How far can a mid sized language model go if the real innovation moves from the backbone into the agent scaffold and tool stack? Meta and Harvard researchers have released the Confucius Code Agent, an open sourced AI software engineer built on the Confucius SDK that is designed for industrial scale ...

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how we use Ibis to build a portable, in-database feature engineering pipeline that looks and feels like Pandas but executes entirely inside the database. We show how we connect to DuckDB, register data safely inside the backend, and define complex transformations ...

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 I learned to stop worrying and love AI slop —Caiwei Chen If I were to locate the moment AI slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video ...

Here at MIT Technology Review we’ve been writing about the gene-editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet so far, there’s been only one gene-editing drug approved. It’s been used commercially on only about 40 patients, all with sickle-cell ...

The name Google has always been synonymous with technology, and things are no different in the age of AI. Google has quietly been the frontrunner in the AI revolution with a host of products that surprisingly few people know about. Of course, the showstoppers like Gemini and NotebookLM have been ...

Most RAG demos stop at “upload a PDF and ask a question.” That proves the pipeline works. It doesn’t prove you understand it. These projects are designed to break in interesting ways. They surface bias, contradictions, forgotten context, and overconfident answers. That’s where real RAG learning ...

A team of Stanford Medicine researchers have introduced SleepFM Clinical, a multimodal sleep foundation model that learns from clinical polysomnography and predicts long term disease risk from a single night of sleep. The research work is published in Nature Medicine and the team has released the ...

The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US’s federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations—a move that health associations worry puts children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease. There ...

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. Researchers are getting organoids pregnant with human embryos At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into ...

For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers were ordered to stop work immediately. The cited reason? ...

The beginning of a new year brings about a new sense of energy in most. One may argue that it is all psychological, as nothing changes other than the date. Agreed, to a point. Though it is psychological, the change is not just based on the onset of a “new year.” A deep-rooted logical reasoning The ...

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to build a unified Apache Beam pipeline that works seamlessly in both batch and stream-like modes using the DirectRunner. We generate synthetic, event-time–aware data and apply fixed windowing with triggers and allowed lateness to demonstrate how Apache Beam ...