The Download: down the Mandela effect rabbit hole, and the promise of a vaccine for colds

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The Download: down the Mandela effect rabbit hole, and the promise of a vaccine for colds

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. Why do so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia? Quick question: Does the Fruit of the Loom logo feature a cornucopia?Many of us have been wearing the company’s T-shirts for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a woven brown horn of plenty on the logo is surprisingly contentious.According to a 2022 poll, 55% of Americans believe the logo does include a cornucopia, 25% are unsure, and only 21% are confident that it doesn’t, even though this last group is correct.There’s a name for what’s happening here: the “Mandela effect,” or collective false memory, so called because a number of people misremember that Nelson Mandela died in prison. Yet while many find it easy to let their unconfirmable beliefs go, some spend years seeking answers—and vindication. Read the full story. —Amelia Tait This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology. Here’s why we don’t have a cold vaccine. Yet. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the season of the sniffles. As the weather turns, we’re all spending more time indoors. The kids have been back at school for a couple of months. And cold germs are everywhere. So why can’t we get a vaccine to protect us against the common cold? Scientists have been working on this for decades, but it turns out that creating a cold vaccine is hard. Really hard. But not impossible. There’s still hope. 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. Inside the archives of the NASA Ames Research Center At the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, surrounded by the tech giants Google, Apple, and Microsoft, sits the historic NASA Ames Research Center. Its rich history includes a grab bag of fascinating scientific research involving massive wind tunnels, experimental aircraft, supercomputing, astrobiology, and more.A collection of 5,000 images from NASA Ames’s archives paints a vivid picture of bleeding-edge work at the heart of America’s technology hub. Read the full story.—Jon Keegan This story is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is full of stories about the body. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The US government is considering banning TP-Link routersAn investigation has raised concerns over the company’s links to China. (WP $)+ Lawmakers are worried its equipment is vulnerable to hacking. (Bloomberg $)2 ICE has proposed building a deportation network in TexasThe 24/7 operation would transfer detained immigrants into holding facilities. (Wired $)+ But US citizens keep being detained, too. (NY Mag $)+ Inside the operation giving ICE a run for its money. (Slate $)+ Another effort to track ICE raids was just taken offline. (MIT Technology Review) 3 Ukrainian drone teams are gamifying their war effortsOfficials say rewarding soldiers for successful attacks keeps them motivated. (NYT $)+ A Peter Thiel-backed drone startup crashed and burned during military trials. (FT $)+ Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Meta has denied torrenting porn to train its AI modelsInstead, it claims, the downloads were for someone’s “private personal use.” (Ars Technica) 5 Bird flu is getting harder to keep tabs onThe virus has wreaked havoc on the US poultry industry for close to four years. (Vox)+ A new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes. (MIT Technology Review) 6 AI browsers are a cybersecurity nightmareThey’re a hotbed of known—and unknown—risks. (The Verge)+ I tried OpenAI’s new Atlas browser but I still don’t know what it’s for. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Robots are starting to do more jobs across AmericaBut they’re still proving buggy and expensive to run. (WSJ $)+ When you might start speaking to robots. (MIT Technology Review) 8 These are the jobs that AI builtFrom conversation designer to adoption strategist. (WP $)+ if you fancy landing a job in quantum computing, here’s how to do it. (IEEE Spectrum) 9 Computer vision is getting much, much better 👀Their blind spots are rapidly being eliminated. (Knowable Magazine) 10 A lock-cracking YouTuber is being sued by a lockmaking company 🔓 It’s arguing he defamed the company, even though he didn’t say a word during the clip. (Ars Technica) Quote of the day “Yes, we’ve been to the Moon before… six times!” —NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy reacts to Kim Kardashian’s belief that man has never set foot on the moon, the Guardian reports. One more thing What happens when you donate your body to science Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures that complain from the trees that surround the Western Carolina University body farm. Her arrival has interrupted their breakfast. George studies human decomposition, and part of decomposing is becoming food. Scavengers are welcome. In the US, about 20,000 people or their families donate their bodies to scientific research and education each year. Whatever the reason, the decision becomes a gift. Western Carolina’s FOREST is among the places where watchful caretakers know that the dead and the living are deeply connected, and the way you treat the first reflects how you treat the second. Read the full story. —Abby Ohlheiser We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)+ Zoo animals across the world are getting into the Halloween spirit with some tasty pumpkins.+ If you’re stuck for something suitably spooky to watch tonight, this list is a great place to start.+ New York’s historic Morris-Jumel Mansion is seriously beautiful—and seriously haunted.+ Salem’s Lucipurr is on the prowl!

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.

Why do so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia?

Quick question: Does the Fruit of the Loom logo feature a cornucopia?

Many of us have been wearing the company’s T-shirts for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a woven brown horn of plenty on the logo is surprisingly contentious.

According to a 2022 poll, 55% of Americans believe the logo does include a cornucopia, 25% are unsure, and only 21% are confident that it doesn’t, even though this last group is correct.

There’s a name for what’s happening here: the “Mandela effect,” or collective false memory, so called because a number of people misremember that Nelson Mandela died in prison. Yet while many find it easy to let their unconfirmable beliefs go, some spend years seeking answers—and vindication. Read the full story.

—Amelia Tait

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s series “The New Conspiracy Age,” on how the present boom in conspiracy theories is reshaping science and technology.

Here’s why we don’t have a cold vaccine. Yet.

For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the season of the sniffles. As the weather turns, we’re all spending more time indoors. The kids have been back at school for a couple of months. And cold germs are everywhere.

So why can’t we get a vaccine to protect us against the common cold? Scientists have been working on this for decades, but it turns out that creating a cold vaccine is hard. Really hard. But not impossible. There’s still hope. 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.

Inside the archives of the NASA Ames Research Center

At the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, surrounded by the tech giants Google, Apple, and Microsoft, sits the historic NASA Ames Research Center. Its rich history includes a grab bag of fascinating scientific research involving massive wind tunnels, experimental aircraft, supercomputing, astrobiology, and more.

A collection of 5,000 images from NASA Ames’s archives paints a vivid picture of bleeding-edge work at the heart of America’s technology hub. Read the full story.

—Jon Keegan

This story is from the latest print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is full of stories about the body. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US government is considering banning TP-Link routers
An investigation has raised concerns over the company’s links to China. (WP $)
+ Lawmakers are worried its equipment is vulnerable to hacking. (Bloomberg $)

2 ICE has proposed building a deportation network in Texas
The 24/7 operation would transfer detained immigrants into holding facilities. (Wired $)
+ But US citizens keep being detained, too. (NY Mag $)
+ Inside the operation giving ICE a run for its money. (Slate $)
+ Another effort to track ICE raids was just taken offline. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Ukrainian drone teams are gamifying their war efforts
Officials say rewarding soldiers for successful attacks keeps them motivated. (NYT $)
+ A Peter Thiel-backed drone startup crashed and burned during military trials. (FT $)
+ Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Meta has denied torrenting porn to train its AI models
Instead, it claims, the downloads were for someone’s “private personal use.” (Ars Technica)

5 Bird flu is getting harder to keep tabs on
The virus has wreaked havoc on the US poultry industry for close to four years. (Vox)
+ A new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes. (MIT Technology Review)

6 AI browsers are a cybersecurity nightmare
They’re a hotbed of known—and unknown—risks. (The Verge)
+ I tried OpenAI’s new Atlas browser but I still don’t know what it’s for. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Robots are starting to do more jobs across America
But they’re still proving buggy and expensive to run. (WSJ $)
+ When you might start speaking to robots. (MIT Technology Review)

8 These are the jobs that AI built
From conversation designer to adoption strategist. (WP $)
+ if you fancy landing a job in quantum computing, here’s how to do it. (IEEE Spectrum)

9 Computer vision is getting much, much better 👀
Their blind spots are rapidly being eliminated. (Knowable Magazine)

10 A lock-cracking YouTuber is being sued by a lockmaking company 🔓
It’s arguing he defamed the company, even though he didn’t say a word during the clip. (Ars Technica)

Quote of the day

“Yes, we’ve been to the Moon before… six times!”

—NASA’s acting administrator Sean Duffy reacts to Kim Kardashian’s belief that man has never set foot on the moon, the Guardian reports.

One more thing

What happens when you donate your body to science

Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures that complain from the trees that surround the Western Carolina University body farm. Her arrival has interrupted their breakfast. George studies human decomposition, and part of decomposing is becoming food. Scavengers are welcome.

In the US, about 20,000 people or their families donate their bodies to scientific research and education each year. Whatever the reason, the decision becomes a gift. Western Carolina’s FOREST is among the places where watchful caretakers know that the dead and the living are deeply connected, and the way you treat the first reflects how you treat the second. Read the full story.

—Abby Ohlheiser

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Zoo animals across the world are getting into the Halloween spirit with some tasty pumpkins.
+ If you’re stuck for something suitably spooky to watch tonight, this list is a great place to start.
+ New York’s historic Morris-Jumel Mansion is seriously beautiful—and seriously haunted.
+ Salem’s Lucipurr is on the prowl!

Stay Ahead

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AMD to build two more supercomputers at Oak Ridge National Labs

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Trump Says Canada Trade Talks Won’t Resume, Contradicting Energy Sec

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Data centers as engines of economic growth

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Nvidia GTC show news you need to know round-up

In the case of Flex, it will use digital twins to unify inventory, labor, and freight operations, streamlining logistics across Flex’s worldwide network. Flex’s new 400,000 sq. ft. facility in Dallas is purpose-built for data center infrastructure, aiming to significantly shorten lead times for U.S. customers. The Flex/Nvidia partnership aims to address the country’s labor shortages and drive innovation in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and technology. The companies believe the partnership sets the stage for a new era of giga-scale AI factories. Nvidia and Oracle to Build DOE’s Largest AI Supercomputer Oracle continues its aggressive push into supercomputing with a deal to build the largest AI supercomputer for scientific discovery — Using Nvidia GPUs, obviously — at a Department of Energy facility. The system, dubbed Solstice, will feature an incredible 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. A second system, dubbed Equinox, will include 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and is expected to be available in the first half of 2026. Both systems will be interconnected by Nvidia networking and deliver a combined 2,200 exaflops of AI performance. The Solstice and Equinox supercomputers will be located at Argonne National Laboratory, the home to the Aurora supercomputer, built using all Intel parts. They will enable scientists and researchers to develop and train new frontier models and AI reasoning models for open science using the Nvidia Megatron-Core library and scale them using the Nvidia TensorRT inference software stack.

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

And Microsoft isn’t the only one that is ramping up its investments into AI-enabled data centers. Rival cloud service providers are all investing in either upgrading or opening new data centers to capture a larger chunk of business from developers and users of large language models (LLMs). In a report published in October 2024, Bloomberg Intelligence estimated that demand for generative AI would push Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Meta, and Apple would between them devote $200 billion to capex in 2025, up from $110 billion in 2023. Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders, followed closely by Google and AWS, Bloomberg Intelligence said. Its estimate of Microsoft’s capital spending on AI, at $62.4 billion for calendar 2025, is lower than Smith’s claim that the company will invest $80 billion in the fiscal year to June 30, 2025. Both figures, though, are way higher than Microsoft’s 2020 capital expenditure of “just” $17.6 billion. The majority of the increased spending is tied to cloud services and the expansion of AI infrastructure needed to provide compute capacity for OpenAI workloads. Separately, last October Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said his company planned total capex spend of $75 billion in 2024 and even more in 2025, with much of it going to AWS, its cloud computing division.

John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Self-driving tractors might be the path to self-driving cars. John Deere has revealed a new line of autonomous machines and tech across agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. The Moline, Illinois-based John Deere has been in business for 187 years, yet it’s been a regular as a non-tech company showing off technology at the big tech trade show in Las Vegas and is back at CES 2025 with more autonomous tractors and other vehicles. This is not something we usually cover, but John Deere has a lot of data that is interesting in the big picture of tech. The message from the company is that there aren’t enough skilled farm laborers to do the work that its customers need. It’s been a challenge for most of the last two decades, said Jahmy Hindman, CTO at John Deere, in a briefing. Much of the tech will come this fall and after that. He noted that the average farmer in the U.S. is over 58 and works 12 to 18 hours a day to grow food for us. And he said the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually; and the agricultural work force continues to shrink. (This is my hint to the anti-immigration crowd). John Deere’s autonomous 9RX Tractor. Farmers can oversee it using an app. While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability. In construction, about 80% percent of contractors struggle to find skilled labor. And in commercial landscaping, 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions, he said. “They have to figure out how to do

2025 playbook for enterprise AI success, from agents to evals

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 2025 is poised to be a pivotal year for enterprise AI. The past year has seen rapid innovation, and this year will see the same. This has made it more critical than ever to revisit your AI strategy to stay competitive and create value for your customers. From scaling AI agents to optimizing costs, here are the five critical areas enterprises should prioritize for their AI strategy this year. 1. Agents: the next generation of automation AI agents are no longer theoretical. In 2025, they’re indispensable tools for enterprises looking to streamline operations and enhance customer interactions. Unlike traditional software, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can make nuanced decisions, navigate complex multi-step tasks, and integrate seamlessly with tools and APIs. At the start of 2024, agents were not ready for prime time, making frustrating mistakes like hallucinating URLs. They started getting better as frontier large language models themselves improved. “Let me put it this way,” said Sam Witteveen, cofounder of Red Dragon, a company that develops agents for companies, and that recently reviewed the 48 agents it built last year. “Interestingly, the ones that we built at the start of the year, a lot of those worked way better at the end of the year just because the models got better.” Witteveen shared this in the video podcast we filmed to discuss these five big trends in detail. Models are getting better and hallucinating less, and they’re also being trained to do agentic tasks. Another feature that the model providers are researching is a way to use the LLM as a judge, and as models get cheaper (something we’ll cover below), companies can use three or more models to

OpenAI’s red teaming innovations define new essentials for security leaders in the AI era

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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