Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
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. We can’t “make American children healthy again” without tackling the gun crisis This week, the Trump administration released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titled—you guessed it—Make Our Children Healthy Again. It suggests American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise. But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence. This week’s news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis. 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 . How do AI models generate videos? It’s been a big year for video generation. In the last nine months OpenAI made Sora public, Google DeepMind launched Veo 3, and the video startup Runway launched Gen-4. All can produce video clips that are (almost) impossible to distinguish from actual filmed footage or CGI animation. The downside is that creators are competing with AI slop, and social media feeds are filling up with faked news footage. Video generation also uses up a huge amount of energy, many times more than text or image generation. With AI-generated videos everywhere, let’s take a moment to talk about the tech that makes them work. Read the full story . —Will Douglas Heaven This article is part of MIT Technology Review Explains, our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here . Meet our 2025 Innovator of the Year: Sneha Goenka Up to a quarter of children entering intensive care have undiagnosed genetic conditions. To be treated properly, they must first get diagnoses—which means having their genomes sequenced. This process typically takes up to seven weeks. Sadly, that’s often too slow to save a critically ill child. Hospitals may soon have a faster option, thanks to a groundbreaking system built in part by Sneha Goenka, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton—and MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovator of the Year. Read all about Goenka and her work in this profile . —Helen Thomson As well as our Innovator of the Year, Goenka is one of the biotech honorees on our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2025. Meet the rest of our biotech and materials science innovators, and the full list here . The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fasci
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review