The Download: NASA’s new telescope and Chinese tech import curbs

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. NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its quest is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos. But Roman could also serve another purpose: defending Earth from killer asteroids. In September, a multi-institutional team of planetary scientists and astronomers will outline how it’s uniquely placed to scan asteroids, and provide information about their trajectories, sizes and compositions. Read our story about how this new space telescope might boost planetary defense. —Robin George Andrews MIT Technology Review Narrated: The inevitable weakness of metrics —Bryan Gardiner There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more that it can obscure or corrupt. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, get outside more, and bring order to the messiness and uncertainty of my daily existence. But external metrics and data can never capture what’s truly important. Worse, they inevitably redefine your core sense of what’s important, whether you’re aware of the trap or not. Read the full story. This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts . Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1