-for-everything-agent/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.
—Melissa Heikkilä

Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think
Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think. You’re probably familiar with the way alarmed grown-ups through the decades have assailed the mind-rotting potential of search engines, video games, television, and radio—but those are just the recent examples.
Here at MIT Technology Review, writers have grappled with the effects, real or imagined, of tech on the human mind for over a century. But while we’ve always greeted new technologies with a mixture of fascination and fear, something interesting always happens. We get used to it. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092350/technology-is-probably-changing-us-for-the-worse-or-so-we-always-think/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.
—Timothy Maher
MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. Check out this piece from the series by David Rotman, our editor at large, about how <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/27/1087041/technological-unemployment-elon-musk-jobs-ai/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">fear AI will take our jobs is nothing new</a>.

Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now
Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits the city government to go to Western platforms like YouTube and Spotify and demand they remove the protest anthem “<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092252/hong-kong-court-ban-song/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Glory to Hong Kong</a>,” because the government claims it has been used for sedition.
Aside from the depressing implications for pro-democracy movements’ decline in Hong Kong, this lawsuit has also been an interesting case study of the local government’s complicated relationship with internet control. Although it’s tightening its grip, it’s still wary of imposing full-blown ‘Great Firewall’ style censorship. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092461/hong-kong-china-great-firewall/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story to find out why</a>.
—Zeyi Yang
This story is from China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech and power in China. <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/tech-control-china-report/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Sign up</a> to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Ilya Sutskever is leaving OpenAI Where its former chief scientist goes next is anyone’s guess. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/14/technology/ilya-sutskever-leaving-openai.html">NYT</a> $) + It’s highly likely Sutskever’s new project will be focussed on AGI. (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/14/ilya-sutskever-leaves-openai/">WP</a> $) + Read our interview with Sutskever from last October. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/26/1082398/exclusive-ilya-sutskever-openais-chief-scientist-on-his-hopes-and-fears-for-the-future-of-ai/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
2 The US AI roadmap is here Senators claim it’s the “broadest and deepest” piece of AI legislation to date. (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/15/congress-ai-road-map-regulation-schumer/">WP</a> $) + What’s next for AI regulation in 2024? (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/05/1086203/whats-next-ai-regulation-2024/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
3 A real estate mogul has made a bid to acquire TikTok Frank McCourt has thrown his hat into the ring to own the company’s US business. (<a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-billionaire-frank-mccourt-organizes-bid-to-acquire-tiktok-82052809?mod=tech_lead_pos1">WSJ</a> $) + The depressing truth about TikTok’s impending ban. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/01/1091951/tiktok-ban-chinese-companies-political/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
4 Neuralink’s brain implant issues are nothing new Insiders claim that the firm has known about problems with the implant’s wires for years. (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-neuralink-has-faced-issues-with-its-tiny-wires-years-sources-say-2024-05-15/">Reuters</a>)
5 Wannabe mothers are finding sperm donors on Facebook The industry’s sky-high fees are driving women to the social network. (<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/sperm-donors-found-in-facebook-groups-fertility.html?_gl=1*n3bcul*_ga*NDYwNDYwODMyLjE3MDg4NDMzMDU.*_ga_DNE38RK1HX*MTcxNTc2ODYzNi4xMDAuMC4xNzE1NzY4NjQzLjAuMC4yMTA1ODAxNzE3*_fplc*U24zTld2akZQVElmNmJ4aTA5Sm9XbiUyQkxROXZsQSUyRmE1VVk1MG92VnhPVUNyMEs1NHA5amNGcTdpelZ5MnBsa1k3QkdNNVYzamhqT3B1dHhCRUFFWUxzbCUyRkhxTmJ4VGE1cWx1SHU0cTZLdm5OU1pGQ3U3SUZ0WUdJbjFzeVpBJTNEJTNE#_ga=2.127900429.1832415569.1715768633-460460832.1708843305">NY Mag</a> $) + I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/12/1059204/ivf-fertility-technology-sperm-eggs-global-couriers/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
6 We’re getting a better idea of how long you can expect to lose weight on Wegovy But we still don’t know how long people have to keep taking the drug to maintain it. (<a href="https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/05/long-term-wegovy-study-finds-weight-loss-plateaus-a-little-after-a-year/">Ars Technica</a>) + Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/20/1070037/weight-loss-injections-societal-impact-ozempic/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
7 What do DNA tests for the masses really achieve? <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f9ec.png" alt="🧬" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> Most customers don’t really need to know if they’re genetically predisposed to hate cilantro or not. (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-05-15/23andme-s-dna-test-drama-shows-limits-of-what-genetics-can-do?srnd=businessweek-v2&sref=E9Urfma4">Bloomberg</a> $)
8 How to save rainforests from wildfires Even lush green spaces aren’t safe from flames. (<a href="https://hakaimagazine.com/features/not-too-wet-to-burn/">Hakai Magazine</a>) + The quest to build wildfire-resistant homes. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/18/1071274/climate-change-building-fire-resistant-homes-adaptation/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
9 Memestocks are mounting a major comeback It’s like 2021 all over again. (<a href="https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2024/5/14/24156725/meme-stocks-gamestop-reddit-amc-blackberry-wallstreetbets">Vox</a>)
10 Mark Zuckerberg’s just turned 40 It looks like his new rapper look is here to stay. (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/rapper-swag-zuck-has-gone-too-far-2024-5">Insider</a> $)

Quote of the day
“His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important.”
—Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, offers a measured response to the news that Ilya Sutskever is leaving the company in a <a href="https://twitter.com/sama/status/1790518031640347056">post on X</a>.

The big story
How to measure all the world’s fresh water
<figure class="wp-block-image"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/22/1041323/remote-sensing-freshwater-climate-hydrologist/?truid=*|LINKID|*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*|SUBCLASS|*&utm_content=*|DATE:m-d-Y|*"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/Os8JA-03xA3OyC24t_qGfPcAkc23oCz4_HiVFIUhCyu_x1juWVNQB6J4YiSa7ktlZEeyXfvmz-5U1O-5SFuDS145AtlyaSZQO4ukC8EjIu966Z3pbCjhMc_2OvWH_IkouonytdSfT5il5xZfOCIDHdQ" alt=""/></a></figure>
<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/22/1041323/remote-sensing-freshwater-climate-hydrologist/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*"></a>December 2021
The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s climate system, but the amount of water in it is something of a mystery.
Scientists rely on monitoring stations to track the river, but what was once a network of some 400 stations has dwindled to just 15. Measuring water is key to helping people prepare for natural disasters and adapt to climate change—so researchers are increasingly filling data gaps using information gathered from space. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/22/1041323/remote-sensing-freshwater-climate-hydrologist/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.
—Maria Gallucci

We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? <a href="mailto:rhiannon.williams@technologyreview.com">Drop me a line</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/yannon_">tweet ’em at me</a>.)
+ The Cookie Monster had no right to <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@angelcallie/video/7367559562091810094?_r=1&_t=8mJUvwbQz6v">go this hard</a>! + It’s time to make <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/make-product-design-great-again-c7b505c56983">product design</a> great again. But how, exactly? + The universe is <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/collapsing-sheets-of-spacetime-could-explain-dark-matter-and-why-the/?utm_source=pocket_discover_self-improvement">humming</a> all the time, but no one really knows why. + Who here remembers the original <a href="https://www.inverse.com/gaming/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-nes-anniversary?utm_source=pocket_discover">Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles</a> on NES?
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<title>Hong Kong is safe from China’s Great Firewall—for now</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092461/hong-kong-china-great-firewall/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Zeyi Yang]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Policy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[China Report]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092461</guid>
<description><![CDATA[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. We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits…]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/tech-control-china-report/?_ga=2.51846569.1436992670.1667238728-1045050203.1649777307">Sign up</a> to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
We finally know the result of a legal case I’ve been tracking in Hong Kong for almost a year. Last week, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal granted an injunction that permits the city government to go to Western platforms like YouTube and Spotify and demand they remove the protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong,” because the government claims it has been used for sedition.
To read more about how this injunction is specifically designed for Western Big Tech platforms, and the impact it’s likely to have on internet freedom, you can read my story <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/09/1092252/hong-kong-court-ban-song/">here</a>.
Aside from the depressing implications for pro-democracy movements’ decline in Hong Kong, this lawsuit has also been an interesting case study of the local government’s complicated relationship with internet control and censorship.
I was following this case because it’s a perfect example of how censorship can be built brick by brick. Having reported on China for so long, I sometimes take for granted how powerful and all-encompassing its censorship regime is and need to be reminded that the same can’t be said for most other places in the world.
Hong Kong had a free internet in the past. And unlike mainland China, it remains relatively open: almost all Western platforms and services are still available there, and only a few websites have been censored in recent years. 
Since Hong Kong was returned to China from the UK in 1997, the Chinese central government has clashed several times with local pro-democracy movements asking for universal elections and less influence from Beijing. As a result, it started cementing tighter and tighter control over Hong Kong, and people have been worrying about whether its Great Firewall will eventually extend there. But actually, neither Beijing nor Hong Kong may want to see that happen. All the recent legal maneuverings are only necessary because the government doesn’t want a full-on ban of Western platforms.
<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/08/1083098/hong-kong-crypto-web3-regulation/">When I visited Hong Kong last November</a>, it was pretty clear that both Beijing and Hong Kong want to take advantage of the free flow of finance and business through the city. That’s why the Hong Kong government was given tacit permission in 2023 to explore government cryptocurrency projects, even though crypto trading and mining are illegal in China. Hong Kong officials have boasted on many occasions about the city’s value proposition: connecting untapped demand in the mainland to the wider crypto world by attracting mainland investors and crypto companies to set up shop in Hong Kong.
But that wouldn’t be possible if Hong Kong closed off its internet. Imagine a “global” crypto industry that couldn’t access Twitter or Discord. Crypto is only one example, but the things that have made Hong Kong successful—the nonstop exchange of cargo, capital, ideas, and people—would cease to function if basic and universal tools like Google or Facebook became unavailable.
That’s why there are these calculated offenses on internet freedom in Hong Kong. It’s about seeking control but also leaving some breathing space; it’s as much about looking tough on the outside as negotiating with platforms down below; it’s about showing its determination to Beijing but also not showing too much aggression to the West. 
For example, the experts I’ve talked to don’t expect the government to request that YouTube remove the videos for everyone globally. More likely, they may ask for the content to be geo-blocked just for users in Hong Kong.
“As long as Hong Kong is still useful as a financial hub, I don’t think they would establish the Great Firewall [there],” says Chung Ching Kwong, a senior analyst at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an advocacy organization that connects legislators from over 30 countries working on relations with China. 
It’s also the reason why the Hong Kong government has recently come out to say that <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-06/hong-kong-consultation-on-security-law-cited-communication-apps">it won’t outright ban platforms like Telegram and Signal</a>, even though it said that it had received comments from the public asking it to do so.
But coming back to the court decision to restrict “Glory to Hong Kong,” even if the government doesn’t end up enforcing a full-blown ban of the song, as opposed to the more targeted injunction it’s imposed now, it may still result in significant harm to internet freedom.
We are still watching the responses roll in after the court decision last Wednesday. The Hong Kong government is anxiously waiting to hear how Google will react. Meanwhile, some videos have already been taken down, though it’s unclear whether they were pulled by the creators or by the platform. 
Michael Mo, a former district councilor in Hong Kong who’s now a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds in the UK, created a website right after the injunction was first initiated last June to embed all but one of the YouTube videos the government sought to ban. 
The domain name, “gloryto.hk,” was the first test of whether the Hong Kong domain registry would have trouble with it, but nothing has happened to it so far. The second test was seeing how soon the videos would be taken down on YouTube, which is now easy to tell by how many “video unavailable” gaps there are on the page. “Those videos were pretty much intact until the Court of Appeal overturned the rulings of the High Court. The first two have gone,” Mo says. 
The court case is having a chilling effect. Even entities that are not governed by the Hong Kong court are taking precautions. Some YouTube accounts owned by media based in Taiwan and the US proactively enabled geo-blocking to restrict people in Hong Kong from watching clips of the song they uploaded as soon as the injunction application was filed, Mo says. 
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of internet freedom in Hong Kong? Let me know what you think at <a href="mailto:zeyi@technologyreview.com">zeyi@technologyreview.com</a>.
<hr class="wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity"/>
<h1 class="wp-block-heading">Now read the rest of China Report</h1>
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Catch up with China</h3>
1. The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, from 25% to 100%. Since few Chinese cars are currently sold in the US, this is mostly a move to deter future imports of Chinese EVs. But it could slow down the decarbonization timeline in the US.  (<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-expected-quadruple-tariffs-chinese-electric-vehicles-source/story?id=110174778">ABC News</a>)
2. Government officials from the US and China met in Geneva today to discuss how to mitigate the risks of AI. It’s a notable event, given how rare it is for the two sides to find common ground in the highly politicized field of technology. (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-china-meet-geneva-discuss-ai-risks-2024-05-13/">Reuters $</a>)
3. It will be more expensive soon to ride the bullet trains in China. A 20% to 39% fare increase is causing controversy among Chinese people. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-trains-ticket-prices.html">New York Times $</a>)
4. From executive leadership to workplace culture, TikTok has more in common with its Chinese sister app Douyin than the company wants to admit. (<a href="https://restofworld.org/2024/tiktok-chinese-us-ban/">Rest of World</a>)
5. China’s most indebted local governments have started claiming troves of data as “intangible assets” on their accounting books. Given the insatiable appetite for AI training data, they may have a point. (<a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3262037/chinas-local-governments-swap-debt-data-pressure-builds-relieve-burdens">South China Morning Post $</a>)
6. A crypto company with Chinese roots purchased a piece of land in Wyoming for crypto mining. Now the Biden administration is blocking the deal for national security reasons. (<a href="https://apnews.com/article/cfius-wyoming-crypto-nuclear-base-fb8355b7c14d1f16c7f186b936247e0c">Associated Press</a>)
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lost in translation</h3>
Recently, following an order made by the government, hotels in many major Chinese cities stopped asking guests to submit to facial recognition during check-in. 
<a href="https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/l5DqupGhnd7p35rCi6H1HA">According to the Chinese publication TechSina</a>, this has had a devastating impact on the industry of facial recognition hardware. 
As hotels around the country retire their facial recognition kiosks en masse, equipment made by major tech companies has flooded online secondhand markets at steep discounts. What was sold for thousands of dollars is now resold for as little as 1% of the original price. Alipay, the Alibaba-affiliated payment app, once invested hundreds of millions of dollars to research and roll out these kiosks. Now it’s one of the companies being hit the hardest by the policy change.
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">One more thing</h3>
I had to double-check that this is not a joke. It turns out that for the past 10 years, the Louvre museum has been giving visitors a Nintendo 3DS—a popular handheld gaming console—as an audio and visual guide. 
It feels weird seeing people holding a 3DS up to the Mona Lisa as if they were in their own private Pokémon Go–style gaming world rather than just enjoying the museum. But apparently it doesn’t work very well anyway. Oops.
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">and it was THE WORST at navigating bc a 3ds can’t tell which direction you’re facing + the floorplan isn’t updated to match ongoing renovations. kept tryna send me into a wall <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/14.0.0/72x72/1f614.png" alt="😔" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> i almost chucked the thing i stg— taylor (@taylorhansss) <a href="https://twitter.com/taylorhansss/status/1789799540163269040?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 12, 2024</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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<title>Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/15/1092350/technology-is-probably-changing-us-for-the-worse-or-so-we-always-think/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Timothy Maher]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[125th Anniversary]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092350</guid>
<description><![CDATA[MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think.…]]></description>
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MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. 
Do we use technology, or does it use us? Do our gadgets improve our lives or just make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are old questions—maybe older than you think. You’re probably familiar with the way alarmed grown-ups through the decades have assailed the mind-rotting potential of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/">search engines</a>, <a href="https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games">video games</a>, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tv-hurts-kids-of-all-ages-studies-say/">television</a>, and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/american-children-faced-great-dangers-1930s-none-greater-little-orphan-annie-180957544/#:~:text=In%20March%201933%2C%20Time%20reported,bad%20emotional%20effect%20and%20unnatural">radio</a>—but those are just the recent examples.
Early in the last century, pundits argued that the <a href="https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/why-technophobes-have-been-getting-it-wrong-since-gutenberg/">telephone severed the need for personal contact</a> and would lead to social isolation. In the 19th century some warned that <a href="https://www.atlantisjournal.org/index.php/atlantis/article/view/598">the bicycle would rob women of their femininity</a> and result in a <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/moral-and-medical-panic-over-bicycles">haggard look known as “bicycle face.”</a> Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Frankenstein-Original-Unabridged-Version-Shelley/dp/1947215140/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=8JE8811GJ4OR&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._wGyhBm5zTHC9Gf5Ap4kzRvMYURmb5bDXfuIg7a92wOTrnnsbPoSB8ainNnIGU8xGzqjV4giJURQfpPPzvyfeiu2mekjE4nSslSrR-uN7wmmguRvBpLzEA16XY4uPVHSaISjT7ZW2L5LA7aizz9mpvx3qKiuUAbB6RO2Z0nO_at8VizK14V54bsZ1Ikuzbwj2oEq-3pqfjH5bPPVkQOSRmG1E2lDtfJCWawwO-pAY3o.xzXRSNaot2AJi4qreAvCnW6SGWhOnyro4dwteEqMkLw&dib_tag=se&keywords=Frankenstein&qid=1710774783&sprefix=frankenstein%2Caps%2C108&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9hdGY&psc=1">Frankenstein</a> was a warning against using technology to play God, and how it might blur the lines between what’s human and what isn’t.
Or to go back even further: in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Phaedrus-Oxford-Worlds-Classics-Plato/dp/0199554021/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2W8NHH9CZD3R4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.K-Bi2-UPjUzLkFm3dwz6kKOHeb2oapX7D5uMsTzn4rye0oZ7xjHcaI2C9giygFkGeGfotJ4T02Ikq3Jbn9q6xY97IfOL9FKrGoZEJ5W2_cr95OjCqI2tY8qFgmeGtm5lReUHWxVYmBZHbcHB5DfdoYJ7GE4Or3hahmSwh414L53lPKx8oDdIKkASYjf9QFEIg9SOybyvyqTee-sOTG2CNs3R0ql2JTg1xbggiHaYE-A.m-UrAYcEaAKApqLlDltKFkJ3S6z2PA87Tjlnx0atPVc&dib_tag=se&keywords=phaedrus&qid=1709575308&sprefix=phaedrus%2Caps%2C102&sr=8-5">Plato’s Phaedrus</a>, from around 370 BCE, Socrates suggests that writing could be a detriment to human memory—the argument being, if you’ve written it down, you no longer needed to remember it.
We’ve always greeted new technologies with a mixture of fascination and fear,  says <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/author/margaret-omara/">Margaret O’Mara</a>, a historian at the University of Washington who focuses on the intersection of technology and American politics. “People think: ‘Wow, this is going to change everything affirmatively, positively,’” she says. “And at the same time: ‘It’s scary—this is going to corrupt us or change us in some negative way.’”
And then something interesting happens: “We get used to it,” she says. “The novelty wears off and the new thing becomes a habit.” 
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A curious fact</h3>
Here at MIT Technology Review, writers have grappled with the effects, real or imagined, of tech on the human mind for nearly a hundred years. In our <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/magazines/mit-technology-review-march-1931/">March 1931 issue</a>, in his essay “Machine-Made Minds,” author <a href="https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Bakeless__John_Edwin">John Bakeless</a> wrote that it was time to ask “how far the machine’s control over us is a danger calling for vigorous resistance; and how far it is a good thing, to which we may willingly yield.”
The advances that alarmed him might seem, to us, laughably low-tech: radio transmitters, antennas, or even rotary printing presses.
But Bakeless, who’d published books on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lewis-Clark-Discovery-Adventure-Paperback/dp/B011METS5K/ref=sr_1_14?crid=6LU65ONN41FC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-ffhW_ocMUmE_DVsrdP_DEMcEYfclJeNlt5qLbdFcHY4Hxqv-xFNcGHBplCcpvRF3abZmNiSvHCJ-K6GTbDBOvA0ytix8JqyG0AUjit3pqzga400Uer6p7XqUAOCXfsea502RezpgTB10Bp5_FNT11VC0vJC1dJPnww7Ep_-kJM4PxlIIL0mqnHq3ouMnC5saT_ZbRmYX3nPBgtJNikD1k-RavP2d7dN8yxM7ZhJj08.Qe7EvVhtPxSXRBx7izcP9sObIgLqHaTw7zyR8ELO918&dib_tag=se&keywords=John+Bakeless&qid=1709575888&sprefix=john+bakeless%2Caps%2C102&sr=8-14">Lewis and Clark</a> and other early American explorers, wanted to know not just what the machine age was doing to society but what it was doing to individual people. “It is a curious fact,” he wrote, “that the writers who have dealt with the social, economic, and political effects of the machine have neglected the most important effect of all—its profound influence on the human mind.”
In particular, he was worried about how technology was being used by the media to control what people thought and talked about. 
“Consider the mental equipment of the average modern man,” he wrote. “Most of the raw material of his thought enters his mind by way of a machine of some kind … the Twentieth Century journalist can collect, print, and distribute his news with a speed and completeness wholly due to a score or more of intricate machines … For the first time, thanks to machinery, such a thing as a world-wide public opinion is becoming possible.”
Bakeless didn’t see this as an especially positive development. “Machines are so expensive that the machine-made press is necessarily controlled by a few very wealthy men, who with the very best intentions in the world are still subject to human limitation and the prejudices of their kind … Today the man or the government that controls two machines—wireless and cable—can control the ideas and passions of a continent.”
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Keep away</h3>
Fifty years later, the debate had shifted more in the direction of silicon chips. In our <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/magazines/mit-technology-review-october-1980/">October 1980 issue</a>, engineering professor Thomas B. Sheridan, in “Computer Control and Human Alienation,” asked: “How can we ensure that the future computerized society will offer humanity and dignity?” A few years later, in our <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/magazines/mit-technology-review-august-1987/">August/September 1987 issue</a>, writer David Lyon felt he had the answer—we couldn’t, and wouldn’t. In “Hey You! Make Way for My Technology,” he wrote that gadgets like the telephone answering machine and the boom box merely kept other pesky humans at a safe distance: “As machines multiply our capacity to perform useful tasks, they boost our aptitude for thoughtless and self-centered action. Civilized behavior is predicated on the principle of one human being interacting with another, not a human being interacting with a mechanical or electronic extension of another person.”
By this century the subject had been taken up by a pair of celebrities, novelist Jonathan Franzen and Talking Heads lead vocalist David Byrne. In our September/October 2008 issue, Franzen suggested that cell phones had turned us into performance artists. 
In <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/08/19/269130/i-just-called-to-say-i-love-you/">“I Just Called to Say I Love You,”</a> he wrote: “When I’m buying those socks at the Gap and the mom in line behind me shouts ‘I love you!’ into her little phone, I am powerless not to feel that something is being performed; overperformed; publicly performed; defiantly inflicted. Yes, a lot of domestic things get shouted in public which really aren’t intended for public consumption; yes, people get carried away. But the phrase ‘I love you’ is too important and loaded, and its use as a sign-off too self-conscious, for me to believe I’m being made to hear it accidentally.”
In <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/08/15/149854/eliminating-the-human/">“Eliminating the Human,”</a> from our September/October 2017 issue, Byrne observed that advances in the digital economy served largely to free us from dealing with other people. You could now “keep in touch” with friends without ever seeing them; buy books without interacting with a store clerk; take an online course without ever meeting the teacher or having any awareness of the other students.
“For us as a society, less contact and interaction—real interaction—would seem to lead to less tolerance and understanding of difference, as well as more envy and antagonism,” Byrne wrote. “As has been in evidence recently, social media actually increases divisions by amplifying echo effects and allowing us to live in cognitive bubbles … When interaction becomes a strange and unfamiliar thing, then we will have changed who and what we are as a species.”
<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Modern woes</h3>
It hasn’t stopped. Just last year our own Will Douglas Heaven’s <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/06/1071059/chatgpt-change-not-destroy-education-openai/">feature on ChatGPT</a> debunked the idea that the AI revolution will destroy children’s ability to develop critical-thinking skills.
As O’Mara puts it: “Do all of the fears of these moral panics come to pass? No. Does change come to pass? Yes.” The way we come to grips with new technologies hasn’t fundamentally changed, she says, but what has changed is—there’s more of it to deal with. “It’s more of the same,” she says. “But it’s more. Digital technologies have allowed things to scale up into a runaway train of sorts that the 19th century never had to contend with.”
Maybe the problem isn’t technology at all, maybe it’s us. Based on what you might read in 19th-century novels, people haven’t changed much since the early days of the industrial age. In any Dostoyevsky novel you can find people who yearn to be seen as different or special, who take affront at any threat to their carefully curated public persona, who feel depressed and misunderstood and isolated, who are susceptible to mob mentality.
“The biology of the human brain hasn’t changed in the last 250 years,” O’Mara says. “Same neurons, still the same arrangement. But it’s been presented with all these new inputs … I feel like I live with information overload all the time. I think we all observe it in our own lives, how our attention spans just go sideways. But that doesn’t mean my brain has changed at all. We’re just getting used to consuming information in a different way.”
And if you find technology to be intrusive and unavoidable now, it might be useful to note that Bakeless felt no differently in 1931. Even then, long before anyone had heard of smartphone or the internet, he felt that technology had become so intrinsic to daily life that it was like a tyrant: “Even as a despot, the machine is benevolent; and it is after all our stupidity that permits inanimate iron to be a despot at all.”
If we are to ever create the ideal human society, he concluded—one with sufficient time for music, art, philosophy, scientific inquiry (“the gorgeous playthings of the mind,” as he put it)—it was unlikely we’d get it done without the aid of machines. It was too late, we’d already grown too accustomed to the new toys. We just needed to find a way to make sure that the machines served us instead of the other way around. “If we are to build a great civilization in America, if we are to win leisure for cultivating the choice things of mind and spirit, we must put the machine in its place,” he wrote.
Okay, but—how, exactly? Ninety-three years later and we’re still trying to figure that part out.
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<title>Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/14/1092407/googles-astra-is-its-first-ai-for-everything-agent/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Melissa Heikkilä]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2024 17:55:53 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Artificial intelligence]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[App]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092407</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched.  The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…]]></description>
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Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. 
The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is rebranding its assistants as more advanced “agents,” which it says could  show reasoning, planning, and memory skills and are able to take multiple steps to execute tasks. 
People will be able to use Astra through their smartphones and possibly desktop computers, but the company is exploring other options too, such as embedding it into smart glasses or other devices, Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review. 
“We are in very early days [of AI agent development],” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call ahead of Google’s I/O conference today. 
“We’ve always wanted to build a universal agent that will be useful in everyday life,” said Demis Hassabis, the CEO and cofounder of Google DeepMind. “Imagine agents that can see and hear what we do, better understand the context we’re in, and respond quickly in conversation, making the pace and quality of interaction feel much more natural.” That, he says, is what Astra will be. 
Google’s announcement comes a day after competitor OpenAI unveiled its own supercharged AI assistant, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/13/1092358/openais-new-gpt-4o-model-lets-people-interact-using-voice-or-video-in-the-same-model/">GPT-4o</a>. Google DeepMind’s Astra responds to audio and video inputs, much in the same way as GPT-4o (albeit it <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-4o-model-gives-chatgpt-a-snappy-flirty-upgrade/">less flirtatiously</a>).
In a press demo, a user pointed a smartphone camera and smart glasses at things and asked Astra to explain what they were. When the person pointed the device out the window and asked “What neighborhood do you think I’m in?” the AI system was able to identify King’s Cross, London, site of Google DeepMind’s headquarters. It was also able to say that the person’s glasses were on a desk, having recorded them earlier in the interaction. 
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<iframe loading="lazy" title="Project Astra: Our vision for the future of AI assistants" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nXVvvRhiGjI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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The demo showcases Google DeepMind’s vision of multimodal AI (which can handle multiple types of input—voice, video, text, and so on) working in real time, Vinyals says. 
“We are very excited about, in the future, to be able to really just get closer to the user, assist the user with anything that they want,” he says. Google recently upgraded its artificial-intelligence model Gemini to <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/15/1088367/googles-new-version-of-gemini-can-handle-far-bigger-amounts-of-data/">process even larger amounts of data</a>, an upgrade which helps it handle bigger documents and videos, and have longer conversations. 
Tech companies are in the middle of a fierce competition over AI supremacy, and  AI agents are the latest effort from Big Tech firms to show they are pushing the frontier of development. Agents also play into a narrative by many tech companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, that aim to build artificial general intelligence, a <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/16/1083498/google-deepmind-what-is-artificial-general-intelligence-agi/">highly hypothetical idea</a> of superintelligent AI systems.
“Eventually, you’ll have this one agent that really knows you well, can do lots of things for you, and can work across multiple tasks and domains,” says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in online search.
This vision is still aspirational. But today’s announcement should be seen as Google’s attempt to keep up with competitors. And by rushing these products out, Google can collect even more data from its over a billion users on how they are using their models and what works, Shah says.
Google is unveiling many more new AI capabilities beyond agents today. It’s going to integrate AI more deeply into Search through a new feature called AI overviews, which gather information from the internet and package them into short summaries in response to search queries. The feature, which launches today, will initially be available only in the US, with more countries to gain access later. 
This will help speed up the search process and get users more specific answers to more complex, niche questions, says Felix Simon, a research fellow in AI and digital news at the Reuters Institute for Journalism. “I think that’s where Search has always struggled,” he says. 
Another new feature of Google’s AI Search offering is better planning. People will soon be able to ask Search to make meal and travel suggestions, for example, much like asking a travel agent to suggest restaurants and hotels. Gemini will be able to help them plan what they need to do or buy to cook recipes, and they will also be able to have conversations with the AI system, asking it to do anything from relatively mundane tasks, such as informing them about the weather forecast, to highly complex ones like helping them prepare for a job interview or an important speech.
People will also be able to interrupt Gemini midsentence and ask clarifying questions, much as in a real conversation. 
In another move to one-up competitor OpenAI, Google also unveiled Veo, a new video-generating AI system. Veo is able to generate short videos and allows users more control over cinematic styles by understanding prompts like “time lapse” or “aerial shots of a landscape.”
Google has a significant advantage when it comes to training generative video models, because it owns YouTube. It’s already announced collaborations with artists such as Donald Glover and Wycleaf Jean, who are using its technology to produce their work. 
Earlier this year, OpenA’s CTO, Mira Murati, fumbled when asked about whether the company’s model was trained on YouTube data. Douglas Eck, senior research director at Google DeepMind, was also vague about the training data used to create Veo when asked about by MIT Technology Review, but he said that it “may be trained on some YouTube content in accordance with our agreements with YouTube creators.”
On one hand, Google is presenting its generative AI as a tool artists can use to make stuff, but the tools likely get their ability to create that stuff by using material from existing artists, says Shah. AI companies such as Google and OpenAI have faced a slew of lawsuits by writers and artists claiming that their intellectual property has been used without consent or compensation.  
“For artists it’s a double-edged sword,” says Shah. 
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<title>The Download: OpenAI’s GPT-4o, and what’s coming at Google I/O</title>
<link>https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/14/1092377/the-download-openais-gpt-4o-and-whats-coming-at-google-i-o/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rhiannon Williams]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2024 12:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[The Download]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1092377</guid>
<description><![CDATA[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. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model The news: OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real…]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[
This is today’s edition of <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/briefing-the-download/?_ga=2.179569122.736533416.1649661040-405833893.1649413289">The Download</a>, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
OpenAI’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model
The news: OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT app and the web interface, according to the company. How does it differ to GPT-4? GPT-4 also gives users multiple ways to interact with OpenAI’s AI offerings. But it siloed them in separate models, leading to longer response times and presumably higher computing costs. GPT-4o has now merged those capabilities into a single model to deliver faster responses and smoother transitions between tasks. The big picture: The result, the company’s demonstration suggests, is a conversational assistant much in the vein of Siri or Alexa—but capable of fielding much more complex prompts. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/13/1092358/openais-new-gpt-4o-model-lets-people-interact-using-voice-or-video-in-the-same-model/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.
—James O’Donnell

What to expect at Google I/O
Google is holding its I/O conference today, May 14, and we expect them to announce a whole new slew of AI features, further embedding it into everything it does. There has been a lot of speculation that it will upgrade its crown jewel, Search, with generative AI features that could, for example, go behind a paywall. Google, despite having 90% of the online search market, is in a defensive position this year. It’s racing to catch up with its rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, while upstarts such as Perplexity AI have launched their own versions of AI-powered search to rave reviews. While the company is tight-lipped about its announcements, we can make educated guesses. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/14/1092375/what-to-expect-at-google-i-o/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.
—Melissa Heikkilä 
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. <a href="https://forms.technologyreview.com/newsletters/ai-demystified-the-algorithm/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Sign up</a> to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

Get ready for EmTech Digital 
If you want to learn more about how Google plans to develop and deploy AI, come and hear from its vice president of AI, Jay Yagnik, at our flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital. We’ll hear from OpenAI about its video generation model Sora too, and Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, will also join MIT Technology Review’s executive editor Amy Nordrum for an exclusive interview on stage. 
It’ll be held at the MIT campus and streamed live online next week on May 22-23. Readers of The Download get 30% off tickets with the code DOWNLOADD24—<a href="https://event.technologyreview.com/emtech-digital-US-2024/begin?code=DOWNLOADD24">register here</a> for more information. See you there!

The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 US senators are preparing to unveil their ‘AI roadmap’ The guidelines, which aren’t legislation, will cost billions of dollars to implement. (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/13/congress-ai-laws-research-regulation-schumer/">WP</a> $) + What’s next for AI regulation. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/05/1086203/whats-next-ai-regulation-2024/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
2 It’s going to get much more expensive to import tech from China The Biden administration has hiked tariffs on batteries, EVs and semiconductors. (<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/972cabfb-f587-4cb3-ab21-ec3380b049da">FT</a> $) + Three takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/24/1091708/takeaways-chinese-tech-us-harvard/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
3 The NYC mayor wants to equip the subway with gun-detection tech Even though the firm maintains its detectors aren’t designed for that environment. (<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/evolv-gun-detection-nyc-subways-emails/">Wired</a> $) + The maker’s relationship with Disney appears to have been a key factor in the decision. (<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/13/24155861/evolv-scanners-ai-gun-detection-nyc-subway-disney-eric-adams">The Verge</a>) + Can AI keep guns out of schools? (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/27/1057112/podcast-can-ai-keep-guns-out-of-schools/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
4 A Chinese crypto miner has been forced to abandon its facility in Wyoming The US said it was too close to an Air Force base and a data center doing work for the Pentagon. (<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-13/us-kicks-chinese-crypto-mining-firm-off-land-near-air-force-base?srnd=technology-vp&sref=E9Urfma4">Bloomberg</a> $) + Microsoft first flagged the mine to authorities last year. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/bitcoin-mine-biden-ban.html">NYT</a> $) + How Bitcoin mining devastated this New York town. (<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/18/1049331/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-cryptomining-new-york/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">MIT Technology Review</a>)
5 App Stores are big business And governments want to rein them in. (<a href="https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/13/app-stores-are-hugely-lucrative-and-under-attack">Economist</a> $)
6 How social media ads attract networks of predators Audience tools highlight how platforms’ algorithms direct them to pictures of children. (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/us/instagram-child-safety.html">NYT</a> $)
7 Enterprising Amazon workers are using bots to nab time off slots Employees are using automated scripts to gain an edge over their colleagues. (<a href="https://www.404media.co/amazon-workers-use-bots-to-snatch-fiercely-competitive-time-off/">404 Media</a>)
8 Dating app Bumble is ditching its ads criticizing celibacy Critics say the billboards undermined daters’ freedom of choice. (<a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/bumble-is-removing-anti-celibacy-ads-following-backlash-ef2001d8?mod=tech_lead_story">WSJ</a> $) + The platform is in a state of flux right now. (<a href="https://www.thecut.com/article/the-controversy-around-bumbles-anti-celibacy-billboards.html">NY Mag</a> $)
9 Buying digital movies is a risky business What happens if the platform you bought them on shuts down? (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/article/2024/may/14/my-whole-library-is-wiped-out-what-it-means-to-own-movies-and-tv-in-the-age-of-streaming-services">The Guardian</a>)
10 The New York-Dublin video portal has been temporarily shut down Who could have predicted that people would behave inappropriately? (<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1882x5xggo">BBC</a>) + There have been some heartwarming interactions too, though. (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/13/smiles-waves-flashed-body-parts-video-portal-links-dublin-new-york">The Guardian</a>)

Quote of the day
“Rewatched Her last weekend and it felt a lot like rewatching Contagion in Feb 2020.”
—Noam Brown, an OpenAI researcher, reflects <a href="https://twitter.com/polynoamial/status/1790072604469993672">on X</a> about the vast changes the company’s new companion AI model GPT-4o could usher in.

The big story<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/12/1059204/ivf-fertility-technology-sperm-eggs-global-couriers/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*"></a>
I took an international trip with my frozen eggs to learn about the fertility industry
<figure class="wp-block-image"><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/12/1059204/ivf-fertility-technology-sperm-eggs-global-couriers/?truid=*|LINKID|*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*|SUBCLASS|*&utm_content=*|DATE:m-d-Y|*"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/hlPfWqT5Xi74TIrPyxJSuVGTu9Db0B6-Tvi_gs1FQrEDH4wIWkglkOeFHex2UTxtYjQJc1f1Vo5-OTOy1YyojZD3YUC-7MqUFb_6T9a1FvmRZU2DI871Ig8qF6N9OKVjXE1dY3dDRZnZinpN3JaOrz8" alt=""/></a></figure>
<a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/12/1059204/ivf-fertility-technology-sperm-eggs-global-couriers/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*"></a>September 2022
—Anna Louie Sussman
Like me, my eggs were flying economy class. They were ensconced in a cryogenic storage flask packed into a metal suitcase next to Paolo, the courier overseeing their passage from a fertility clinic in Bologna, Italy, to the clinic in Madrid, Spain, where I would be undergoing in vitro fertilization.
The shipping of gametes and embryos around the world is a growing part of a booming global fertility sector. As people have children later in life, the need for fertility treatment increases each year.
After paying for storage costs for years, at 40 I was ready to try to get pregnant. And transporting the Bolognese batch served to literally put all my eggs in one basket. <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/12/1059204/ivf-fertility-technology-sperm-eggs-global-couriers/?truid=*%7CLINKID%7C*&utm_source=the_download&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement&utm_term=*%7CSUBCLASS%7C*&utm_content=*%7CDATE:m-d-Y%7C*">Read the full story</a>.

We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? <a href="mailto:rhiannon.williams@technologyreview.com">Drop me a line</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/yannon_">tweet ’em at me</a>.)+ Bayley the sheepadoodle really does look just like <a href="https://people.com/pets/snoopy-look-alike-bayley-mini-sheepadoodle/">Snoopy</a>. + The secret to better sleep? Setting a <a href="https://www.domino.com/content/what-time-to-wake-up/">consistent wake-up time</a> (and sticking to it.) + Going <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@tabithalipkin/video/7364045259099180330?_r=1&_t=8m52mX4Rwav">Nemo-spotting</a> in the Great Barrier Reef sounds pretty amazing. + Here’s exactly what the benefits of eating <a href="https://theconversation.com/were-told-to-eat-a-rainbow-of-fruit-and-vegetables-heres-what-each-colour-does-in-our-body-191337">colorful fruit and veg</a> are, broken down by color.
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