The Download: AI tracking birds, and a pig kidney transplant

In a warming world, migratory birds face many threats to their survival. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track when and where they migrate, but each method has drawbacks. There’s another problem: Most birds migrate at night, when it’s harder to identify them visually, and most birders are in bed.

For more than a century, acoustic monitoring has remained out of reach as a solution to ornithologists’ dilemmas. Now, machine learning tools are finally opening up a treasure trove of acoustic data for ecologists. Read the full story.

——Christian Elliott

This story is from an upcoming issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, going online on January 6th—all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world today. If you haven’t yet, subscription Receive a copy.

A U.S. woman becomes third person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney

Towana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama, became the third living patient to receive a gene-edited pig kidney transplant.

Looney donated one of his kidneys to his mother in 1999, and a few years later she suffered kidney failure due to high blood pressure due to pregnancy complications. She began dialysis treatment in December 2016 and was put on the waiting list for a kidney transplant shortly after.

But it’s hard to find a match. So Looney’s doctors recommended experimental pig organs as an alternative. After eight years on the waiting list, Looney was authorized to receive a kidney. Read the full story.