Waymo’s weekly paid robotaxi trips have increased tenfold in less than two years.
Read more 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.
How a couple of ski bums built the internet’s best weather app
The best snow-forecasting app for skiers isn’t a federally-funded service or a big-name brand. It’s OpenSnow, a startup that uses government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to deliver the best predictions out there.
The app has proved especially vital this winter, one of the weirdest on record. It’s even made microcelebrities of its forecasters, who sift through reams of data to write “Daily Snow” reports for locations around the world.
We headed to the Tahoe mountains to hear how two broke ski bums became modern-day snow gods. Read the full story.
—Rachel Levin
Here’s why some people choose cryonics to store their bodies and brains after death
—Jessica Hamzelou
This week I reported on unusual research focused on the frozen brain of L. Stephen Coles.
Coles, a researcher who studied aging, was interested in cryonics—the long-term storage of human bodies and brains in the hope that they might one day be brought back to life. It’s a hope shared by many.
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to people who run cryonics facilities, study cryopreservation, or just want to be cryogenically stored. All of them acknowledge that there’s a vanishingly small chance of being brought back to life. So why do they do it?
Read the full story to find out.
This article is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
What’s next for space exploration?
Whether it’s the race to find life on Mars, the campaign to outsmart killer asteroids, or the quest to make the moon a permanent home to astronauts, scientists’ efforts in space can tell us more about where humanity is headed.
To learn more about the progress and possibilities ahead, our features editor Amanda Silverman sat down with Robin George Andrews, an award-winning science journalist and author, on Wednesday. If you missed their conversation, fear not—you can catch up and watch the video here. You’ll need to be a subscriber to access it, but the good news is subscriptions are discounted right now. Bag yours if you haven’t already!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Pentagon’s ban on Anthropic has been halted
A judge has paused its designation as a supply chain risk. (CBS News)
+ She said the government was trying to “chill public debate.” (BBC)
+ Sam Altman claimed he tried to “save” Anthropic in the clash. (Axios)
2 Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against an ad boycott on X
A judge admonished the “fishing expedition.” (Ars Technica)
+ Ad revenue fell by more than half as advertisers fled X after Musk took over. (BBC)
3 OpenAI has put plans for an erotic chatbot on hold “indefinitely”
Staff and investors had raised concerns. (The Information $)
+ The company is making a sharp strategic pivot. (FT $)
+ AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction. (MIT Technology Review)
4 A helium shortage has started impacting tech supply chains
The problem stems from the Middle East conflict. (Reuters)
+ The era of cheap helium is over. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Trump’s new science advisers: 12 tech chiefs and just one academic
They include at least nine billionaires. (Nature)
+ David Sacks is stepping down as Trump’s crypto and AI czar. (TechCrunch)
6 Anthropic is mulling an IPO as soon as October
It’s racing OpenAI to hold an initial public offering. (Bloomberg $)
7 Wikipedia has banned all AI-generated content
LLM-related issues had overwhelmed editors. (404 Media)
+ Here’s what we’re getting wrong about AI’s truth crisis. (MIT Technology Review)
8 OpenAI’s ad pilot generated $100 million in under 2 months
More than 600 advertisers are working on the trial. (CNBC)
+ Ads will arrive on ChatGPT free and Go in the coming weeks. (Reuters)
9 An Irish village is giving kids a phone-free upbringing
The ban works because almost everyone’s bought in. (NYT $)
10 Chatting with sycophantic AI makes you less kind
New research found it encourages “uncouth behavior.” (Nature)
Quote of the day
“I don’t know if it’s ‘murder,’ but it looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic.”
—Judge Rita Lin rules against the Pentagon’s ban on Anthropic, The Verge reports.
One More Thing
AURELIA INSTITUTE
This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit
More and more people are traveling beyond Earth, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 of them at a time.
Aurelia Institute, an architecture R&D lab based in Cambridge, MA, is building a solution: a habitat that launches in compact stacks of flat tiles—and self-assembles in orbit.
The concept may sound far-fetched, but it’s already won support from NASA. Read the full story.
—Sarah Ward
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.)
+ These optical illusions are absolute brain-melters.
+ The web design museum lovingly visualizes the evolution of the internet.
+ Zara Picken’s modernist illustrations are a new window into the mid-20th century.
+ Explore our planet’s connections through the digital Knowledge Garden.
This week I reported on some rather unusual research that focuses on the brain of L. Stephen Coles.
Coles was a gerontologist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2014. He had spent the latter part of his career specializing in human longevity. And before he died, he decided to have his brain preserved by a cryonics facility. Today, it’s being stored at −146 °C at a center in Arizona, where it sits covered in a thin layer of frost.
Coles also tasked his longtime friend Greg Fahy with studying pieces of his brain to see how they had fared (partly because he was worried his brain might crack). Fahy, a renowned cryobiologist, has found that the brain is “astonishingly well preserved.”
But that doesn’t mean Coles could be reanimated. Over the past few years, I’ve spoken to people who run cryonics facilities, study cryopreservation, or just want to be cryogenically stored. All those I’ve spoken to acknowledge that the chance they’ll one day be brought back to life is vanishingly small. So why do they do it?
The first person to be cryonically preserved was James Hiram Bedford, a retired psychology professor who died of kidney cancer in 1967. Affiliates of the Cryonics Society of California, an organization headed by a charming TV repairman with no scientific or medical training, perfused his body with cryoproctective chemicals to protect against harmful ice formation and “quick-froze” him.
Today, Bedford’s body is still in storage at Alcor, a cryonics facility based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s one of a handful of organizations that offer to collect, preserve, and store a person’s whole body or just their brain—pretty much indefinitely. It’s where Coles’s brain is stored.
Both men died from cancer. Medicine could not cure them. But in the future, who knows? One of the premises of cryonics is that modern medicine will continue to advance over time. Cancer death rates have declined significantly in the US since the early 1990s. I don’t know what exactly drove Coles and Bedford to their decisions, but they might have hoped to be reanimated at some point in the future when their cancers became curable.
Others simply don’t want to die, period. Last year, I attended Vitalist Bay, a gathering for people who believe that life is good and that death is “humanity’s core problem.” Emil Kendziorra, CEO of the cryonics organization Tomorrow.Bio, spoke at the event, and a healthy interest in cryonics was obvious among the attendees.
Many of them believe that science will find a way to “obviate” aging. And some were keen on the idea of being preserved until that happens. Think of it as a way to cheat not only death but aging itself.
This sentiment might have support beyond the realms of Vitalist Bay, according to research by Kendziorra and his colleagues. In 2021, they surveyed 1,478 US-based internet users who were recruited via Craigslist. They found that men were more aware of cryonics than women, and more optimistic about its outcomes. Just over a third of the men who completed the survey expressed interest “a desire to live indefinitely.”
Still, cryonics is a niche field. Worldwide, only around 5,000 or 6,000 people have signed up for cryopreservation when they die, Kendziorra told me when we chatted at Vitalist Bay. He also told me that his company gets between 20 and 50 new signups every month.
And there are plenty of reasons why people don’t do it. A small fraction of the people who responded to Kendziorra’s survey said that they thought the idea of cryonics was dystopian, and some even said it should be illegal.
Then there’s the cost. Alcor charges $80,000 to store a person’s brain, and around $220,000 to store a whole body. Tomorrow.Bio’s charges are slightly higher. Many people, including Kendziorra himself, opt to cover this cost via a life insurance policy.
Perhaps the main reason people don’t opt for cryonic preservation is that we don’t have any way to bring people back. Bedford has been in storage for more than 50 years, Coles for more than a decade. All the scientists I’ve spoken to say the likelihood of reanimating remains like theirs is vanishingly small.
The fact that the possibility—however tiny—is above zero is enough for some, including Nick Llewellyn, the director of research and development at Alcor. As a scientist, he says, he acknowledges that the chances reanimation will actually work are “pretty low.” Still, he’s interested in seeing what the future will look like, so he has signed himself up for the cryonic preservation of his brain.
But Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, tells me that she wouldn’t sign up for cryonic preservation even if it worked. “It turns into a philosophical question,” she says.
“Do I want to be revived hundreds of years later when my family is gone and life is different?” she asks. “There are so many complicated philosophical, societal, [and] legal complications that need to be thought through.”
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.
Kraken’s Wyoming-chartered banking unit became the first crypto-native company to secure a Federal Reserve Master Account in March.
Spot ETF outlflows, falling DEX volumes and a declining ETH futures premium may be preventing Ether from rallying, but flipping them could catalyze a rally to $2,400.
The Treasury Department announced plans to add US President Donald Trump’s signature to US currency, reportedly starting with the $100 bill in June.
GameStop has revealed that it pledged nearly all of its Bitcoin, worth $325 million, as collateral on Coinbase as part of a covered-call strategy.
Representative Stephen Lynch voiced concerns about the direction of the SEC under Donald Trump, citing dropped investigations and enforcement actions on crypto companies.
Sacks will be much further from power center in Washington than since the outset of this second Trump administration.
Read more A federal judge has ordered that the Trump administration rescind recent restrictions it placed on the AI company.
Read more