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. Microbes could extract the metal needed for cleantech In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a…

3 February 2026

In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a time when carmakers want the metal for electric-vehicle batteries, nickel concentration at Eagle Mine is falling and could soon drop too low to warrant digging. But earlier this year, the…

3 February 2026

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about—where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie, and…

2 February 2026

Many organizations rushed into generative AI, only to see pilots fail to deliver value. Now, companies want measurable outcomes—but how do you design for success? At Mistral AI, we partner with global industry leaders to co-design tailored AI solutions that solve their most difficult problems. Whether it’s increasing CX productivity with Cisco, building a more…

2 February 2026

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. Inside the marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files…

2 February 2026

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Demand for electric vehicles and the batteries that power them has never been hotter. In 2025, EVs made up over a quarter of new vehicle sales globally,…

2 February 2026

Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana…

30 January 2026

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. DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos The news: The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared…

30 January 2026

For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity’s “core problem.” Put simply, they say death is wrong—for everyone. They’ve even said it’s morally wrong. They established what they consider a new philosophy, and they called it Vitalism. Vitalism is more than a philosophy,…

30 January 2026

Everyone is panicking because AI is very bad; everyone is panicking because AI is very good. It’s just that you never know which one you’re going to get. Grok is a pornography machine. Claude Code can do anything from building websites to reading your MRI. So of course Gen Z is spooked by what this…

29 January 2026