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Nuclear reactors could someday power a chemical plant in Texas, making it the first with such a facility onsite. The factory, which makes plastics and other materials, could become a model for power-hungry data centers and other industrial operations going forward. The plans are the work of Dow Chem...

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. Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire? For several years now, Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences has been in the news for its pl...

Agents are the talk of the AI industry—they’re capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could...

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. Trump’s tariffs will deliver a big blow to climate tech US president Donald Trump’s massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling yesterday, settin...

US president Donald Trump’s massive, sweeping tariffs sent global stock markets tumbling on Thursday, setting the stage for a worldwide trade war and ratcheting up the dangers of a punishing recession.  Experts fear that the US cleantech sector is especially vulnerable to a deep downturn, which woul...

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. The first trial of generative AI therapy shows it might help with depression The first clinical trial of a generative AI therapy bot suggests it was as effective ...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A tech company accumulates a ton of user data, hoping to figure out a business model later. That business model never arrives, the company goes under, and the data is in the wind.  The latest version of that story emerged on March 24, when the onetime genetic...

The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating ...

A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze.  At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of hig...

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. China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. Just months ago, China’s boom in data center construction was at its height, ...

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 handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake —Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Sasha Luccioni, Giada Pistilli all work for Hugging Face, an...

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 a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier” The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the b...