ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Sam Altman Says Helpful Agents Are Poised to Become AI’s Killer FunctionJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review“Altman, who was visiting Cambridge for a series of events hosted by Harvard and the venture capital firm Xfund, described the killer app for AI as a

Getting microbes to eat plastic is a frequently touted solution to our growing waste problem, but making the approach practical is tricky. A new technique that impregnates plastic with the spores of plastic-eating bacteria could make the idea a reality. The impact of plastic waste on the

To anyone living in a city where autonomous vehicles operate, it would seem they need a lot of practice. Robotaxis travel millions of miles a year on public roads in an effort to gather data from sensors—including cameras, radar, and lidar—to train the neural networks that operate them. In recent

Imagine the tap of a card that bought you a cup of coffee this morning also let a hacker halfway across the world access your bank account and buy themselves whatever they liked. Now imagine it wasn’t a one-off glitch, but it happened all the time: Imagine the locks that secure our electronic data

Blood transfusions save lives. In the US alone, people receive around 10 million units each year. But blood banks are always short in supply—especially when it comes to the “universal donor” type O. Surprisingly, the gut microbiome may hold a solution for boosting universal blood supplies by