MIT Tech

• Europe’s extreme heat is shutting down power plants

  Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load. On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947.…

• The Download: introducing the Engineering issue

  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. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new…

• Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections

  The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now the payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new…

• The emergence of the web data infrastructure layer for AI

  AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models.  To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed…

• This flying solar-powered platform could deliver better internet from the air

  As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan.  Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface, in a wispy-thin…