The virtual wall that watched people die
Over 25 years, the U.S. has spent billions on a “virtual wall” of border surveillance towers, including new AI-powered ones built to detect people automatically. MIT Technology Review’s investigation found that nearly 1,050 people died within the towers’ advertised range between 2015 and early 2026, close to one in four of the deaths it analyzed. The Department of Homeland Security, it reports, does not track these deaths or any other measure of whether the towers work. Two days later, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) proposed ending the program.
Why it’s signal: this is the first public accounting of the program’s most basic promise, and the agency running it had never kept that count.
A mouse whose cortex is human
At Stanford, Sergiu Pașca’s team bred mice that could not grow their own cortex. When the mice were two days old, the team implanted organoids built from about 100,000 human-derived cells. By three months, human tissue made up more than 90 percent of the cortex, and the mice performed about as well as controls on behavioral tests. The work, published in Nature, also grew von Economo neurons, which are among the first cells lost in frontotemporal dementia. That gives researchers a new way to study the disease.
Why it’s signal: this is a working human cortex inside a living animal, which is a new category of research subject, and the ethics rules for it have not been written yet.
Why women with power in tech aren’t famous for it
In “The Search for Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful Woman”, WIRED’s Lauren Goode starts from a paradox: women hold some of the most consequential jobs in technology, yet none has become a cult figure the way the industry’s male founders have. The story leads WIRED’s special issue on tech and gender. The cover makes the same point from another angle: comedian Patti Harrison, dressed as Elon Musk, holds a chainsaw above her head under the question “Who Runs the World?” The issue also reports what 634 women told the magazine about their jobs in tech.
Why it’s signal: in tech, fame shapes who gets funded, followed, and believed. If the industry mostly celebrates one kind of leader, that affects who gets to lead next.
AI starts replacing enterprise software
Ema, which sells teams of “AI employees” that run multistep work in HR, IT, and finance, raised a $77 million Series B. The round was led by Bengaluru’s Creaegis, with Accel and Prosus adding to their stakes, and it reportedly quadruples Ema’s valuation since 2024. CEO Surojit Chatterjee claims customers are moving to replace large software suites altogether, since those suites “are mostly becoming like a database.” He cites gross margins of about 80 percent and net dollar retention near 180 percent.
Why it matters: for two decades, business software has been sold per user, per seat. Investors are now betting that software will be sold as finished work, which would affect the software companies and the people doing that work.
“God told them to sell crypto”
Denver pastor Eli Regalado and his wife Kaitlyn raised more than $3 million from over 500 investors for INDXcoin. The coin’s exchange collapsed within hours of launching. A judge ordered them to pay $3.4 million, and they now face 40 felony counts. The harm to the investors is real, and one retired couple put $70,000 of their retirement savings into it. We file it under Noise because the only new element is the blockchain. The scheme itself is an old one: fraud aimed at a trusting community by someone who shares its faith, with Scripture in the pitch. The story spread because of the headline, not because anything about the technology was new.
THE LONG WAVE
This week, technology kept ahead of the systems meant to account for it. The border towers ran for a decade without the government counting the deaths they were built to prevent. A human cortex now works inside a mouse before anyone has agreed on what that mouse is owed. Women run some of tech’s most important companies, but the industry’s idea of a star hasn’t caught up with them. Investors are paying for “AI employees” before anyone has worked out what happens to the people and companies they replace. The engineering works in every case. What lags is the accounting: the rule, the measure, even the list of names.
Pick a technology you use every day. Who, if anyone, is keeping count of what it costs?
Sourced this week from MIT Technology Review, WIRED, and TechCrunch.
— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —
It’s interesting that Rodin attracts so much attention from medical experts, especially here at Stanford, who have used his hands for diagnostic purposes. It’s true that Rodin was intensely interested in exploring pathologies of the body, especially now-discredited understandings of female hysteria. But there is also the irony that Rodin became furious after a critic accused him of making his first life-size figure through life casting, rather than modeling it himself. It should go without saying, but Rodin’s hands are not hands – not real ones, anyway – and their expressive forms don’t align neatly with the anatomical reality of hands in flesh and blood or even their more naturalistic counterparts. But the very fact that they elicit such responses demonstrates the power of art to provoke challenging questions that drive innovative paths of research that cut across disciplines, particularly in a university setting.
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