MIT Technology Review

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Dr. Google" had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better? For the past two decades, there's been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online....

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial intelligence in the US reached a boiling point. On December 11, after Congress failed twice...

This week marked a rather unpleasant anniversary: It's a year since Texas reported a case of measles-the start of a significant outbreak that ended up spreading across multiple states. Since the start of January 2025, there have been over 2,500 confirmed cases of measles in the US. Three people have died. As vaccination rates drop...

For the past two decades, there's been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker Dr. Google." But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. According to OpenAI, 230 million people ask...

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in techby Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. It's supposed to be frigid in Davos this time of year. Part of the charm is seeing the world's elite tromp through the...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Yann LeCun's new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in...

In 2026, I'm going to be closely watching the price of lithium. If you're not in the habit of obsessively tracking commodity markets, I certainly don't blame you. (Though the news lately definitely makes the case that minerals can have major implications for global politics and the economy.) But lithium is worthy of a close...

Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry's current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we should be betting on world...

Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in sovereign AI," with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally trained models, independent supply chains, and national talent pipelines. This is a response to real...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. All anyone wants to talk about at Davos is AI and Donald Trump -Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review's editor in chief At Davos this year Trump is dominating all the side conversations. There...

This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in techby Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. Hello from the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. I've been here for two days now, attending meetings, speaking on panels,...

The story of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is really a story of businesses learning to organize themselves around the latest, greatest technology of the times. In the 1960s through the '80s, mainframes, material requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing resource planning (MRP II) brought core business data from file cabinets to centralized systems. Client-server architectures defined...

AI agents are moving beyond coding assistants and customer service chatbots into the operational core of the enterprise. The ROI is promising, but autonomy without alignment is a recipe for chaos. Business leaders need to lay the essential foundations now. The agent explosion is coming Agents are independently handling end-to-end processes across lead generation, supply...

A number of startups and university teams that are building AI scientists" to design and run experiments in the lab, including robot biologists and chemists, have just won extra funding from the UK government agency that supports moonshot R&D. The competition, set up by ARIA (the Advanced Research and Invention Agency), gives a clear sense...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The man who made India digital isn't done yet Nandan Nilekani can't stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What it's like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the...

Today marks an inflection point for enterprise AI adoption. Despite billions invested in generative AI, only 5% of integrated pilots deliver measurable business value and nearly one in two companies abandons AI initiatives before reaching production. The bottleneck is not the models themselves. What's holding enterprises back is the surrounding infrastructure: Limited data accessibility, rigid...

It was early evening in Berlin, just a day before Christmas Eve, when Josephine Ballon got an unexpected email from US Customs and Border Protection. The status of her ability to travel to the United States had changed-she'd no longer be able to enter the country. At first, she couldn't find any information online as...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced. Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code...

Earlier this week, MIT Technology Review published its annual list of Ten Breakthrough Technologies. As always, it features technologies that made the news last year, and which-for better or worse-stand to make waves in the coming years. They're the technologies you should really be paying attention to. This year's list includes tech that's set to...

In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you'll learn about how the idea that machines will be as smart as-or smarter than-humans has hijacked an entire industry. by Will Douglas Heaven October 30, 2025 Table of Contents: Related Stories: Access all subscriber-only eBooks:

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he bought...

Happy New Year! I know it's a bit late to say, but it never quite feels like the year has started until the new edition of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list comes out. For 25 years, MIT Technology Review has put together this package, which highlights the technologies that we think are going to matter...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint The popularity of commercial nuclear reactors has surged in recent years as worries about climate change and energy independence drowned out concerns about...

Behold, the hyperscale data center! Massive structures, with thousands of specialized computer chips running in parallel to perform the complex calculations required by advanced AI models. A single facility can cover millions of square feet, built with millions of pounds of steel, aluminum, and concrete; feature hundreds of miles of wiring, connecting some hundreds of...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Sodium-ion batteries are making their way into cars-and the grid For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium's limited supply and volatile price have led the industry...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth See you in...

Emissions from air freight have increased by 25% since 2019, according to a 2024 analysis by environmental advocacy organization Stand.Earth. The researchers found that the expansion of cargo-only fleets to transport goods during the pandemic - as air travel halted, slower freight modes faced disruption, but demand for rapid delivery soared - has led to...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Introducing this year's 10 Breakthrough Technologies It's easy to be cynical about technology these days. Many of the disruptions" of the last 15 years were more about coddling a certain set of young,...

In February 2025, cyberattackers thought to be linked to North Korea executed a sophisticated supply chain attack on cryptocurrency exchange Bybit. By targeting its infrastructure and multi-signature security process, hackers managed to steal more than $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum in the largest known digital-asset theft to date. The ripple effects were felt across the...

Every year, MIT Technology Review publishes a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In fact, the 2026 version is out today. This marks the 25th year the newsroom has compiled this annual list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited...

For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that's about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms. The first of...

Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutrons, which bump into other atoms, continuing the chain reaction. That reaction gives off heat, which can be used directly or help turn water...

In sprawling stretches of farmland and industrial parks, supersized buildings packed with racks of computers are springing up to fuel the AI race. These engineering marvels are a new species of infrastructure: supercomputers designed to train and run large language models at mind-bending scale, complete with their own specialized chips, cooling systems, and even energy...

For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium's limited supply and volatile price have led the industry to seek more resilient alternatives. A sodium-ion battery works much like a lithium-ion one: It stores and releases energy by shuttling ions between two electrodes. But unlike lithium, a somewhat rare element...

Hundreds of millions of people now use chatbots every day. And yet the large language models that drive them are so complicated that nobody really understands what they are, how they work, or exactly what they can and can't do-not even the people who build them. Weird, right? It's also a problem. Without a clear...

Kyle KJ" Muldoon Jr. was born with a rare genetic disorder that left his body unable to remove toxic ammonia from his blood. He was lethargic and at risk of developing neurological disorders. The condition can be fatal. KJ joined a waiting list for a liver transplant. Then Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Kiran Musunuru at the...

Many Americans agree that it's acceptable to screen embryos for severe genetic diseases. Far fewer say it's okay to test for characteristics related to a future child's appearance, behavior, or intelligence. But a few startups are now advertising what they claim is a way to do just that. Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) has been around...

Nuclear power has been a critical part of the electricity grid for decades, but old reactor designs-which often come in years behind schedule and billions over budget-could soon get a big refresh. Next-generation nuclear reactors are smaller and simpler to manufacture, and they use different materials to generate a constant stream of electricity. These changes...

Chatbots are skilled at crafting sophisticated dialogue and mimicking empathetic behavior. They never get tired of chatting. It's no wonder, then, that so many people now use them for companionship-forging friendships or even romantic relationships. According to a study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, 72% of US teenagers have used AI for companionship. Although...

Here at MIT Technology Review we've been writing about the gene-editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet so far, there's been only one gene-editing drug approved. It's been used commercially on only about 40 patients, all with sickle-cell disease. It's becoming clear that the impact of CRISPR...

The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US's federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations-a move that health associations worry puts children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease. There was more news from the federal government on Wednesday,...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Researchers are getting organoids pregnant with human embryos At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into the lining of the uterus then grips tight,...

For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers were ordered to stop work immediately. The cited reason? National security, specifically concerns that turbines...

When the concept of Web 3.0" first emerged about a decade ago the idea was clear: Create a more user-controlled internet that lets you do everything you can now, except without servers or intermediaries to manage the flow of information. Where Web2, which emerged in the early 2000s, relies on centralized systems to store data...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Europe's drone-filled vision for the future of war Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a digital targeting web," as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog...