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A live agent spends hours each week manually documenting routine interactions. Another combs through multiple knowledge bases to find the right solution, scrambling to piece it together while the customer waits on hold. A third types out the same response they’ve written dozens of times before. These repetitive tasks can be draining, leaving less time…

It’s a stormy holiday weekend, and you’ve just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: The first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you’ll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks…

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the January/February Puzzle Corner, brought to you with a special Mystery Hunt twist by guest editor Dan Katz ’03. This column includes solutions to three September/October 24 problems. Find solutions to the other three problems here.

Here are solutions for the three bonus problems that appeared in the September/October 2024 Puzzle Corner column we guest edited. Solutions for S/O2, S/O4, and S/O6 are below; those for S/O1, S/O3, and S/O5 can be found here. S/O2. Frank notes that a repunit Rk is a decimal integer consisting of the digit 1 repeated…

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. The next generation of neural networks could live in hardware Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin…

US doctors write billions of prescriptions each year. During 2024, though, one type of drug stood out—“wonder drugs” known as GLP-1 agonists. As of September, one of every 20 prescriptions written for adults was for one of these drugs, according to the health data company Truveta. The drugs, which include Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Victoza, are…

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. Later today, around 10 minutes after this email lands in your inbox, I’ll be holding my four-year-old daughter tight as she receives her booster dose of the MMR…

Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That’s according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,…