The Download: introducing the Engineering issue

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. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That’s what the new Engineering issue of MIT Technology Review is all about. Sometimes the challenges we face are giant, like tunneling beneath the seafloor. Some exist at the nanoscale, as with a new ASML machine powering the future of chipmaking. Others represent problems at a planetary scale and in truly unknown territory, like replicating a volcano’s mechanism to cool the Earth on purpose. These incredible engineering stories show we can come together to get to work and, when the smoke clears, find we’ve made real progress. Subscribe now to read all of them—and more—in the full print issue. Stripe, Anthropic, and OpenAI are backing an effort to stop respiratory infections The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now, the payment company Stripe is funding a new $500-million nonprofit aiming to prevent both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual goal is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Bill Gates have also backed the venture, which will investigate whether modern technologies can counter the common cold and the flu. Dive into the nonprofit’s plans.—Antonio Regalado MIT Technology Review Narrated: inside the hunt for the most dangerous asteroid ever As asteroid 2024 YR4 hurtled toward Earth, astronomers determined that this massive rock posed a higher risk of impact than any object of its size in recorded history. Then, just as quickly as history was made, experts declared that the danger had passed. This is the inside story of the network of global scientists who found, followed,