Reviews

The news: There is a new most expensive drug ever—a gene therapy that costs as much as a Brooklyn brownstone or a Miami mansion, and more than the average person will earn in a lifetime. Lenmeldy is a gene treatment for metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) and was approved in the US on Monday. Its maker, Orchard Therapeutics, says the $4.25 million wholesale cost reflects the value the treatment has for patients and families. Why it matters:  MLD is a nerve disorder that strikes toddlers, quickly robbing them of their…

The Redmi Note 13 Pro, in some sense, may appear as the awkward middle sibling in the new Redmi Note 13 series, but it is nonetheless an attractive option, considering the price. Starting at Rs 25,999, the smartphone packs a 200MP camera, 67W charging, a tall 6.67-inch AMOLED display with 1.5K (2,712 x 1,220 pixels) resolution, and Dolby Atmos-enabled stereo speakers.The Note 13 Pro also sticks to the OG Redmi Note roots and it is among the few sub-Rs 30K phones to offer a headphone jack. There’s also an IR transmitter,…

It’s part of the city’s efforts to cut down on the risk of battery fires, some of which have been sparked by e-bike batteries charging inside apartment buildings, according to the fire department. For more on the program and how it might help address fires, check out my latest story. In the meantime, here’s what I heard from delivery drivers and the startups at the kickoff event. On a windy late-February day, I wove my way through the lines of delivery workers who showed up to the event in Manhattan’s Cooper Square.…

But there’s no denying that super-high prices can signal that a treatment isn’t economically sustainable.  One prior title holder, the gene therapy Glybera, was purchased only once before being retired from the market. It didn’t work well enough to justify the $1 million price tag, which made it the price champion at the time. Then there’s the treatment that’s been reigning as the costliest until today, when Lenmeldy took over. It’s a $3.5 million hemophilia treatment called Hemegenix, which is also a gene therapy. Such…

The Blackview MP60 mini PC. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETBlackview, a company best known for its rugged Android smartphones with built-in thermal cameras, released the MP60 Mini PC Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETThe cooling fan has a cool LED light-up effect. Well, it's cool if you like such things. If not, I haven't found a way to switch it off without opening up the system. That fan initially bothered me because I thought it might be noisy, but the sound turned out to be very unobtrusive.Power adapter, HDMI cable,…

For companies producing just about any physical product, the many “black swan” events (catastrophic incidents that are nearly impossible to predict) of the last four years illustrate the importance of supply chain resilience—businesses’ ability to anticipate, respond, and bounce back. Yet many organizations still don’t have robust measures in place for future setbacks. In a poll of 250 business leaders conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights in partnership with Infosys Cobalt, just 12% say their supply chains are…

Existing battery swap networks like Nio’s have mostly included a single company’s equipment, giving the manufacturer control over the vehicle, battery, and swapping equipment. That’s because one of the keys to making battery swapping work is fleet commonality—a base of many vehicles that can all use the same system. Fortunately, delivery drivers have formed something of a de facto fleet in New York City, says David Hammer, co-founder and president of Popwheels. Roughly half of the city’s 60,000-plus delivery workers…

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. A wave of drugs dreamed up by AI is on its way Alex Zhavoronkov has been messing around with artificial intelligence for more than a decade. In 2016, the programmer and physicist was using AI to rank people by looks and sort through pictures of cats. Now he says his company, Insilico Medicine, has created the first “true AI drug” that’s advanced to a test of whether…

If you are looking for a TV under Rs 1,00,000, there are many options and a host of features you can expect from your TV. From local dimming to a native 120Hz panel with support for all HDMI 2.1 features, Rs 1,00,000 is the sweet spot for great features and performance. While we have seen OLED TVs available under Rs 1 lakh, such as the LG A2, it misses out on HDMI 2.1 support which could be a deal breaker if you are a gamer. Today, we have the 55-inch LG QNED83, which is an LED-backlit TV. The QNED in the name means that…

Zhavoronkov has a track record of implementing cutting-edge AI methods as soon as they’re available. He started Insilico in 2014, shortly after AI started to achieve new breakthroughs in image recognition with so-called deep-learning models. The new approach blew away prior techniques for classifying images and on tasks like finding cats in YouTube videos. Zhavoronkov initially found notoriety—and some controversy—for AI apps that guessed people’s age and a program that ranked people by their looks. His beauty contest…