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.

Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” 

When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have only a matter of hours to get it into a recipient.

In most cases, organs will be kept on ice during that time, at around 4 °C (39 °F). They cannot be frozen—in previous attempts, ice has formed, causing all kinds of damage.

But now, scientists have come up with a device that allows organs to be cooled to -4 °C (25 °F) without forming any ice. They’ve tested it with pig organs and shown that kidneys, at least, can be preserved in the device for days then successfully transplanted. 

Read our story about their breakthrough, and why it raises hopes for longer-term storage of donated human organs.

—Jessica Hamzelou

If you want to read more about this story and its implications for organ preservation and transplantation, sign up to receive The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter, later today.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Inside China’s epic push to replace US chips 
The gap between their chips’ capabilities remains large—for now. (WSJ $)
+ How China is using open source AI as a new form of soft power around the globe. (NYT $)
+ A new bill in the US takes aim at Chinese AI companies’ training practices. (NBC)
+ US lawmakers are also mulling banning the military from using Chinese humanoid robots. (SCMP)

2 Space data centers don’t exist yet, but people already oppose them
Environmental experts warn it’ll further pollute the stratosphere. (Guardian)
+ Four things we’d need to put data centers in space. (MIT Technology Review)
+ What it’s like inside the data centers powering AI down here on Earth. (Axios)
+ The left and right are finding common cause with data center protests in the US. (The Verge)

3 US lawmakers are pushing for an AI ‘kill switch’
After OpenAI’s models went rogue and hacked Hugging Face. (BBC)

4 Peptides seem on the cusp of going mainstream in the US
A lack of scientific evidence didn’t stop the FDA just voting to let some pharmacies to legally dispense them. (Wired $)
+ How does Make America Healthy Again hold up to scientific scrutiny? (Nature)
+ US measles cases are reaching levels not seen for three decades. (Wired $)
+ Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. (MIT Technology Review)

5 The EU just fined Google almost $1 billion
For competition breaches over apps and search. (FT $)
+ It came just a day before Trump renewed tariffs on 60 trading partners, including the EU. (BBC)

6 Electric vehicles are selling well in Europe
And the share made by Chinese firms has doubled in the last year. (The Next Web)
+ Hybrids are hot property in the US this summer. (Wired $)

7 There’s a worsening shortage of computer science professors
You can blame AI companies—they keep snapping them up, to our general detriment. (The Atlantic $)

8 A judge caught a stenographer allowing AI errors into their transcript 
It’s apparently the first time this has happened, but it certainly won’t be the last. (404 Media)
+ Even judges themselves are falling for AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Here’s what new tech millionaires will do with their IPO wealth 
What a nice problem to have to grapple with! (Quartz $)

10 Dating apps’ latest wheeze? In-person events 
Well well well, it seems we’ve come full circle. (Bloomberg $)

Quote of the day

“Call us optimists, call us dreamers. Just as we’ve always done, we’re betting on people.” 

—The voiceover from a new advert from Meta, which exhorts us to be more optimistic about AI.

One More Thing

AI is changing how we study bird migration

In a warming world increasingly full of human infrastructure that can be deadly to them, like glass skyscrapers and power lines, migratory birds are facing many existential threats. 

Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their migrations, though each has shortcomings. But now, machine-learning tools are unlocking a treasure trove of acoustic data for ecologists. 

Read our story about the technology that’s making it easier to detect and identify birds and their movements.

—Christian Elliott

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.)

+ It’s never too late to live your dreams. Here’s how these late bloomers did it.
+ Limbs feeling a bit tight? Try these stretches!
+ These English football fans went to the 1986 World Cup—and loved it so much they never came home.
+ How the invention of the humble paint tube revolutionized the world of art.

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 power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags 

During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about 9% of its total demand that day.

Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens. It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.

One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. 

Still, the line could help shape the future of our grid, if it can overcome these sorts of snags. Read our story to understand how.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US Treasury is threatening to sanction Chinese AI companies
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. (TechCrunch)
+ Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is arguing that America has nothing to fear from Chinese AI. (Axios)
+ Like it or not, Chinese models are now part of the global AI infrastructure. (Rest of World)
+ China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Why the OpenAI hack is the scariest AI mishap yet
AI’s capabilities seem to be starting to outpace our current ability to control them. (The Economist $)
+ Hugging Face had to turn to a Chinese AI model to rescue it from the hack. (BI)

3 Visually impaired Europeans can now get an implant that restores sight
And Americans may not have to wait long to receive it, too. (STAT)
+ This retina implant lets people with vision loss do a crossword puzzle. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A bellwether lawsuit suing Meta for social media addiction has been dropped
There are, however, many more waiting in the wings. (NYT $)

5 Here’s how ICE gets its hands on Americans’ data
As soon as you open a credit card or phone account, its agents can see where you live. (404 Media)
+ States are warring with the Trump administration over the right to see ICE agents’ faces. (Wired $)

6 We urgently need to grapple with AI’s environmental impact
As the world warms, is the price we’re paying worth it? (The Verge)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Privacy issues with smart glasses need an industrywide fix
That’s according to Samsung, which is unveiling glasses it developed with Google this fall. (Bloomberg $)

8 The US Army is begging soldiers to limit their AI use
The token crisis comes for us all eventually, it seems. (Ars Technica)

9 Why does lettuce keep making Americans sick? 
It’s pretty simple: a lot of people eat it, and it doesn’t get cooked. (Wired $)

10 Pokemon Go is the perfect game to play this summer
It’s fun, collaborative, and it gets you outdoors. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“It went off and did this hack all by itself, as far as we can tell. This is the highest level of autonomy that we’ve seen in the use of a large language model for cyber operations.”

—Colin Shea-Blymyer, a cybersecurity research fellow at Georgetown University, tells NPR why the OpenAI hack on Hugging Face is so alarming. 

One More Thing

Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream 

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap one cryptocurrency for another and earn fees from making those swaps.  

But is he responsible for what it’s used for? It’s a question that matters because in January last year, its users lost more than $200 million in cryptocurrency after THORChain transactions and accounts were frozen by an admin override, which users believed was not supposed to be possible given the decentralized structure. It’s also been used by North Korean hackers to move $1.2 billion of stolen ethereum. 

Thorbjornsen explains this all away as a function of THORChain’s decentralized and permissionless nature. Read our story exploring whether we should believe him or not. 

—Jessica Klein

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.)

+ A musician developed an ingenious way to strum a guitar with an electric fan.
+ Ukraine’s tunnel of love is a leafy green corridor of romance that’s straight out of a fairy tale.
+ The driver of a giant banana has been pulled over 100s of times, but still won’t ditch his treasured ride.
+ Ever wonder which albums and songs truly stand the test of time? The Greatest Music tries to answer that via an algorithm that analyses hundreds of “best of” lists.

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.

Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. It will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography.

The technology will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds.

“I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer.

Read the full story on the space telescope that could transform the search for distant planets.

—Eshan Raul

MIT Technology Review Narrated: PsiQuantum has a plan to make a massive quantum computer out of light

The machine that could change the world will be housed in a room that looks like a data center crossed with an ice cream factory. 

Inside, some 100 stainless-steel cabinets each hold hundreds of chips. On those chips, thousands of light particles will fly through a maze of optical switches and beam splitters. Each photon must be accounted for, because precisely measuring where it ends up will help answer questions that current computers might take millions of years to solve.

This computer, as described, does not exist. It’s the brainchild of a company called PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four physicists from UK universities. In a crowded field of deep-pocketed competitors with similarly fantastical visions, the company aims to be the first to build a useful quantum machine.

—James O’Donnell

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotifyand Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI says one of its models carried out an autonomous hack
It escaped its testing sandbox and breached AI research platform Hugging Face. (Reuters $)
+ OpenAI described it as a cybersecurity test that went badly wrong. (WSJ $)
+ The hack is among the first known cyberattacks by an AI acting on its own. (FT $)
+ Even simple AI attacks are cause for alarm, though. (MIT Technology Review)

2 France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15s
Its parliament approved the ban, which President Macron championed. (NYT $)
+ He pledged to enforce it by September, the start of the school year. (Guardian)
+ But critics say it’s unconstitutional and impossible to enforce. (NPR)

3 The US and China will hold talks over AI in September
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will lead the US side. (Reuters $)
+ Chinese models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Publishers are considering cutting Google off as AI reshapes search
News outlets are weighing lost traffic against AI exposure. (WSJ $)

5 Samsung is in talks to invest €1 billion in Mistral
The French AI firm is positioning itself as an alternative to US models. (FT $)
+ It’s Europe’s leading AI firm, but US peers dwarf its $20 billion valuation. (Reuters $)

6 Amazon pushed up rivals’ prices, leaked records allege
Internal emails reveal tactics that allegedly reshaped online pricing. (Guardian)

7 Trump has tapped a Big Tech critic to lead the DOJ’s antitrust division
Adam Candeub has called for tougher federal competition enforcement. (FT $)

8 New drilling methods could unlock geothermal energy almost anywhere
They aim to unlock Earth’s enormous heat reserves. (New Scientist $)
+ AI is uncovering hidden geothermal energy resources. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI researchers have proposed a “Genie coefficient” for measuring AI risks
It would track the gap between intent and action. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ We need better ways to evaluate AI. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Japan’s AI boom has two unlikely winners: a toilet maker and an MSG giant
They’re supplying critical chipmaking materials. (CNBC)

Quote of the day

“He’s an analog man in a digital AI world, and I think that’s incredibly appealing.”

—Paul Dergarabedian, a movie industry analyst at Comscore, tells Fortune that Christopher Nolan’s commitment to human filmmaking provides an attractive counterweight to Hollywood’s embrace of AI.

One More Thing

Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening

Taiwan produces the majority of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90% of the most advanced chips needed for AI applications. Many believe that’s helped deter China from invading the island. But now some Taiwan specialists and citizens are worried that this “silicon shield” is cracking.

Facing pressure from Washington, TSMC—the world’s largest chipmaker—is expanding manufacturing abroad. In Taiwan, there are worries that this will dilute the company’s power at home, making the US and other countries less inclined to defend the island.

Find out why Taiwan’s chipmaking dominance could be key to its future security.

—Johanna M. Costigan

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.)

+ Thrifty filmmakers have masterfully recreated Star Wars on a $10 budget.
+ A man discovered squirrels hug and kiss their loved ones in the privacy of their homes.
+ Toronto’s floating waterfront store is reimagining one of the most familiar spaces across cultures.
+ These animations of Sesame Street characters performing classic tracks like Underworld’s “Born Slippy” will brighten up your day.

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’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself

Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks branded Anthropic’s models “lobotomized” and “woke.” Emil Michael, a top Pentagon official, called OpenAI’s new head of strategic futures a “supreme village idiot.”

It began because no one can agree on what to do about Kimi, a free, open-source model that Chinese AI company Moonshot launched last week. It appears to rival the intelligence of models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are very much not free. 

Every time a new smart, free model from China gets released, US companies see less reason to fork out money for models from Anthropic or OpenAI. That’s creating economic and political problems for the president—and dividing the top AI strategists in his orbit. 

Read the full story on why no one can agree what to do about Kimi.

—James O’Donnell

This article is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Anthropic’s record $1.5 billion copyright settlement has been approved
The plaintiffs said Anthropic used pirated works to train Claude. (Reuters $)
+ And won the largest known copyright payout in history. (Engadget)
+ Yet many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win. (TechCrunch)
+ But AI copyright anxiety could limit creativity. (MIT Technology Review)
 
2 The Trump administration is weighing a ban on Chinese AI models
The launch of Kimi K3 has revived calls for restrictions. (Axios)
+ But officials are divided on the proposals. (Fast Company)
+ China’s bet on open-source is paying off. (MIT Technology Review)
 
3 China is mulling tighter export controls on AI models and chips
It wants to stop the West from acquiring its tech and startups. (FT $)
+ Beijing has held talks with tech firms about potential restrictions. (Reuters $)
 
4 Trump’s AI safety head has resigned after just three months
Chris Fall had led CAISI, the federal AI Safety Institute, since April. (Axios)
+ No reason was given for his exit. (CNBC)
 
5 Google is working on a new chip to run Gemini models more efficiently 
The chip, called “Frozen V2,” may be deployed in 2028. (Information $)
+ Alphabet stock popped on the report. (CNBC)

6 New Orleans police have explored arming drones with weapons
A draft drone manual paves the way for weaponised quadcopters. (404 Media)
+ Shoplifters could soon be chased by drones. (MIT Technology Review)
 
7 The EU has handed AliExpress a record fine over unsafe product sales
The €550 million fine is the largest-ever under the Digital Services Act. (BBC)
+ Alibaba has vowed to appeal the fine. (SCMP)

8 Election advice from AI chatbots is “inaccurate and unreliable”
That’s the conclusion from tests in Hungary earlier this year. (Guardian)

9 Red light therapy is showing promise for healing and healthy aging
Better skin and reduced vision loss are also on the cards. (Economist $)

10 Neill Blomkamp’s new horror clip is all AI-generated—and it sucks
The acclaimed director wants to make “a full feature in this format.” (Gizmodo)

Quote of the day

“This would be a terribly self-defeating form of intervention if it were to happen.” 

—Tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya slams plans to restrict Chinese AI models in a post on X.

One More Thing

Inside Chicago’s surveillance panopticon

Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, four people were shot and killed on a westbound train in Chicago. Police swiftly activated a digital dragnet—a surveillance network that connects thousands of cameras across the city—and arrested the suspect just 90 minutes later.

Law enforcement and security advocates say this vast monitoring system protects public safety and works well. But activists and many residents say it’s a surveillance panopticon that creates a chilling effect on behavior and violates guarantees of privacy and free speech.

Go inside the surveillance network that’s dividing Chicago.

—Rod McCullom

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.)

+ NASA has shared a stunning timelapse video of the Psyche spacecraft’s view of Mars.
+ This comparison of American and European Urbanism shows good city design is a choice.
+ Musician Luca Stricagnoli recently performed a marvellous acoustic guitar medley of Prodigy songs.
+ Two Australian paddleboarders saved a stranded wallaby after it was swept out to sea—and caught the whole rescue on video.