Category: tech

As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with €10,000 in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining read more

Organic bedding brand Coyuchi recently launched its own organic mattress, combining cotton, wool, and Dunlop latex atop individually wrapped coils. While Coyuchi’s linen sheets are excellent, I was a little nervous to try the company’s first mattress effort. Bedding is not a mattress, after all, and expertise does not always transfer across endeavors. In this read more

Under the surface are 11 individually powered speakers, including two 5-inch woofers, two midrange drivers, two tweeters, and five “full-range” drivers. The collection includes both side-firing and up-firing drivers to bounce sound off your walls and ceiling for surround sound and 3D audio formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Around back, you’ll find solid connectivity, read more

My kids’ appetite for stickers is endless. I find them constantly, on the mirrors in our house, on their school planners and water bottles, and occasionally stuck to the back of my chair or in the car. Stickers are also an accessible way of supporting independent artists. Maybe you can’t buy a painting or a read more

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine “tears” or “legs” result from the difference in surface tension read more

The developers of the big generative AI chatbots are continuing to push out new features at a rapid rate, as they bid to make sure their bot is the one you turn to whenever you need some assistance from artificial intelligence. One of the latest updates to Google Gemini gives you the ability to set read more

Until recently, my smart home setup was in chaos. After years of testing, buying, and upgrading to the latest smart home gadgets in an attempt to make my life easier, it became a bloated mess that was actually making it more complicated. My Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home apps were awash with dead devices, read more

Honorable Mentions There are so many good TVs available, we can’t add them all to our top list. Here are some great options that either missed the cut or got knocked off our top list by their replacements. Hisense U8QG: The U8QG is a great buy at its lowest price (around $1,000 for a 65-inch read more

Shopping for a PC gamer is a perilous endeavor. What might look like a great sale on a GPU or gaming keyboard can turn out to be a bad deal because of some arcane spec that only the most die-hard forum-dwellers understand. If you’re shopping for the gamer in your life who lives that nerd read more

Compare Top 5 Lip Balms Honorable Mentions Photograph: Boutayna Chokrane Eos 24H Moisture Super Balm for $6: I’ve been a fan of Eos’s egg-shaped balms since middle school. The 24H Moisture Super Balm feels like the grown-up version. There are some solid ingredients like shea butter, avocado oil, and castor seed oil. It’s also free read more

Figure 2.1: Statistical Process Control! In this workshop, we will learn how to perform statistical process control in Python, using statistical tools and plotnine visualizations! Statistical Process Control refers to using statistics to (1) measure variation in product quality over time and (2) identify benchmarks to know when intervention is needed. Let’s get started! Getting read more

A robot searching for workers trapped in a partially collapsed mine shaft must rapidly generate a map of the scene and identify its location within that scene as it navigates the treacherous terrain. Researchers have recently started building powerful machine-learning models to perform this complex task using only images from the robot’s onboard cameras, but read more

Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you’re writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence systems seem to have you covered. The source of read more

Designing a complex electronic device like a delivery drone involves juggling many choices, such as selecting motors and batteries that minimize cost while maximizing the payload the drone can carry or the distance it can travel. Unraveling that conundrum is no easy task, but what happens if the designers don’t know the exact specifications of read more

When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world in 2022, it brought generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream and started a snowball effect that led to its rapid integration into industry, scientific research, health care, and the everyday lives of people who use the technology. What comes next for this powerful but imperfect tool? With that read more

Growing up in the suburban town of Spring, Texas, just outside of Houston, Erik Ballesteros couldn’t help but be drawn in by the possibilities for humans in space. It was the early 2000s, and NASA’s space shuttle program was the main transport for astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Ballesteros’ hometown was less than read more

In an office at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a soft robotic hand carefully curls its fingers to grasp a small object. The intriguing part isn’t the mechanical design or embedded sensors — in fact, the hand contains none. Instead, the entire system relies on a single camera that watches the robot’s read more

Teaching a robot new skills used to require coding expertise. But a new generation of robots could potentially learn from just about anyone. Engineers are designing robotic helpers that can “learn from demonstration.” This more natural training strategy enables a person to lead a robot through a task, typically in one of three ways: via read more

When ChatGPT or Gemini give what seems to be an expert response to your burning questions, you may not realize how much information it relies on to give that reply. Like other popular generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, these chatbots rely on backbone systems called foundation models that train on billions, or even trillions, of read more

As spaceflight becomes more affordable and accessible, the story of human life in space is just beginning. Aurelia Institute wants to make sure that future benefits all of humanity — whether in space or here on Earth. Founded by Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20; Danielle DeLatte ’11; and former MIT research scientist Sana Sharma, read more