The Download: carbon removal’s future, and measuring pain using an app
Plus: Meta’s lawyers advised staff to remove parts of their research
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.
What’s next for carbon removal?
After years of growth that spawned hundreds of startups, the nascent carbon removal sector appears to be facing a reckoning.
Running Tide, a promising aquaculture company, shut down its operations last summer, and a handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasn’t made a whole lot more progress toward Running Tide’s ambitious plans to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year.
The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, experts warn.
And the open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there? Read the full story.
—James Temple
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
An AI app to measure pain is here
This week I’ve also been wondering how science and technology can help answer that question—especially when it comes to pain.
In the latest issue of MIT Technology Review’s print magazine, Deena Mousa describes how an AI-powered smartphone app is being used to assess how much pain a person is in.
The app, and other tools like it, could help doctors and caregivers. They could be especially useful in the care of people who aren’t able to tell others how they are feeling.
But they are far from perfect. And they open up all kinds of thorny questions about how we experience, communicate, and even treat pain. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Meta’s lawyers advised workers to remove parts of its teen mental health research
Its counsel told researchers to block or update their work to reduce legal liability. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meta recently laid off more than 100 staff tasked with monitoring risks to user privacy. (NYT $)
2 Donald Trump has pardoned the convicted Binance founder
Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to violating US money laundering laws in 2023. (WSJ $)
+ The move is likely to enable Binance to resume operating in the US. (CNN)
+ Trump has vowed to be more crypto-friendly than the Biden administration. (Axios)
3 Anthropic and Google Cloud have signed a major chips deal
The agreement is worth tens of billions of dollars. (FT $)
4 Microsoft doesn’t want you to talk dirty to its AI
It’ll leave that kind of thing to OpenAI, thank you very much. (CNBC)
+ Copilot now has its own version of Clippy—just don’t try to get erotic with it. (The Verge)
+ It’s pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty, however. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Big Tech is footing the bill for Trump’s White House ballroom
Stand up Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. (TechCrunch)
+ Crypto twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are also among the donors. (CNN)
6 US investigators have busted a series of high-tech gambling schemes
Involving specially-designed contact lenses and x-ray tables. (NYT $)
+ The case follows insider bets on basketball and poker games rigged by the mafia. (BBC)
+ Automatic card shufflers can be compromised, too. (Wired $)
7 Deepfake harassment tools are easily accessible on social media
And simple web searches. (404 Media)
+ Bans on deepfakes take us only so far—here’s what we really need. (MIT Technology Review)
8 How algorithms can drive up prices online
Even benign algorithms can sometimes yield bad outcomes for buyers. (Quanta Magazine)
+ When AIs bargain, a less advanced agent could cost you. (MIT Technology Review)
9 How to give an LLM brain rot
Train it on short “superficial” posts from X, for a start. (Ars Technica)
+ AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Meet the tech workers using AI as little as possible
In a bid to keep their skills sharp. (WP $)
+ This professor thinks there are other ways to teach people how to learn. (The Atlantic $)
Quote of the day
“He was convicted. He’s not innocent.”
—Republican Senator Thom Tillis criticises Donald Trump’s decision to pardon convicted cryptocurrency mogul Changpeng Zhao, Politico reports.
One more thing
We’ve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change.
When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants.
Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still don’t really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural hunger circuits into uncharted parts of the brain to try and find out.
Their work could shed new light on the factors that have caused the number of overweight adults worldwide to skyrocket in recent years. And it could also help solve the mysteries around how and why a new class of weight-loss drugs seems to work so well. Read the full story.
—Adam Piore
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)+ Middle aged men are getting into cliff-jumping. Should you?
+ Pumpkin spice chocolate chip cookies sounds like a great idea to me.
+ Christmas Island’s crabs are on the move! 🦀
+ Watch out if you’re taking the NY subway today: you might bump into these terrifying witches.
