The Download: the internet’s best weather app, and why people freeze their brains
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. How a couple of ski bums built the internet’s best weather app  The best snow-forecasting app for skiers isn’t a federally-funded service or a big-name brand. It’s OpenSnow, a startup that uses government data, its own AI…
Here’s why some people choose cryonics to store their bodies and brains after death
This week I reported on some rather unusual research that focuses on the brain of L. Stephen Coles. Coles was a gerontologist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2014. He had spent the latter part of his career specializing in human longevity. And before he died, he decided to have his brain preserved by a…
The Download: a battery pivot to AI, and rewriting math
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. Why this battery company is pivoting to AI  Qichao Hu doesn’t mince words about the state of the battery industry. “Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It’s kind of…
Are high gas prices good news for EVs? It’s complicated.
I live in a dense city with plentiful public transportation options and limited parking, so I don’t own a car. I’m often utterly clueless about the current price of gasoline. But as the conflict in Iran has escalated, fossil-fuel prices have been on a roller-coaster, and I’ve started paying attention. In the US, average gas…
The snow gods: How a couple of ski bums built the internet’s best weather app
The best snow-forecasting app for skiers and snowboarders isn’t from any of the federally funded weather services. Nor from any of the big-name brands. It’s an independent app startup that leverages government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to offer better snow (and soon avalanche) predictions than anything else out there.…
Roundtables: The Next Era of Space Exploration
Listen to the session or watch below Whether it’s the race to find life on Mars, the campaign to outsmart killer asteroids, or the quest to make the moon a permanent home to astronauts, scientists’ efforts in space can tell us more about where humanity is headed. This subscriber-only discussion examines the progress and possibilities…
Why this battery company is pivoting to AI
Qichao Hu doesn’t mince words about how he sees the state of the battery industry. “Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It’s kind of the reality,” he says. Hu is the CEO of SES AI, a Massachusetts-based battery company. It once had aims of making huge amounts of…
This startup wants to change how mathematicians do math
Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a free new AI tool for mathematicians, designed to discover mathematical patterns that could unlock solutions to long-standing problems. The tool, called Axplorer, is a redesign of an existing one called PatternBoost that François Charton, now a research scientist at Axiom, co-developed in 2024…
The Download: reawakening frozen brains, and the AI Hype Index returns
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain  L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature…
Agentic commerce runs on truth and context
Imagine telling a digital agent, “Use my points and book a family trip to Italy. Keep it within budget, pick hotels we’ve liked before, and handle the details.” Instead of returning a list of links, the agent assembles an itinerary and executes the purchase. That shift, from assistance to execution, is what makes agentic AI…
DeepMind's Genie 2: World Models That Generate Playable 3D Environments
DeepMind's Genie 2 can generate consistent, interactive 3D environments from a single image, maintaining physical plausibility and object permanence across extended interactions—a breakthrough in world model capabilities.
Causal AI Breakthrough: New Framework Enables Models to Reason About Counterfactuals
Researchers at MIT and Stanford introduce CausalBench, a framework enabling LLMs to perform genuine causal reasoning and counterfactual analysis, moving beyond correlation-based pattern matching.
Geometric Deep Learning Enables Protein Structure Prediction at Atomic Precision
A new geometric deep learning architecture achieves sub-angstrom accuracy in protein structure prediction, surpassing AlphaFold 3 on several benchmarks and enabling more precise drug design.