MIT Technology Review

Frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and business process management (BPM) first gained traction because they promised clarity in the chaos-a structured way to bring order to messy, sprawling operations. Lean Six Sigma emphasized statistical rigor and quality control; BPM created end-to-end maps of how work should flow across departments. Both offered a repeatable way to...

Artificial intelligence may have captured the public imagination through chatbots and image generators, but some of its most consequential use cases are unfolding far from consumer-facing tools. In industries where physical infrastructure, operational continuity, and safety are paramount, AI is becoming a core operating layer. With its sprawling industrial systems and constant stream of operational...

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. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice-Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini-and type Give me a random number between 1...

Something stinks in California's climate policies. Years ago, the state set up a system that pays cattle farmers across the country to turn the methane emitted from cattle manure into natural gas, encouraging the dairy sector to produce a gas we burn instead of one that just pollutes the air. It's become wildly popular because...

Let's start with a game. Open up your chatbot of choice-Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini-and type Give me a random number between 1 and 10." You're going to get 7. Almost always. Now type Another" and you'll get 3 or 4. Type Another" again and you'll get 8 or 9. That won't work every time-but if it...

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. Claude Science is Anthropic's newest flagship product At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers yesterday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research...

At an event for pharmaceutical executives, biotech founders, and researchers on Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Science, a major new product intended to support scientific research in the same way that Claude Code supports software engineering. Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access...

Listen to the session or watch below Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Will they really work? Watch a conversation exploring longevity's new focus. Speakers: Mary Beth Griggs, science editor and Jessica...

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. AI agents are not your coworkers" Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool-one...

Artificial intelligence is transforming what is possible in agriculture, but industry leaders should be wary of investing in AI without first laying the groundwork. The use cases are promising, especially for an industry navigating volatile fertilizer costs, unpredictable weather, and margins that leave little room for error. Research shows AI-enabled predictive models can improve crop...

Apple. Anthropic. Disney Research. Google. Meta. Microsoft. NVIDIA. OpenAI. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people-roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world's most influential technology companies...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool-one that your company nonetheless calls Alex, an...

Enterprise investment in AI is booming. Gartner is calling 2026 an inflection year" for organizations to align their AI projects with strategic business objectives. As the pressure to prove ROI mounts, executives and technology leaders are looking to agentic AI to drive the measurable financial outcomes their businesses seek. A prime opportunity for AI agents...

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. The inevitable weakness of metrics 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...

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. Heat waves mess with your brain. Scientists are trying to figure out why. -Jessica Hamzelou It's been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western...

It's been hot in London this week. Really hot. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. Yesterday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 C (about 97 F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it felt like 39 C. It's frightening that we are seeing such temperatures in...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping retail, but not in the ways consumers might immediately notice. The biggest transformation may not be flashy virtual try-ons or chatbot shopping assistants, but in how decisions are made behind the scenes: how products surface in search results, how inventory moves through supply chains, how engineers ship code faster, and...

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. Europe's extreme heat is shutting down power plants Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to...

It's been hard to look away from headlines about the European heat wave this week. Temperatures are breaking records across the continent, and the weather is threatening lives, shutting down schools, and in one particularly ironic case, forcing the cancellation of a London Climate Action Week event about extreme heat. As the summer ramps up...

IBM has built a new prototype chip with around 100 billion transistors on an area the size of a fingernail, which is twice the density of the company's previous state-of-the-art technology announced in 2021. The design could pave the way for faster and more energy efficient computers for years to come. For more than half...

Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won't be online to help handle the load. On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947....

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. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can't fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity. That's what the new...

When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in complete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up the desert and...

MIT engineers have found the first direct evidence that plant seeds can sense sounds in nature: Rice submerged in shallow water germinated 30% to 40% more quickly when exposed to vibrations from water dripping on the surface. They think other types of seeds may respond similarly. When a raindrop hits a puddle's surface or the...

With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. The idea is that a person would first breathe in nanoparticles that are specially...

Rob Morris, SM '09, PhD '15, didn't know where to turn when he first felt symptoms of depression as a teenager: I had no exposure to healthy coping strategies. I had no vocabulary for what was happening to me." That experience, he says, has driven his work onKoko, a tech nonprofit that grew out of...

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. The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It's a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML's newest machine. It's about the size of a double-decker...

India is home to about 60% of the world's wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals' habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been some 3,000 human casualties in the...

Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine. It's a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus-more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic's latest feud with the US government, here's a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos...

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. Inside the world's deepest and longest subsea road tunnel -Niall Firth I'm currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I'm increasingly...

It's cold, it's very, very noisy, and-if I can be quite honest with you-I'm not feeling super relaxed. I'm currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just above my...

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 startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck...

There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot...

This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell-a man with ALS who is the first power user" of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables...

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. The search for dark matter has been blown wide open For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has...

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle. Some...

Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky shields, massive detectors filled with liquid xenon aim to make the first direct detections of dark matter, the long-sought invisible substance whose gravity has sculpted...

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. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering gets a reality check Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations...

Most of Kenya's power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering universal electricity access by 2030 without driving up emissions. The ever-improving economics of solar technology have helped. A couple of years ago, a panel cost about...

Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly-so high you can see the curvature of the Earth....

A collection of stories about how militaries are using AI models to make decisions. This subscriber-only eBook is a package of six stories that were originally published in MIT Technology Review between April 11, 2025, and April 21, 2026, and have been updated to reflect recent developments. Stories written by James O'Donnel by James O'Donnell...

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. This man with ALS is the first power user" of a brain implant that lets him speak Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost...

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men's team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face and passport. On the subway home,...

Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost three years. Harrell, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is paralyzed, first used his brain-computer interface (BCI) to speak" sentences with the help of a research team in 2023. Since then, Harrell has clocked thousands of hours of use. He...

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. These new solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren't so sure. After three years of record-breaking heat and another scorcher underway, air-conditioning isn't going anywhere. That's good for our health,...

After three years of record-breaking heat, this one is set to be yet another scorcher. Air-conditioning? Not going anywhere. The International Energy Agency projects that the number of AC units will triple by 2050. That's good for health-one Lancet study estimated that AC prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths in 2019 alone-but bad for the planet....

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. Why reprogramming" is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first...

There we were, a regular murderers' row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn't respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the screwdriver she'd...