Lifeboat Foundation

MIT will reshape itself to shape the future, investing $1 billion to address the rapid evolution of computing and AI — and its global effects. At the heart of this effort: a $350 million gift to found the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

Photo: Christopher Harting

Seismologists from from the Australia National University (ANU) have found the first conclusive proof that the Earth’s innermost core is solid after 80 years of searching.

Aristotle called it the fifth element. Alchemists thought it was the key to the philosopher’s stone. Scientists believed it was the stuff light moved through. But it never existed at all.

Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was born from this very question, and the answer is as weird as you’d expect.

Ice shelves perform a vital function in slowing down the rate of glacier melt in Antarctica, so scientists keep an eye on them for signs of collapse. And as the continent’s largest, the Ross Ice Shelf is particularly important. After monitoring seismic activity over a few years, researchers noticed that the Ross Ice Shelf is “singing” – and listening out for changes in that song could be an early warning system for potential problems.

‘’In the medieval period, life was miserable and there wasn’t anything people could do to improve it. Today, the gap between the way the world is and the way it could be is enormous.

But he’s still an optimist.

The behemoths’ annual conferences, held to announce new tools, features, and acquisitions, always “send shock waves of fear through entrepreneurs”, says Mike Driscoll, a partner at Data Collective, an investment firm. “Venture capitalists attend to see which of their companies are going to get killed next.” But anxiety about the tech giants on the part of startups and their investors goes much deeper than such events. Venture capitalists, such as Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures, who was an early investor in Twitter, now talk of a “kill-zone” around the giants. Once a young firm enters, it can be extremely difficult to survive. Tech giants try to squash startups by copying them, or they pay to scoop them up early to eliminate a threat.

Big, rich and paranoid, they have reams of data to help them spot and buy young firms that might challenge them.

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