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Host Jennifer Strong thoughtfully examines the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence on our daily lives. Produced by MIT Technology Review, the podcast explores the rise of AI through the voices of people reckoning with the power of the technology, and by taking listeners up close with the inventors and founders whose ambitions are fueling the development of new forms of AI.

By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.

The regulator has suggested that it treat every edit of an animal’s genome like a new drug, but some scientists think it could slow progress.

The founder of Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX is deservedly admired for his technological insight. But is his latest business plan reckless?

Extraordinary progress has been made in artificial intelligence of late. But to achieve their full promise, machines must understand language, and that will be the most difficult step yet.

When Southwest Airlines pilot Paul Watson lands in a new city, he often strikes out to visit the labs of local scientists studying Down syndrome. He likes to stay current because his 14-year-old son, Nathan, has the condition. And Watson can take some credit for one idea spreading among parents: that the drug fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, might actually treat Down syndrome.

The U.S. renewable energy industry got a welcome boost this week when Congress agreed on an omnibus spending bill that includes a five-year extension of the investment tax credit for solar and wind power projects. The bill will be voted on Friday and is expected to pass both houses and to be signed by President Obama.

We haven’t stopped huge breaches. The focus now is on resilience, with smarter ways to detect attacks and faster ways to respond to them. In November 2014, an especially chilling cyberattack shook the corporate world - hackers, having explored the internal servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment, captured internal financial reports, top executives’ embarrassing e-mails, private employee health data, and even unreleased movies and scripts and dumped them on the open Web.

When Milton Wright III got his third cancer diagnosis, he cried until he laughed. He was 20 and had survived leukemia twice before, first when he was eight and again as a teen. Each time he’d suffered through years of punishing chemotherapy.

A new report starts to quantify the effect that popular encryption products have on law enforcement.

The U.S. Department of Defense founded a kind of startup in Silicon Valley to accelerate the development and acquisition of new technologies useful to the military. But will it survive President Trump?

Despite their ubiquity, smartphones are still not very helpful at getting you information based on what you're already doing. For instance, if you get an e-mail from a friend asking if you want to check out a new restaurant in town, you have to leave the app behind and go conduct a Web search to learn more.

A colleague recently described a fun Friday night for his teenage son: staying home and chatting online. Every now and then there’s a party where all his friends talk on their laptops.

The startup is exploring a molten chloride reactor concept, but says it remains committed to traveling wave reactors.

The theoretical underpinnings of quantum computing are well established. And physicists can build the basic units, known as qubits, out of which a quantum computer would be made. They can even operate qubits together in small groups. But they have not made a fully working, practical quantum computer.

When Brian Hanley set out to test a gene therapy, he started with himself.

Patients must give their informed consent before undergoing whole-genome sequencing or any other genetic test. But there are no laws that restrict what patients can do with their own genetic information, or that require patients’ family members to be involved in the consent process. This raises questions about who owns an individual’s genetic code, since family members share many genetic traits and may harbor the same genetic abnormalities associated with certain diseases.

Spending thousands of hours playing Grand Theft Auto might have questionable benefits for humans, but it could help make computers significantly more intelligent. Several research groups are now using the hugely popular game, which features fast cars and various nefarious activities, to train algorithms that might enable a self-driving car to navigate a real road.

The news that Padmasree Warrior, a former technology chief at Cisco and Motorola, was hired this week as CEO of the U.S. division of the Chinese company NextEV raised an obvious question: what exactly is NextEV?

As @POTUS contemplates his legacy, the editors of MIT Technology Review took a look back at some of the most important technology initiatives of his eight years to assess that record. He succeeded in some important ways, such as supporting net neutrality and joining global action on climate change. But there were failures, too—remember healthcare.gov?—and even some of the successes are now in question as a new administration comes into power.