Dijitaryum where the tech meets

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. This company is planning a lithium empire from the shores of the Great Salt Lake On a bright afternoon in August, the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake looks like something out of…

BOX ELDER COUNTY, Utah – On a bright afternoon in August, the shore on the North Arm of the Great Salt Lake looks like something out of a science fiction film set in a scorching alien world. The desert sun is blinding as it reflects off the white salt that gathers and crunches underfoot like…

Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a “cameo” of yourself—a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice—and insert other peoples’ cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set). …

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: 10 climate tech companies to watch Every year, the MIT Technology Review newsroom produces a list of some of the most promising climate tech firms on the planet. It’s an exercise that…

Cement is one of the most used materials on the planet, and the industry emits billions of tons of greenhouse gasses annually. Cemvision wants to use waste materials and alternative fuels to help reduce climate pollution from cement production. Today, making cement requires crushing limestone and heating it to super high temperatures, usually by burning…

Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to grow crops across many parts of the world. Pairwise is leveraging CRISPR gene editing to develop plants that can better withstand adverse conditions. Pairwise uses cutting-edge gene editing to produce crops that can withstand increasingly harsh climate conditions, helping to feed a growing population even as the…

MIT Technology Review’s reporters and editors faced a dilemma as we began to mull nominees for this year’s list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. How do you pick companies poised to succeed in a moment of such deep uncertainty, at a time when the new Trump administration is downplaying the dangers of climate change,…

HiNa Battery Technology is a trailblazer in developing and mass-producing batteries using sodium, a widely available element that can be extracted from sea salt. The startup’s products—already powering small vehicles and energy storage plants in China—provide a valuable alternative to lithium-based batteries, made with materials mined and processed in just a few countries. Over the…

It’s a foregone conclusion that the world will not meet the goals for limiting emissions and global warming laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Many people want to blame politicians and corporations for this failure, but there’s an even more fundamental reason: We don’t have all the technological tools we need to do it,…