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The Download: AI headphone translation, and the link between microbes and our behavior

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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.

A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously

What’s new: Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time.

How it works: The system tracks the direction and vocal characteristics of each speaker, helping the person wearing the headphones to identify who is saying what in a group setting. Read the full story.

—Rhiannon Williams

Your gut microbes might encourage criminal behavior

A few years ago, a Belgian man in his 30s drove into a lamppost. Twice. Local authorities found that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. Over the space of a few years, the man was apprehended for drunk driving three times. And on all three occasions, he insisted he hadn’t been drinking.

He was telling the truth. A doctor later diagnosed auto-brewery syndrome—a rare condition in which the body makes its own alcohol. Microbes living inside the man’s body were fermenting the carbohydrates in his diet to create ethanol. Last year, he was acquitted of drunk driving.

His case, along with several other scientific studies, raises a fascinating question for microbiology, neuroscience, and the law: How much of our behavior can we blame on our microbes? 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 How the Gates Foundation will end
Bill Gates will wind it down in 2045, after distributing most of his remaining fortune. (NYT $)
+ He estimates he’ll give away $200 billion in the next 20 years. (Semafor)
+ The foundation is shuttering several decades earlier than he expected. (BBC)

2 US Customs and Border Protection will no longer protect pregnant women
It’s rolled back policies designed to protect vulnerable people, including infants. (Wired $)
+ The US wants to use facial recognition to identify migrant children as they age. (MIT Technology Review)

3 DOGE is readying software to turbo-charge mass layoffs
After some 260,000 government workers have already been let go. (Reuters)
+ DOGE’s math doesn’t add up. (The Atlantic $)
+ One of its biggest inspirations is no fan of the program. (WP $)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Scientists are using AI to predict cancer survival outcomes
In some cases, it’s outperforming clinicians’ forecasts. (FT $)
+ Why it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Apple is reportedly working on new chips for its smart glasses
But we’ll have to wait a few more years. (Bloomberg $)
+ What’s next for smart glasses. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Silicon Valley has a vision for the future of warfare
Military technologies are no longer solely the preserve of governments. (Bloomberg $)
+ Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality. (MIT Technology Review)

7 AI companies don’t want regulation any more
Just a few short years after they claimed regulation was the best way of making AI safe. (WP $)

8 Forget SEO, GEO is where it’s at these days
Marketers are scrambling to adopt best Generative Engine Optimization practices now that AI is upending how we search the web. (WSJ $)
+ Your most important customer may be AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 AI-generated recruiters are making job hunting even worse
Avatars can glitch out and stumble over their words. (404 Media)

10 A Soviet-era spacecraft is reentering Earth’s atmosphere
More than 50 years after it misfired on a journey to Venus. (Ars Technica)
+ The world’s next big environmental problem could come from space. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

—Bill Gates lashes out at Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID in an interview with the Financial Times.

One more thing

The great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit

NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and NASA is currently studying how to safely destroy the space laboratory by around 2030.

The ISS never really became what some had hoped: a launching point for an expanding human presence in the solar system. But it did enable fundamental research on materials and medicine, and it helped us start to understand how space affects the human body.

To build on that work, NASA has partnered with private companies to develop new, commercial space stations for research, manufacturing, and tourism. If they are successful, these companies will bring about a new era of space exploration: private rockets flying to private destinations. They’re already planning to do it around the moon. One day, Mars could follow. Read the full story.

—David W. Brown

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.)

+ It’s almost pasta salad time!
+ Who is the better fictional archaeologist: Indiana Jones or Lara Croft?
+ How a good night’s sleep could help to give you a long-lasting memory boost. 😴
+ How millennials became deeply uncool (allegedly)

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Your gut microbes might encourage criminal behavior

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A few years ago, a Belgian man in his 30s drove into a lamppost. Twice. Local authorities found that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. Over the space of a few years, the man was apprehended for drunk driving three times. And on all three occasions, he insisted he hadn’t been drinking.

He was telling the truth. A doctor later diagnosed auto-brewery syndrome—a rare condition in which the body makes its own alcohol. Microbes living inside the man’s body were fermenting the carbohydrates in his diet to create ethanol. Last year, he was acquitted of drunk driving.

His case, along with several other scientific studies, raises a fascinating question for microbiology, neuroscience, and the law: How much of our behavior can we blame on our microbes?

Each of us hosts vast communities of tiny bacteria, archaea (which are a bit like bacteria), fungi, and even viruses all over our bodies. The largest collection resides in our guts, which play home to trillions of them. You have more microbial cells than human cells in your body. In some ways, we’re more microbe than human.

Microbiologists are still getting to grips with what all these microbes do. Some seem to help us break down food. Others produce chemicals that are important for our health in some way. But the picture is extremely complicated, partly because of the myriad ways microbes can interact with each other.

But they also interact with the human nervous system. Microbes can produce compounds that affect the way neurons work. They also influence the functioning of the immune system, which can have knock-on effects on the brain. And they seem to be able to communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve.

If microbes can influence our brains, could they also explain some of our behavior, including the criminal sort? Some microbiologists think so, at least in theory. “Microbes control us more than we think they do,” says Emma Allen-Vercoe, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Canada.

Researchers have come up with a name for applications of microbiology to criminal law: the legalome. A better understanding of how microbes influence our behavior could not only affect legal proceedings but also shape crime prevention and rehabilitation efforts, argue Susan Prescott, a pediatrician and immunologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues.

“For the person unaware that they have auto-brewery syndrome, we can argue that microbes are like a marionettist pulling the strings in what would otherwise be labeled as criminal behavior,” says Prescott.

Auto-brewery syndrome is a fairly straightforward example (it has been involved in the acquittal of at least two people so far), but other brain-microbe relationships are likely to be more complicated. We do know a little about one microbe that seems to influence behavior: Toxoplasmosis gondii, a parasite that reproduces in cats and spreads to other animals via cat feces.

The parasite is best known for changing the behavior of rodents in ways that make them easier prey—an infection seems to make mice permanently lose their fear of cats. Research in humans is nowhere near conclusive, but some studies have linked infections with the parasite to personality changes, increased aggression, and impulsivity.

“That’s an example of microbiology that we know affects the brain and could potentially affect the legal standpoint of someone who’s being tried for a crime,” says Allen-Vercoe. “They might say ‘My microbes made me do it,’ and I might believe them.”

There’s more evidence linking gut microbes to behavior in mice, which are some of the most well-studied creatures. One study involved fecal transplants—a procedure that involves inserting fecal matter from one animal into the intestines of another. Because feces contain so much gut bacteria, fecal transplants can go some way to swap out a gut microbiome. (Humans are doing this too—and it seems to be a remarkably effective way to treat persistent C. difficile infections in people.)

Back in 2013, scientists at McMaster University in Canada performed fecal transplants between two strains of mice, one that is known for being timid and another that tends to be rather gregarious. This swapping of gut microbes also seemed to swap their behavior—the timid mice became more gregarious, and vice versa.

Microbiologists have since held up this study as one of the clearest demonstrations of how changing gut microbes can change behavior—at least in mice. “But the question is: How much do they control you, and how much is the human part of you able to overcome that control?” says Allen-Vercoe. “And that’s a really tough question to answer.”

After all, our gut microbiomes, though relatively stable, can change. Your diet, exercise routine, environment, and even the people you live with can shape the communities of microbes that live on and in you. And the ways these communities shift and influence behavior might be slightly different for everyone. Pinning down precise links between certain microbes and criminal behaviors will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. 

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to take someone’s microbiome and say ‘Oh, look—you’ve got bug X, and that means you’re a serial killer,” says Allen-Vercoe.

Either way, Prescott hopes that advances in microbiology and metabolomics might help us better understand the links between microbes, the chemicals they produce, and criminal behaviors—and potentially even treat those behaviors.

“We could get to a place where microbial interventions are a part of therapeutic programming,” she says.

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.

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A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously

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Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time.

The system, called Spatial Speech Translation, tracks the direction and vocal characteristics of each speaker, helping the person wearing the headphones to identify who is saying what in a group setting. 

“There are so many smart people across the world, and the language barrier prevents them from having the confidence to communicate,” says Shyam Gollakota, a professor at the University of Washington, who worked on the project. “My mom has such incredible ideas when she’s speaking in Telugu, but it’s so hard for her to communicate with people in the US when she visits from India. We think this kind of system could be transformative for people like her.”

While there are plenty of other live AI translation systems out there, such as the one running on Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, they focus on a single speaker, not multiple people speaking at once, and deliver robotic-sounding automated translations. The new system is designed to work with existing, off-the shelf noise-canceling headphones that have microphones, plugged into a laptop powered by Apple’s M2 silicon chip, which can support neural networks. The same chip is also present in the Apple Vision Pro headset. The research was presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Yokohama, Japan, this month.

Over the past few years, large language models have driven big improvements in speech translation. As a result, translation between languages for which lots of training data is available (such as the four languages used in this study) is close to perfect on apps like Google Translate or in ChatGPT. But it’s still not seamless and instant across many languages. That’s a goal a lot of companies are working toward, says Alina Karakanta, an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who studies computational linguistics and was not involved in the project. “I feel that this is a useful application. It can help people,” she says. 

Spatial Speech Translation consists of two AI models, the first of which divides the space surrounding the person wearing the headphones into small regions and uses a neural network to search for potential speakers and pinpoint their direction. 

The second model then translates the speakers’ words from French, German, or Spanish into English text using publicly available data sets. The same model extracts the unique characteristics and emotional tone of each speaker’s voice, such as the pitch and the amplitude, and applies those properties to the text, essentially creating a “cloned” voice. This means that when the translated version of a speaker’s words is relayed to the headphone wearer a few seconds later, it sounds as if it’s coming from the speaker’s direction and the voice sounds a lot like the speaker’s own, not a robotic-sounding computer.

Given that separating out human voices is hard enough for AI systems, being able to incorporate that ability into a real-time translation system, map the distance between the wearer and the speaker, and achieve decent latency on a real device is impressive, says Samuele Cornell, a postdoc researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, who did not work on the project.

“Real-time speech-to-speech translation is incredibly hard,” he says. “Their results are very good in the limited testing settings. But for a real product, one would need much more training data—possibly with noise and real-world recordings from the headset, rather than purely relying on synthetic data.”

Gollakota’s team is now focusing on reducing the amount of time it takes for the AI translation to kick in after a speaker says something, which will accommodate more natural-sounding conversations between people speaking different languages. “We want to really get down that latency significantly to less than a second, so that you can still have the conversational vibe,” Gollakota says.

This remains a major challenge, because the speed at which an AI system can translate one language into another depends on the languages’ structure. Of the three languages Spatial Speech Translation was trained on, the system was quickest to translate French into English, followed by Spanish and then German—reflecting how German, unlike the other languages, places a sentence’s verbs and much of its meaning at the end and not at the beginning, says Claudio Fantinuoli, a researcher at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz in Germany, who did not work on the project. 

Reducing the latency could make the translations less accurate, he warns: “The longer you wait [before translating], the more context you have, and the better the translation will be. It’s a balancing act.”

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SEC’s Crenshaw slams Ripple settlement, warns of ‘regulatory vacuum’

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SEC’s Crenshaw slams Ripple settlement, warns of ‘regulatory vacuum’

A crypto-skeptical commissioner at the US Securities and Exchange Commission has blasted her agency over its settlement letter that could finally end the Ripple legal saga.

The SEC and Ripple filed a joint settlement letter in a New York court asking for the August 2024 injunction against Ripple to be dissolved and $75 million of the $125 million in civil penalties held in escrow to be returned to the crypto firm, according to a May 8 statement from the SEC.

SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw blasted the pending deal in a May 8 statement, saying it would damage the regulators’ ability to keep crypto firms in line and undermine the court’s ruling.

SEC’s Crenshaw slams Ripple settlement, warns of ‘regulatory vacuum’
Source: James Filan

“This settlement, alongside the programmatic disassembly of the SEC’s crypto enforcement program, does a tremendous disservice to the investing public and undermines the court’s role in interpreting our securities laws,” she said.

“In the meantime, the settlement joins a line of dismissals that collectively erode the credibility of our lawyers in court who are being asked to take legal positions today contrary to the ones taken just months ago.”

Under the Trump administration, the SEC has slowly been walking back its hardline stance toward crypto firms forged under former SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s reign, dismissing a growing number of enforcement actions against crypto firms.

At the same time, Crenshaw argues that if Judge Torres accepts the settlement, it would erase “the investor protections we already won” and leave a “regulatory vacuum,” until the crypto task force hammers out a regulatory framework.

“The settlement is not in the best interests of the investors and markets that our agency is tasked with serving and protecting. It creates more questions than answers.”

In August last year, a Judge ordered Ripple to pay $125 million in penalties after ruling the firm’s XRP (XRP) token was covered by securities laws when sold to institutional investors.

What’s next for the Ripple case? It’s not over yet

While the SEC and Ripple have agreed to a settlement, it’s still not a done deal, according to ex-federal prosecutor James Filan, because there are several steps before the long-running legal saga can conclude.

For a start, Judge Torres needs to provide an indicative ruling if she agrees to the settlement letter, Filan said in a May 8 analysis on X.

SEC’s Crenshaw slams Ripple settlement, warns of ‘regulatory vacuum’
Source: James Filan

If Torres provides an indicative ruling, the SEC and Ripple will ask the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for a limited remand back to Judge Torres, which, if granted, will result in another motion being filed for the agreed settlement, according to Filan.

Related: Bitnomial drops SEC lawsuit ahead of XRP futures launch in the US

“After the injunction is dissolved and the funds distributed, the SEC and Ripple will ask the Court of Appeals to dismiss the SEC’s appeal and Ripple’s cross-appeal. Then it will be over,” he said.

The SEC initially launched legal action against Ripple Labs in December 2020, accusing the firm of illegally selling its token as an unregistered security. 

Magazine: SEC’s U-turn on crypto leaves key questions unanswered

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Coinbase revenue falls 10% in Q1, missing industry estimate

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Coinbase revenue falls 10% in Q1, missing industry estimate

Crypto exchange Coinbase’s total revenue fell 10% quarter-over-quarter to $2 billion in Q1, missing industry estimates by 4.1% as trading activity slowed across the market.

Coinbase’s net income was sliced by 95% from a near-company record $1.29 billion in Q4 to $66 million, in a large part due to Coinbase marking a $596 million paper loss on its crypto holdings.

The firm’s earnings per share of $1.94, however, managed to beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1.85 for the quarter.

Coinbase’s May 8 results also showed that transaction revenue fell 18.9% quarter-on-quarter to $1.26 billion, as did trading volumes, which dipped 10.5% to $393 billion as crypto market cap dropped by double digits over the quarter, partly attributed to the Trump administration’s tariffs. 

In contrast, US President Donald Trump’s election win in November was considered one of the main catalysts behind the rising market prices in Q4. 

Coinbase revenue falls 10% in Q1, missing industry estimate
Key financial metrics for Coinbase in Q1. Source: Coinbase

Meanwhile, Coinbase’s subscription and services revenue rose 8.9% to $698.1 million, with stablecoin revenue the most significant contributor.

Despite the fall in total revenue and trading volume, Coinbase said it gained more market share in global spot and derivatives trading while deepening its presence in emerging markets such as Argentina and India with “critical registrations.”

On the regulatory front, Coinbase said the dismissal of its lawsuit with the US securities regulator marked a “major judicial win for balanced, innovation-friendly regulation, and our efforts to make crypto mainstream.”

Coinbase makes deal with major crypto derivatives platform

On May 8, Coinbase agreed to acquire crypto derivatives platform Deribit for $2.9 billion, marking the industry’s largest corporate acquisition to date. 

The acquisition will expand Coinbase’s footprint in the crypto derivatives market immensely, which previously had been limited to its Bermuda-based platform.

Coinbase noted that Deribit facilitated over $1 trillion in trading volume in 2024 and has around $30 billion of current open interest. 

Related: $45 million stolen from Coinbase users in the last week — ZachXBT

The deal now makes Coinbase the “global leader” in crypto derivatives trading, the firm said. 

Competitor firm Kraken struck a similar deal in March when it agreed to acquire futures brokerage NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion.

Coinbase’s Deribit deal contributed to a 5.1% rise in Coinbase’s (COIN) share price during the May 8 trading day, though shares have pulled back 3.1% in after-hours since the crypto exchange posted its Q1 results.

Coinbase revenue falls 10% in Q1, missing industry estimate
Coinbase’s change in share price on May 8, including after-hours. Source: Google Finance

Magazine: Crypto wanted to overthrow banks, now it’s becoming them in stablecoin fight

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Meta exploring stablecoin integration for payouts: Report

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Meta exploring stablecoin integration for payouts: Report

Tech company Meta is reportedly exploring integrating stablecoin payments into its platforms after a three-year hiatus from cryptocurrencies, Fortune reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

The Facebook parent held talks with several crypto infrastructure firms in consultation but has not chosen a decisive course of action, according to the report.

One source said the company may take a multi-token approach and integrate support for popular stablecoins such as Tether’s USDt (USDT), Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and others.

Meta is the latest tech firm to integrate or explore the use of stablecoins for payments, as they increasingly attract institutional interest and investment, causing the stablecoin market capitalization to soar past $230 billion.

Stablecoin, Meta
An overview of the stablecoin market. Source: RWA.XYZ

Related: US Stablecoin bill blocked as Democrats withdraw support

Stablecoins attract more institutional investment and become US strategic interest

Several payment processing companies announced investments into stablecoin companies or announced stablecoin integrations in May this year.

On May 7, payments giant Visa announced that it invested in stablecoin startup BVNK. Although details of the deal remain scant, Visa’s head of products and partnerships, Rubail Birwadker, said stablecoins were commanding an ever-greater market share of payments.

Stripe, a global payments platform, launched stablecoin-based accounts for customers in over 100 countries on May 7.

The accounts allow users to store stablecoin balances or transfer the tokens to other users and withdraw the stablecoin balances as fiat currency to traditional bank accounts.

World Liberty Financial (WLFI), a crypto firm backed by US President Donald Trump, launched USD1, a US dollar-pegged stablecoin, in March.

In May, USD1 was the seventh-largest stablecoin by market cap — highlighting the rapid growth of the tokenized fiat market.

The Trump administration has repeatedly stated that stablecoins are central to US policy and a way to extend US dollar hegemony by harnessing demand for US government Treasurys and other government securities.

Stablecoin, Meta
Source: Scott Bessent

However, comprehensive stablecoin regulations were stalled on May 8 after Democratic Senators blocked the GENIUS Stablecoin bill — dashing the hopes of senior officials in the Trump administration.

“The Senate missed an opportunity to provide leadership today by failing to advance the GENIUS Act. This bill represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to expand dollar dominance,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote in a May 8 X post.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom

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One of Elon Musk’s longtime VCs is suing his former employer after allegedly being fired

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Josh Raffaelli, who has deep roots as a Silicon Valley investor and has backed a number of Elon Musk companies, is suing his former employer, the massive trillion-dollar AUM Brookfield Asset Management, reports The New York Times.  Much of Raffaelli’s complaint concerns how Brookfield covered pandemic-related real estate losses and alleges the company fired him […]
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Microsoft employees are banned from using DeepSeek app, president says 

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Microsoft employees aren’t allowed to use DeepSeek due to data security and propaganda concerns, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith said in a Senate hearing today. “At Microsoft we don’t allow our employees to use the DeepSeek app,” Smith said, referring to DeepSeek’s application service (which is available on both desktop and mobile). Smith […]
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